Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/31/25 Larry Johnson on DC’s Delusional Goals in Ukraine and Venezuela

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Larry Johnson joins the show to talk about what he witnessed on his recent trip to Russia and the absurd march towards regime change in Venezuela.   Discussed on the show: Sonar 21 “On Russia-Ukraine, the misdiagnosed patient is flatlining” (Responsible Statecraft) “Pentagon Tells Congress It Doesn’t Know Who It’s Killing in Latin American Boat Strikes” (Antiwar.com) Larry C. Johnson is a former CIA officer and intelligence analyst, and a former planner and advisor at the US State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. Follow his analysis at Sonar21.  For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott's full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.comYou can also support Scott's work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest reporting to the American people what's going on in this country. Because the babies are making it. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president visited, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

negotiate now end this war and now here's your host scott horton all right you guys i am literally on the edge of my seat for this one it's uh larry johnson from uh formerly from the cia and now from the good guy's side trying to argue for peace and debunk lies as best he can and especially uh focusing on the uh russia ukraine war and he just got back from a big trip to Russia where he got brainwashed by Russian talking points by the KGB. And so now he is their slave

and is here to tell us exactly what they want him to say. Right, Larry, welcome the show. How you doing, buddy? They gave me bags of gold. I just couldn't get them on board the plane, you know? Big dollar's time with the line on the side. All right. Now, listen, no, the truth is that you are

former CIA officer because you're no dummy and you weren't over there to get snowed by a bunch of cooks. You were over there to find out the truth as best you could. And I admit, I'm sorry, I've been so swamped, especially this week. I've not had a chance to read all of your different pieces, but I saw I'm subscribed to your email list there at sonar21.com. And I have seen a lot of headlines. I know that you have talked to a lot of people in and out of government and academia and media. And you got a hell of a tour. I don't think it was. was any Potemkin tour led by anyone you went and did this and found out everything that you could about the Russian point of view about what the hell is going on in the world and so now I just want

to hear it man the floor is yours to educate me and my people here please well Scott thanks for that look when I started you know I started my career as a TV talking head back in 1994 in I think it was August when they captured uh Carlos the jackal and I did my first hit on CNN so over the years I did I have appeared on every single media you know publicly owned media platform privately owned in the United States I was on nightline with Ted Cople probably at least 12 times crossfire on CNN today show and I bring that up because over the years I learned that a lot times they do a pre-interview before you'd be going on air they'd want to interview and find out what are you going to say?

And then you tell them what you're going to say, and then lo and behold, hey, you know, something else has come up. We're going to go a different direction today. You know, they wouldn't put me on. I put that as background because when I went this invitation to Russia was from the International Unity Club. And I was, they said, look, we'll set you up with

interviews, with, as you pointed, with politicians, with military leaders, with economic leaders, with academics, with journalists, and you can ask whatever you want. There isn't, they didn't say, here are the topics you must discuss. Here are the topics you can't discuss. None of that.

And so, you know, the latest piece I posted at sonar21.com features my interview with a woman who was, she was a TV personality, but she's now an elected member of the Duma. she represents one a political party that supports Vladimir Putin

and then Ghanadi Juganov the head of the Communist Party interviewed him oh really he's still around huh I wrote about him in provoked but I hadn't heard of him in a while so yeah no he still in fact

when he when he sat down and he starts passing out gifts like he says here it was a chocolate bar with his picture on it awesome man what a great anecdote yeah so but you know and i ask i can ask anything um the one thing i came away with was the west has this fatal misunderstanding about russia the trump administration all the pundits in the infest dc they believe that the united states has leverage that we can punish and put enough pain on Russia that it will change Russia's policy

and that they'll stop their campaign in Ukraine. Ain't going to happen. There is nothing that the U.S. could do to Russia that's going to change their policy as they've stated it, which Vladimir Putin announced back on June 14th, 2024, or what his intentions were, what he would accept as a solution. Russia is sick and tired of the U.S. lies of pushing NATO to their frontier. They're not going to put up with it anymore. I had a great conversation with this one individual, a man by the name of Galushka,

who was the head of all the economic activities out in Siberia. he was a senior government minister he's like a 50 year old guy now he's got the number one selling book in russia on the russian economy and the history and he just made it very plain he said look we could build a wall around ourselves and there's nothing we need we don't need to import a single thing from the united states or from europe or even from china we were self-sufficient but We prefer to try to integrate and be part of the broader world, but we're not going to be bullied and we're not going to be held hostage. And so the world needs to learn to accept, at least the West needs to learn to accept,

that they can't tell us what to do anymore. Now that, but that was not just his view uniquely. That view is shared across ideological spectrums there in Russia. And, you know, most Americans, they don't understand how big Russia is. So we like to think, you know, the United States, my God, we stretch from Maine to Hawaii. That's six time zones. Russia has five more than that. They stretch 11 times zones.

So just the vast size of Russia is something that's on their own. You know, we impose sanctions. Oh, we're not going to let you buy any more. aircraft. Russia said, all right, we'll build our own. And they have now built their first commercial jetliner entirely from parts, engines, motors, computer chips, everything from inside Russia, not from the United States. Now, that really helped Boeing out. So Russia is now in a position where they're going to start producing commercial airliners that will compete with Boeing because they will be cheaper and more inexpensive,

not the lessen quality. And it's not like Boeing's got a great reputation now anyway. So the miscalculations of the West, the thing that we can coerce Russia is just, it's a false dream. Yeah. Man, you know, Larry, this is just so frustrated to me, dude. well let me make a comparison back to a rock war two days i'm sure you experienced the same thing

then we know they're lying because we already know that joby warwick debunked the aluminum tubes on september 9th 2002 in the washington post you can't just keep pretending to be afraid of the aluminum tubes after it's already been debunked in the post dude and then but they just did it anyway and so when we're trying to argue against that war we had to argue one here's what we know about the tubes here's what we know about the anthrax here's what we know about why all these specific claims are not true the ties to bin laden etc then at the end of that we got to argue why this has nothing to do with that anyway dude that's why they're lying is because they have this whole other agenda and that's what this is really about and we get kind of bogged down

in the thing but my point being that from from my side of that whole fight everyone who's lying at least who has any power to do anything about it knows they're lying now there's a nation half full of fools who believe them someone with power is telling me these things that are not true what i'm supposed to let them off the hook like they're just accidentally stupidly mistaken and they don't know what they're doing when i'm just nobody and they are somebody so and they're actually involved in the thing but then here's my frustration i'm getting to that's really bother me now. This is the same thing here where I just read this piece by,

I'm pretty sure it was George Beebe's piece that came out last week. Was it intact or the national interest or something? And it's like something about the fatal misdiagnosis of America's problem with Russia. And what he says in there is that American policy makers believe their own stupid lies, the weapons of mass destruction of the Russia-Ukraine war. that Putin woke up one morning and decided to recreate the Russian empire and has decided

then to invade Ukraine on his first step to conquering all of Europe and I mean what a steaming pile of crap Larry I mean what are you telling me Saddam Hussein has reconstituted nuclear weapons here or something this is absolutely insane

and yet as Bibi puts it listen man in Washington they believe this and their policy is based on this. Right. And they're not going to say, oh, yeah, okay, Horton's right.

This actually was provoked by us. This actually is trying to resolve a border dispute and a threatening military alliance dispute and a dual use missile launcher dispute and these things that we cause that could be resolved. They're not having that conversation, even in private, at night, over whiskeys alone. They are not telling each other the truth. You know, we kind of did this with our stupid coup in 14 and with our absolute refusal to negotiate in 21 and early 22 here, et cetera, et cetera, as you and I understand the story. And so I guess my question is, is that real? Is that your assessment too? Like these these people like by and large really do believe their own fairy tale about how this war happened.

and they're truly then all their policies, even in the Trump administration, are bound by that fateful misunderstanding. And then secondarily, then, from what you've just understood, what you've learned from the Russians from your time over there, how do they feel about all that? How do they perceive that? And what position does that lead them in? Well, to quote Yogi Berra, it's deja vu all over again. It is. It bothers me. So I would, there have been a couple of articles, one in the Wall Street Journal, the other was, I believe, in the Washington Post that have at least now identified that State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, INR, back in March, issued a dissent.

So the way the PDB works, and, you know, like when I was an analyst and I'd write for the PDB. That's the president's daily brief. The presidential daily brief. I'd write the article and then I'd have to coordinate it with State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and with the Defense Intelligence Agency and then with the National Security Agency if I used any of their sources. And analysts at each of those institutions could come back in and say, no, we don't, we disagree with this point. And then we would argue it out. And I'd get pressure from my branch Chief, you know, compromise if necessary, only under the most extreme circumstances would there be a dissent, where basically, you know, the analysts that the I&R would say,

Larry Johnson's full of crap. No, I mean, but they'd say, no, we did, well, Johnson asserts this, but well, we believe this, or the, you know, the CIA says this. INR issued a dissent in March, because at the point, at that time, the Trump administration was saying, okay, what can we do to pressure Russia to get a reach a ceasefire? And CIA was, oh boy, it can be done.

All you got to do is apply this pressure and do this and that. And state IonR came back and said, no, ain't going to happen. The Russians are not going to do that. They're not going to compromise. And what did Trump do? He got mad at INR. And the

head of IANR called in the analyst to say, hey, we're our message isn't being well received at the White House and ultimately according to one of these sources the analysts were fired we don't want to hear from them anymore so

there's actually as was the case with going to war in 2003 in Iraq and has actually been the case repeatedly over the years there is usually within the analytical community a voice that will

speak up to say no, that's not right, and lay out the alternative case. But the one thing these politicians, whether the Republican or Democrat, have in common, if they're committed to a particular policy, they don't give a damn what the actual facts say. They're going to plunge on, and they will create a narrative if necessary. So, you know, we're told about how weak the Russian military is. Okay, let's do a quick comparison. How many hypersonic missiles operationally capable does the United States have?

The answer there would be zero. How many does Russia have? Five. Combat proven. And they've got some that launched by air, some launched from sea. I'm sorry, you're saying five different types they have. Well, they have five different hypersonic missile systems. Iskander, Kinsal, Arrachnik.

And by the way, Larry, I'm just sussing this out logically. Correct me if I'm wrong here. If the Americans did have operational hypersonics, they would announce it to the world because the point of having them is a nuclear deterrent. And that does no good if you don't tell the Russians and everyone else that we do have them. So if people want to presume that, well, America must have better hypersonics, than the other guys, but they're just keeping it secret. There's real reason to disbelieve that and to think that if they had a successful test

and the deployment of these weapons, we would know about it. Yeah. I've got the advantage. I actually know one of the program managers on the U.S. program to develop a hypersonic. And I remember him saying two years ago, yeah, we're going to have it in November. That was going to be November of 2023. And so just about five weeks ago, it was in a conversation. where he said, oh, no, it's going to be in November of this year.

So just keep predicting November, we may eventually get around to it. But the fact of the matter is Russia right now has a generational advantage over the United States with both intermediate range, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, some that are more short range. But the point is, our air defense system, the Patriot, can't stop. them, can't shoot them down. That's number one. Then this week we've learned, they've announced the Bouturvesnik cruise missile, which is fired by a nuclear reactor. So they've built a nuclear reactor that's so small that it fits on this missile, which means when you launch

it, it doesn't have to, you don't have to wait for it to run out of fuel. It basically has an unlimited fuel system built into it. And they also, released the Poseidon missile, but it's underwater. So it's like a torpedo, except it's more like a cruise missile torpedo. Again, the United States

doesn't have anything comparable on drone warfare. Russia's far, far advanced. Yeah, we're good at building the $35 million dollar predator MQ9 Reaper, which actually the Houthi shot down

seven of them in seven weeks when, you know, Trump went back into the Red Sea to say, we're going to teach those Huthies a lesson. And then we declared victory and left because they were shooting down all of our predators and damaged three of our advanced combat aircraft. And the ships were at risk. So my point in this is that our American military and Trump has become the gaslighter in chief with respect to U.S. military capabilities. and we keep downplaying what the Russians are doing and fine you know go ahead keep pretending that

Mike Tyson can't throw a punch and then get in the ring with him and see what happens yeah so that that we've got to catch up we've got to stop this self-deceit that we're so good at yeah you know I used to um I don't know this isn't meaningful whatever it's just my thinking about it. I used to like try to picture Blinken Sullivan and Newland sitting at the White House after hours. The lamps turned down, having a little drink and like, can they be honest with themselves at all with each other, like even in whispers that like, okay, look, if we hadn't have done this, this might not have happened. So because of that we bear some responsibility, maybe we could be a little bit more conciliatory or find a way to compromise with the other

side or like whatever. at all. And then I guess, no. It's the answer to that. And then maybe even worse inside the Trump administration where Marco Rubio is the secretary state and the national security advisor like Henry Kissinger doing both roles right now. Unless I'm wrong, did they hire new national security advisor and still Rubio? Do it? No, just so, you know, and I don't know, man, if there's good reporting about what is J.D. Vance's relationship with the president, how often he advises him about these things or who all his favorite staff are to advise him about these things but uh you know we know that he doesn't have any real background knowledge he's wholly

dependent on his advisors to tell him what's what over there and so like you're saying you know he said oh i'll just end this war in a day because i'll just pick up the phone and say everybody stop fighting not understanding that no the russians are in for a penny and a pound and maybe more now and the ukrainians even though they're losing they're losing slow or and hard as hell. And they don't want to quit either. And so you're not just going to be able to snap your fingers here. And so he's no wonder he was frustrated or whoever in the White House was frustrated that INR was coming out and reading them the facts alive here because it was very different from the narrative that they wanted. And yet, well, here we are. It's the end of

October. And of course, they're not able to solve it because of the actual reality of the situation, all the wishful thinking, notwithstanding. So, but it just means that it's like having W. Bush up there. I mean, Trump is not as cruel and evil and, and, you know, spiteful and narrow-minded and idiotic as W. Bush. But I just mean, I don't think anyone is. But he's, but he's as ignorant and maybe as incurious. And, and that's pretty bad, you know? Well, look at what

we're doing to Venezuela right now. And, and, and, and, and, and the lies surrounding this whole effort to justify, an invasion of Venezuela and killing Maduro and causing a regime change. It's shocking to me that the media is so compliant with a provably false narrative. We're told that these cigarette boats or these different boats that were blowing up out of the water

are carrying narcotics from Venezuela to the United States. The first boat we hit that 60-foot cigarette boat with four outboard motors that that boat with the fully loaded you know fully fueled can can travel about 250 miles the distance from venezuela to the southern coast of florida is 1300 miles so explain to me how a boat that can only go 250 miles is being used to ferry narcotics to the united states particularly it's got 11 people on board So you think if you're going to ferry a bunch of narcotics over that distance, one, you want to have more space to stack drugs as opposed to a bunch of warm bodies. And two, how are you going to refuel?

Well, Larry, I mean, I can save you the time here. They already admitted that they don't know who these people are. Kyle Anselone has a piece about it at Libertarian Institute.org today. And they've been telling the Wall Street Journal and whatever, off the record at least, for weeks and weeks and weeks, since. this began. We don't know who we're killing there. No intelligence on who these guys are. Just taking pot shots. And I'm so sorry, because I'm just the worst on this story. I screw this fact up in the in the Jose Nino interview too. Was it the admiral in charge of the fleet down there that resigned? Or they-H-L-Z-E-Y. I mean, holy crap, man. And he resigned in protest over not wanting

to participate in this policy, right? Yeah. That's the story. And I hope that's true. At least that speaks well of him. But the problem is we got a lot more officers in that chain of command who are going along with these orders. These are illegal orders. We don't, we do not, look, I spent 23 years scripting counterterrorism exercises for the U.S. military special operations forces. And as part of those exercises, the purpose of the exercises was to train J-Soc and Socom. how to prepare concepts of operations and orders that then would be approved by the Secretary of Defense. And within that process, one of the things that was always part of that planning process was rules of engagement.

Under what circumstances can, with the military force, whether we're deploying Delta Force or SEAL Team 6 or the 75th Ranger Regiment, under what circumstances will they be able to kill somebody? And I never saw rules of engagement that said, if they look bad, kill them. Or if you think they're doing something bad, kill them. Never. So, and the reason for that is you should be ever. Maybe in the Obama years, I don't know.

No, it was, you know, I did it. I did it, I started this under Bill Clinton. I did it under George W. Bush, I did it under Barack Obama, and I did it under Donald Trump. And over that entire stance, I never saw a single rule of engagement that would have authorized doing what we're doing

off the coast of Venezuela to just kill these people. Now, you also can't rule out the possibility that some of these boats that were blowing up were actually staged by the CIA. in other words they were creating a narrative that oh yeah look at all these drug boats and we actually may not be killing some people in that process i mean i read in the paper where they say come on all the drugs come on the west coast for mexico's west coast not through the

Caribbean and you know i've had extensive experience and a lot of it goes overground over mexico right is because they've been they've been targeting boats in small plains in the Caribbean for decades. And nobody grows and processes coca or cocaine in Mexico. It's all in Latin America and then it goes overland through Mexico because of the interdiction on the high seas that has been the constant regime since the Reagan years. Yeah. Look, I've got some special experience with this. In the court, my consulting firm, Berg Associates, there were three of us in, you know, over 18 years. One of my partners was chief of international operations for DEA. when they took down Pablo Escobar he was he was really the creator of what was

known as the kingpin program my other partner was the he ran a DEA's undercover money laundering operations in New York City for three years so when one of the things we did with Burgososius we were involved with a variety of investigations that touched on narcotics trafficking you know Panama was a big transit point on not Venezuela. Venezuela was, in fact, the way the Venezuela was involved, if you will, it was used for a money laundering platform. We brought a civil racketeering suit in 2001 against Philip Morris for money laundering because we had evidence that would stand up in a court case or for a criminal court case that Philip Morris was not.

knowingly taking money from Colombian and Russian drug traffickers, criminal organizations around the world. And one of the evidence that we had was that the Philip Morris executives would fly into Venezuela and to Barquisimiento. They'd then rent an armored vehicle that crossed the border into Colombia. And up in the northeast corner of Columbia is this little town called MyCal. My cow was the realm of a certain senator named Santander Lopez Sierra, who's now actually, I believe, incarcerated in Carbondale, Illinois.

But Santander Lopez Sierra was a senator. He was also the major cigarette smuggler, and he was the authorized Philip Morris distributor in Colombia. He's also responsible for killing 24 people, at least. So he was heavily involved with the drug trafficking. these fellow Morris executives would go meet with him in my cow and they'd pick up bags of third-party checks, U.S. postal money orders, which are not supposed to be outside the United States, but there they were. And it was drug money, and they'd bring it back, and then it was deposited into Venezuelan banks, and then wired into Russian banks, and then made its way back into U.S. banks. So, yeah, Venezuela was involved in that regard, but that was small potatoes compared to what was going.

going on out of Panama, out of Mexico, in particular. I mean, in another case, we were hired to look in the U.S. aluminum manufacturer was getting killed by exports for Mexico. Well, we checked it out. What we found out was this Chinese company that had been sanctioned had now, was now rerouting its product through Mexico. They had made a deal with the narcotics. Codics group called the Knights Templar.

And so they set up this big place there where the aluminum from China would come in. It'd get restamped as, you know, ECHO in Mexico, you know, made in Mexico, and then shipped into the United States. And we were fortunate that they were advertising for somebody to print stickers up. So we bid on the contract and we got the contract. So we had someone on the inside. And, you know, so here was this Chinese aluminum maker working closely with a Mexican drug cartel. My point in all this is this narcotics trafficking involves U.S. corporations, U.S. banks, and U.S. personnel, and it's a global phenomena, but to use that as an excuse that Venezuela is some big kingpin in this, that is complete garbage. It's a lie.

Yeah. All right. I want to ask you all about the Ruskis, but you've got to ask. you one more question along these lines though too because you're so well versed in this um the way i remember it was w bush made vincenti fox militarize the war so the cartels are getting away with too much you need to use your army to go after the cartels and then of course all that did was militarized the cartels and tear mexico apart and so like every other bad thing in the world it's all george w bush's fault

yeah like russia's hypersonics and and nuclear powered cruise missiles and nuclear torpedoes it's all w bush's fault the destruction of mexico right no i i've got a lot more blame to go around i mean look go back to the days when uh kiki kamarina was uh you know kidnapped executed um the the the real problem here is the linkage between u s u s corporations u.s. financial institutions who are profiting enormously off of the drug trafficking. I did I did a one due diligence for a bank in Panama this about 12 years ago because they they were getting into the e-commerce and they called me up and said man we got this company that these guys one's a Ukrainian and one's a Spaniard their partners and they're

selling soap online and we're not sure that it's legit would you check it out i said well sure so i got i got the list of all of the credit card transactions that had been run for this for purchasing soap online and it was from a bank a u.s bank that was a subsidiary of bannamex but it was based all along the texas border with mexico and um i saw up i came out i had that i had full name They had names of people, their phone numbers, their address. It was all the stuff you're supposed to have on a know-your client. And so I started calling these people as I was representing myself as the customer service rep for the soap online company. And they call them out, they go, I didn't buy any soap.

What are you talking about? So then I figured out it was a debit, all of these were debit cards. Once I realized all the transactions were being done in a debit card, Then we determined that this bank, it was called the International Bank. What they were doing was they accepted drug money. So let's say a drug, the guys with the cartel come into them and say, hey, we'll give you $2 million and you sell us $1.5 million in debit cards. And then with those debit cards, they gave them, the cartels from the dark web gave him all this personal information.

So the bank could justify if it was audited, hey, you know, we issued debit cards to all these people. And here's all their identifying information. Then what would happen is they'd run the debit card for $75 or $150. That money would then be deposited through that debit card into the Panamanian bank. And when, you know, they'd build up to like $70,000 in the account, it would then be wired to a bank. in cyprus again just one way uh we me and my partners we approached the government of mexico in 2014 about doing a civil racketeering case against wakovia bank because wakobia bank had been involved in the major way and laundering drug proceeds mexican government was willing to do it

except uh when after our meeting with the government of mexico eric holder then attorney general called the Mexicans and basically said, if you do that, we're going to sanction you. So the Mexican government didn't do it. So my point in all this is, the United States is busy trying to blame other countries and other people. Look in the mirror. We should take care of our cells first, get our hands clean, before we go out trying to tell the rest of the world what to do. Oh, yeah, no question about that. I guess my question is more narrow, but I probably didn't phrase it very well.

I mean, there's been, obviously, there's huge demand for drugs inside the United States. there's massive corruption in American government and banking and we know in the 1980s with the CIA and the Nicaraguans after the Boland Amendment and and Gary Webb and his great series, Dark Alliance and all of that stuff. But I guess the story that I was referring to is more narrow, which was for all the corruption and drug dealing and everything going on in Mexico, it was when W. Bush ordered Bincente Fox to send the army out. there to solve it that what happened was rather than going out there and eradicating the enemy like in george should be bush's imagination they just ramped up the entire crisis so every cartel then

militarized and the zetas i don't know i didn't read books about this or anything but there i've read some articles where they say that the zetas started out as a special operations team whose job it was to go out and arrest cocaine smugglers and then they decided well shit why be a special operations team when we could be cocaine smugglers, man, we could be the kings of this thing, and they took that over. And then on the other side, allegedly, you had the CIA running the Sinaloa cartel trying to combat the Zetas and their militaristic monopoly on all of this. And yet all of this is because W. Bush made Vincenta Fox call these troops out of their barracks, whereas this was supposed to be and had previously been as corrupt as it was and as ineffectual as it was. It was a

matter for the Federals, not for the army. And once it became a matter for the army that this is what, you know, has done essentially nothing but escalated since then. Um, because of course, control of the black markets. And then that's where you got all these beheadings and all this where some of these cartels are like as violent as ISIS over there, right over their turf. So am I wrong about that? I know I like blaming W. Bush, but yeah, also I think that's right. Well, I, I'm not sure about the timeline. What I do know is over the years, you know, we did have a phase where one, there would be an effort to produce what they call vetted units, as we've done in Columbia, where you'd get people, they'd be polygraphed, that they'd be especially dedicated to the narcotics effort.

I know that there was a time where the police were considered more corrupt than the Army, and we went into the Army, and that may have been the period you're talking about with Bush. And then I also know that the problem with all of this is the money that's involved is so big that these police officers or army officers can easily be suborned. And then, you know, they become competitors actually with some of the cartels. So the effort to militarize this, you know, the broader point, if that fell under Bush, then, you know, I fully agree with you. here to defend, defend that, because this is, we cannot defeat this militarily. The only way you defeat it is you go after the money. And I've seen too many examples here in the United States with different corporations

where they profit from the drug trafficking. They make money off of it because it's called trade-based money laundering, that products are purchased with drug proceeds. And the cartels, they'll take a discount. You know, they'll lose money, you know, like a, you know, they'll take less money unlike a normal business because at the end, they can still sell the product. And it's a way to move their profits back to Columbia, to Mexico, wherever. So if we will go after the money, be serious about it because we've never been serious about it.

I always hear people talk about follow the money. my partner and I went into brief the Joint Special Operations Command, J-Soc. And this was like 2008. Do you remember this ISIS guy that was running around North Africa, Mokhtar, Bill Mokhtar? You know, he was, you know, in the War on Terror, boy, he was a top target. We killed him like nine times, okay? We got him, you know, and they'd report.

We killed him, we killed. The guy was a big cigarette smuggler. And what was his favorite cigarette? Philip Morris, Marlboro. And so we went into J-Soc and explained how to go get it. If they really wanted to get him, because he was buying cigarettes from Philip Morris. And Philip Morris knew there's somebody in that chain of command. They knew who the customer was.

J-Soc never did anything with it. You know. Man, all right. Well, yeah. So, hey guys, Scott here for Moondos artisan coffees. It's the Scott Horton Show flavored coffee, breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good.

All you do is go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee, and it'll forge you on there to Moondos artisan coffees. Get it, they hate Starbucks because they represent the war party, of course. And so they're Moondos, and they support peace. And guess what? Scott Horton Show coffee is the number one bestselling coffee at Moondos Artisan coffees right now, I'll just go again to scotthornton.org slash coffee. Man, if you have any money, you should be buying gold with it.

Central banks are hoarding it up. And if you need some, you should go to rrbi.c.o. That's Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. It's my buddy Tim Frye. He's a really great guy, him in this business. They've been over there for a very, very long time. And they will help you get your medals. And they will always do you right.

That's Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. at r rbi.co. I write this episode of Scott Horton's show brought to you by the books I wrote. You can see them behind me there. Enough already. Fool's errand and then enough already and provoked. And then, of course, one might have fallen down there,

but I got Ron Paul, the great Ron Paul, Scott Horton show interviews and hotter than the sun. You see that one back there over there that way. Hatter than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons. that's all interviews I did all about nukes and really great stuff and I busted my ass on these things and you know I've gotten a really great reception on all of them. They all have been endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg endorsed two of the three I wrote. He would have endorsed the third one I know but he died too soon unfortunately. Tucker Carlson says that provoked is the definitive

account. In fact, that's what Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Matte said about it too. The definitive account of the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine, so maybe check that up. Hey, guys, you know I have another podcast now, right? Yeah, me and the great American historian Daryl Cooper, that is Martyr Made. He's my co-host and we host a show. Every Friday night, we might be switching to two days a week here sometime soon, but right now we're doing Friday nights live at 8 o'clock Eastern Time on the YouTube's. Checked out our Twitter handle, Provoked show. So time is limited. And I do still got to ask you more about the ruskies but as long as we're on this i still i guess i don't know

what i got to ask you um man give me your best case scenario that could possibly happen for america trying to launch a regime change against maduro here like i'm supposed to imagine some some like scene from a novel where like he just gets shot in the back of the head and then a very nice man replaces him and everything is is wonderful or we're going to have an Iraq-style war, you know, a massive war and a million dead and a counter-insurgency in the end of the... Lots of things. Well, you know, what will happen, I think, let's call it the best case, that if we do manage to remove Maduro and replace him with this, our new Nobel Prize winner, who's been

an asset of both the CIA and Mossad, that it will start an internal civil. war in Venezuela that will also probably spell over to Colombia. And then all of a sudden the era where, you know, American citizens who used to travel freely in those areas, they'll be, they'll become targets. They'll be killed. They'll be kidnapped. So, you know, chaos is the biggest, most likely outcome in that. Venezuela is, you know, I've said that it's Spanish for Vietnam.

Yeah, that's a good one. I'm quoting that if my old line can remember. Feel free to steal. I like that. Because the, you know, we've never had a successful campaign with just through the use of air power. We blow up everything on the ground and the government collapses. Hasn't happened. Going back to World War II, that was, you know, Curtis LeMay and those guys thought,

all we got to do is kill all these German civilians and the Germans will surrender. Nope. took the Russians going to Berlin to get the Germans to surrender. So what we're looking at here is if in the event that we decide to insert troops, you know, I don't know if you've been to Venezuela. I have on several occasions. You know, we did some product counterfeiting investigations down there. You land at the airport, which is out on the coast,

but then you got this windy road up to Caracas to the capital. And you talk about ambush points all along the way. plus you've got a Venezuelan military now that's been warned hey we're coming we're going to hit you so they've got air defense systems I understand they got at least a couple of Chinese advanced air defense systems that are comparable to the S300 so quite capable of shooting down rotary wing aircraft and and potentially some of the the fourth generation combat aircraft we have if we if we go through the

mistake of trying to put soldiers in on the ground, there are going to be a lot of body bags going back to Delaware. So this is the entire justification and rationale in Washington for this. It's a bigger lie than the WMDs in Iraq. Yeah, it's like Rubio has told Trump, it'll be like H.W. Bush in Panama. And Trump goes, oh, I remember that. That was great. That It took three days. Yeah. That, you know, I was, the human cost that we imposed on Panama because of that. During one of the investigations we were doing on, you know,

smuggling out of Panama to Columbia. You know, so products would be going from Panama to Columbia and then make their way into these black markets that were called San Andresitos. and they were in Bogota and in Medellijin. And so they all came out of this one port called Cocosolo, the lone coconut, which is up on the north border where the Cologne Free Trade Zone is. And as we were doing the investigation, we were dealing with this one woman. And I forget how the topic came up, but then she began explaining how in our invasion in 1989,

we killed her two children who were aged like three years old and six years old. And when all of a sudden you're confronted with a woman who's still mourning the loss of young children like that and we did it for what? Yeah.

Oh, to take out a guy who was a CIA asset by L'O. Diego, a guy who we funded, aided, supported, and then decided he was no longer of any use to us and we created this, we created, I was in the branch the Central American branch where the analyst

who was in charge for Panama she was the director of operations was involved with a year long plan, a program to try to provoke Noriega into doing something so we could justify

a military response. Yeah. And I saw that first hand back in 1988. Wow. 1989. Okay. Wow. You see. saw, you saw the McCollum memo of the Panama War, the plan, how to provoke him into doing

something. Yeah. I saw, I saw the actual operation. And he was more about it. Like, what were the steps? Yeah. No, they were, you know, one, they, uh, they sent in this one guy with, with a radio. So he was going to try to coordinate. They were, they were trying to, uh, bribe members of the military. Uh, they were staging provocations where they'd get, uh, higher Panamanians to go attack Americans? Because remember at the time, we still had a fairly significant military presence in Panama. We didn't pull them out until 1999. Yeah, they still had bases there. Yeah, I read a couple of books about this, although it's been a long time. Bob Woodward's book, The Commanders, is actually not too bad on some of the aspects of the story, at least.

Yeah, in fact, at the time from, you know, even after we took out Manuel Noriega, the military police, part of their duties, was to patrol the strip clubs. So they'd be going into the strip clubs every day, every night, just make sure that U.S. troops were semi-behaving themselves. I mean, it was quite, you know, it was just the U.S. presence there was not having what you would call a wholesome effect on the panamanian society yeah well and then hw bush learned from panama that oh war is easy dude let's do iraq we can do a rock because look how easy panama was and convinced you know the whole government convinced themselves like people leave that out of the story of iraq war one but that was a

big part of their you know they'll kind of lead up to it and by the way i have to add this just because um it it seems like an important little anecdote to me and we we see like further examples of how this goes but at one point they had noriega a whole hole up in a church and they're trying to negotiate his surrender. And what happened was there were reporters with those boom microphones with a little dish on them. I could hear from a shotgun microphone from long distance. And they were eavesdropping on the negotiations. So the negotiators, the American, I guess the military, whoever was CIA, started playing music in order to drown out the microphones so that they could have their negotiations in secret. And then when they were

asked, why are you playing music? They said, well, it's to drive. him crazy and force him to surrender. And I forgot if it was like John Denver, Rocky Mountain High over and over again or whatever it was that they did. It was trying to drive him crazy and make him quit. But that was just the cover story. And they were just, it was just to obscure their shotgun

mics. Well, because they believe their own lie, they use this same strategy against the poor helpless branch of idiots by playing, you know, blaring this music at them at all hours, including, you know, Nancy Sinatra, these boots are made for walking. And then,

they would play sounds of horses and rabbits and dogs being slaughtered, house full of little children in order, because they were like, oh, it worked on Manuel Noriega. It drove him crazy and made him surrender. So then they did it to the branch of the Indians, these monsters in the FBI, the Justice Department, all of them, criminal, child murderers, all of them, cover uppers of it. And people say, no, there are good men in the Justice Department. I say, okay, then how come Dick Rogers and Jeff Jamar aren't under arrest right now? And the answer is because there are no good men in the Justice Department.

And they are all either child killers or accessories to child killing after the fact. Sorry. I still got a chip on my shoulder about that one. But I just read something. Now I can remember everything from 30 years ago. But I'm trying to remember for something. I just read the other day where they were playing music trying to drive somebody crazy and make them surrender or something.

It was based on this same legend of Nognege. And a lot of that, it's not based upon actual proven. You know, it's based on assumptions. Yeah. Yeah. And just a cover story. It was just a cover story, and then they ran with the cover story, you know. Well, I want to go back and touch on one thing you said earlier about, you know,

you hope that there would be a time when these policymakers sit down and reflect, you know, is this really working? Why isn't it working? In the course of doing those military exercises, I was involved with over 250, 53, I believe, was the actual number over those 23 years. at the end of each exercise there's something called a hot wash which is basically sort of what you're talking about

where you sit down and look at okay how did we do here were our objectives or did we accomplish our objectives what should we have done different how could we improve that's the concept over the course

and when I first started I thought oh man this is great they're going to learn we're going to build knowledge upon learn from our past there was no learning it was like dealing with an Alzheimer's patient, you know, that do it and then forget that they had done it. And they'd do it over again.

And at the end of each one, they'd say, this was the best exercise ever. So there's no, I did not experience through my time at the Central Intelligence Agency, my time at the U.S. State Department's Office of Counterterrorism, and then my time for 23 years working as a government contractor involved with military exercises, never saw that kind of self-reflection where we learn from anything that we've done or we sit down and say, why isn't this working? In fact, I was, J-Soc asked me to go to Iraq in 2006, and I wound up at the J-Socq base at Balad, where the hunt for Zarqawi, the new ISIS head, was underway.

And in one of my conversations with one of the colonels who was, because that was sort of the offset, the off center for J-SAC operations, but they had different sectors that were divided up, during this time, terrorist attacks were going up. they weren't declining and j sock was conducting uh these uh you know 14 kill capture operations a day 14 to 18 i mean it was incredible i mean they'd go out they'd hit a target they may bring somebody back they'd put him in for interrogation they'd get some fresh intelligence they turned right around launch again 14 to 18 a day and yet with all these operations with all these kill capture going on the terrorist attacks are going up

I was visiting with this one Marine, colonel, and he admitted, and I said, look, here's what the intelligence says. The intelligence says that a lot of these attacks are being done by guys who are being paid to do it because they don't have any money. I said that the intelligence would seem to indicate that if we started paying him to not do attacks, that the attacks would go down. And he admitted, yeah, well, yeah, that may be true, but, you know, there were more bureaucratic empathos to keep this going. Yeah. It was like two years later, they started doing the, let's pay him not to attack us. And guess what?

Terrorist incidents started dropping. Yeah. So, again, lessons learned, not really. Yeah, humans are funny, right? We're smart enough to talk and got engineers who can. make planes fly and land safely and so like there's some pretty incredible things but also we're very average and disappointing a lot of the time too right where you just have you know it's just like when you grow up you get older and you realize that your dad's not superman he's just a man

just like everybody else and whatever you know what I mean you get old enough and then you get a little bit older you realize actually the doctors really aren't smarter than you either and then you realize, wow, the people in Washington making all the policies, like, I think they might really know less about this than I do. And I'm just a cab driver. Oh, my God. Like, you start really realizing that, wow, that's a lot of power to be in the hands of people who really don't bring anything very special to the table beyond what if you just traded them out for people in your neighborhood, you know? Do you remember the first time you debated somebody who, you know, you'd never debated them before they had all the credentials they had all this experiencing government and you assumed

oh my god they're they they probably know more than me i'm going to be mismatched then you get into the debate and you wipe the floor with them and you go hey i they weren't as tough as i thought do you remember did you have the first one that in mind yes harvey kushner was a neoccon a very low ranking neocon from the family association of america something back in 2008 I whooped him so bad he refused to shake my hand at the end when I talked about how Israel supported the rise of Hamas and all that. And then I actually did the same thing to Bill Crystal for everybody in New York City and just left some pants out online.

And I got to say like I did okay, whatever. I said what I wanted to say, except there were a few things I wish I had, but whatever. But what really happened was he just failed. He might as well have not even showed up there because he had nothing. And he had nothing. It was, I was. Not like sympathetic to him, but I was in a way embarrassed for him.

Why? That like, oh, wow, this guy actually doesn't know the first thing about anything other than getting his secretary to file the right paperwork to build the think tank to funnel the money to the guys who will write the study to justify the war for Israel. He can do that. But if you waterboarded him, he couldn't tell you why, you know. It's just nuts, man. Well, that's why, you know, what you're doing, particularly with your new institute, you know, your, let's call it, your online college for understanding how we're, you know, the roots of our foreign policy mistakes and tragedies that is people, they're not going to get informed through the media.

So they have to have an alternative. And so I think what you're providing on that is very important. I commend you on that. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. And listen, we've only got a few minutes for the top of the hour here, but, um, or whatever time is yeah but uh i do want to switch back to russia real quick because i know you did have so many great conversations with people over there and you must have picked up so

many insights and i apologize for not being prepared and fully read up on all that you've written since then i do want to give you an opportunity tell us a little bit more about who you talk to and the important uh parts of what they told you that you think we really need to know but one of the most interesting conversations was with the former prime minister of uh Ukraine, Azharov. He was prime minister from 2002, 10 to 2014. So 2014, the start the Maidan. That was, you know, he was there. And what he explained was, in fact, the most stunning statistic, he says, when I took all over, when I entered office in 2010, there were 57 million Ukrainians living inside Ukraine. And he said, now there are 20,

million, 37 million have, you know, most of them have fled overseas. There's probably a million plus that have been killed in the end of war. But so you're looking at 36 million that have fled overseas and aren't coming back. And he went in detail to how both USAID and the Soros Foundation played a role in basically recruiting people who were in their 20s at the time that by the time the Maidan rolled around, they were in their 30s or 40s, and they became sort of this infiltration program for helping overthrow the government. And they were beholden to the oligarchs in Ukraine. So, you know, getting that insight, along with him, I interviewed another former Ukrainian prosecutor who's also

South refuge in Russia. And he was, you know, he was detailing the kind of corruption that he was investigating that involved Hunter Biden and U.S. influence. But he said the key in all of this was these Ukrainian oligarchs. So if we try to look at the war on the ground as something that's Putin versus Zelensky, we're missing the whole story. Zelensky is the highest paid actor right now in the world, okay? He's playing a role.

He's not the one actually making the decisions. He is not the power. He says, there are powers behind the throne. And this whole question of oligarchs is really at the heart of this. Because I maintain one of the reasons there's such animus and hatred in the United States among the oligarchs here towards Putin, his Putin did solve the oligarch problem in 2001, where he called him all in and said,

Hey, you're going to stop selling us off to the West. You're going to stop participating in politics. You can go make your money. You can get as wealthy as you want, but this is going to stop. You're not going to control the government. And if you don't do it, I'm going to put you in prison, which he did to Mikhail Kortikovsky. A couple of them said, ah, go ahead, show us.

And he did. But they have essentially removed the control of the oligar. over Russian policy in Russia. Whereas here in the United States, our oligarchs are running the show. You know, you're old enough to remember. There was a time 40, 45 years ago when there were independent newspapers,

independent radio stations, independent TV stations. We had an independent media that was not controlled by four or five corporations, like today. And as part of the, of that, what we see is this gaslighting of the public where pick your issue, whether it's the war in Ukraine, whether it's the genocide going on in Gaza, whether it's ginning up to go to

war with Venezuela. You'll not find a single voice in opposition to those policies allowed on air. You know, at least back in 1995, 96, I did crossfire probably 18 times over the time from you know 94 up to 2008 and at least back then you can have opposition voices you can actually have some real disputes you're not allowed you're on peers Morgan but you're not allowed on any of ABC CBS NBC Fox News CNN MSNBC John Mearsheimer shut out Jeffrey Sachs shut out Doug McGregor shut out ray McGovern shut out Scott Ritter shut out It is like no alternative voice is allowed now because we're under this corporate media control in the West. And what I was surprised to find in Russia, you don't have that kind of corporate media control.

Does the government control have influence over a couple of stations? Yeah, but there are a lot of others that are not under government control. And I mean, this is the crazy thing. You now got more media freedom in Russia than you do in the United States. Well, now, and so is that not just, you know, on paper, but on TV, they, they have prominent hosts who rail against the regime and have no problem? I have never. I've, I've been interviewed on RT going back to 2016. They've never done a pre-interview with me. Never have they said, you can't say this, you can't talk about this, or we want to know what you're going to say about President Putin. I've been critical of Putin on RT.

and you know Putin was that he spoke at the RT 20th gala two weeks ago Friday and he was the one that appointed the Margarita Samillon as the head

of RT 20 years ago but they don't come on and say you can't have these people on that are going to be critical of the president so and you know

know a case in point was just like when i spoke to ganadi uh the the the head of the communist party it was you know he's out there speaking out against the government and they haven't locked him up so uh now i'm not claiming russia's perfect and oh my god you know but i'm simply saying the united states is in no position to claim about you know we got press freedom here no we don't What we have is we've got more of a controlled press than it's comparable to what I remember the Soviet Union being like during the Soviet Union days. Although, you know what? Those days are coming to an end.

I mean, I'm not going to brag too much about the audience size for this show. I've only just finally turned it into a video show in the last few weeks here. But last night, Dave Smith interviewed me on his show. And a guy posted on Twitter a screenshot where on his YouTube feed, they showed him the live stream of the um i'm sorry i forget the guy's name but a prominent host on fox news and then the live feed of me and on dave's show and we had you know they had 800 something people watching live for the fox thing and we had you know almost 2000 i think watched live of me on dave's shows so obviously now fox news on tv is going to have larger audiences than that they're not all the way dead and gone

but people, even if they don't understand specifically about how few corporations, this or that, they can just feel it, that I'm not getting what I need to know here. And they're just turning away from TV altogether, turning away from the major papers altogether and just going to X to find out what's right. So we're good and for ill, mostly for good. I ran the numbers in August of 2016. I compared the news coverage for August of 1968. In 1968, the number of viewers watching CBS, NBC, ABC News was about $53 million.

In August of 2016, the number of people in that number in 1968, Walter Cronkite had like $28 million. Then I ran the numbers for August, 2016, for CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox News, CNN, MS. NBC. Total viewers for all of those shows was about what Walter Cronkite had in 1968, 28 million. And our population had grown by like 120 million. Yeah, I was just going to say double the population numbers there. Yeah. So you're you're exactly right. You're exactly right. Yeah. We're parties days are numbered, man. You know what? They still have the money and the authority and the positions of power. But the narrative belongs to the people now.

And there's nothing that they can do about it. So, Things are looking up in a way and, and, and you know what, everybody please, I'll let you start that census here, you're about to say something. Sign up, go not only go read Sonar 21, but sign up for the email list over at Sonar 21. You can keep track of everything that Larry's writing. He writes two, three times a day sometimes on, you know, especially these most important war issues and breaking news, you know, coverage, insight into exactly what's going on right now all the time. So you're an important facet of all of this. I know you've made a hell of an impression on Judge Napolitano and a lot of others since you've been much more active in the last couple of years here. Hey, let me let me say one final thing about Russia.

Sure. I got the meet and interview, Vaughvonne and Lexus. Oh, yeah. I saw that. I saw that in your thing, man. I should have written that down in my notes. So I like those guys in my book a few times because they really have brought some important things to light. Have you talked to them?

Are you? No, I haven't. I have laughed my ass off at some of their achievements before. I'll hook you up with them, and I'm going to post my interview with them tonight. Oh, okay. Oh, that's great. Okay, cool.

Well, then I will be over there hanging out, hit and refresh at sonar21.com. Thanks so much for your time, Larry. Great to talk to you again. Hey, thanks, Scott. All right, you guys, check out Scott Horton Academy.com. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by Robertson Roberts, Brokerage, Inc.

Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, APS Radio News, and dissident media. Subscribe to the show at Scott Horton.org, Scott Horton Show.com, Libertarian Institute.org, YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show, iTunes, Spotify, etc., and check out my books. Fool's errand, enough already, and my latest, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine at Amazon.com. And I'm serializing the audiobook of Provote. at Scott Horton Show.com and Patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. See you next time.