Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/27/23 James Bamford on the Many Failures of American Counterintelligence

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

Scott interviews James Bamford about some of the stories he collected for his new book about the collapse of America’s counterintelligence apparatus. They start with Russiagate and talk about how, while the government and media were screeching about imaginary Trump-Russia collusion, the UAE had two spies in the Clinton Campaign. They also talk about how the NSA lost half a billion classified documents containing methods later used for the WannaCry ransomware attacks of 2017, the former FBI counterintelligence agent who is now facing charges for working with the Russians, a group of former CIA and FBI guys who were accidentally hired to help a Russian coup attempt, the lack of accountability for the intelligence failures of Iraq War II, the framing of Maria Butina and the mole in the FBI who spent two decades transferring documents to the Chinese government in the most blatant fashion imaginable.  Discussed on the show: “The American intelligence community has no accountability — so how can it keep us safe?” (New York Post) Spyfail by James Bamford The Interview (IMDb) “How an Oligarch May Have Recruited the F.B.I. Agent Who Investigated Him” (New York Times) A Pretext for War by James Bamford “How China planted an FBI mole who was discovered only after gutting the CIA's vast spy network” (Business Insider) “These Shady UAE Donors Gave Millions to Clinton and Trump While the Feds Dozed” (Daily Beast) James Bamford is a journalist, professor, documentary filmmaker, and the author of Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency and A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies. Find him on Twitter @WashAuthor. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews. since 2003, almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show.

All right, you guys, special treat for us today on the show. We've got the great James Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, the shadow factory and the brand new book out called Spy Fail. And I'm sure it has a subtitle. I'm clicking on it. It's Spy Fail, Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence. Wow. Welcome to the show.

How you doing, Jim? Great. Great to talk to you again, Scott. Great, man. Happy to have you on the show here. So the book is in the mail, so we're going to follow up and do this same interview again in a few weeks here, hopefully, if I can ever get around reading it. I have a pile of books I'm trying to read right now. But you do have this great one in the New York Post.

The American intelligence community has no accountability. So how can it keep us safe? Yeah, good question. I wasn't really counting on them in the first place. But, boy, you really got some bangers here. when it comes to massive failures in intelligence and counterintelligence. But can we start with Russiagate here? I know that there are a hell of a lot of different aspects to it.

But it looks to me, I don't know, I'm pretty sure I'm right. The whole thing was a put on in the first place. In other words, Papadopoulos was set up by the FBI in the first place. And then, of course, they lied about Carter Page and they lied about the DNC hack and that they never believed it at all. The FBI were co-conspirators with the Democrats and making up these lies. And then the CIA under John Brennan got on board for it after that. And then they perpetrated this massive Russiagate hoax against the public and against the elected president of the United States for another couple of years after that. And so I wonder what's

your take on all of that. Obviously, I'm prejudicing. I don't know how you say that, the question in the issue, but I know you wrote a great one about how they set up or, you know, framed or over-prosecuted Maria Boutina, who really was not any kind of spy at all. So obviously, you're hip to this stuff to a degree. Yeah, I mean, I've looked into it. Obviously, I've written about it. And yeah, I agree with the conclusions of the Mueller report, which was that there wasn't any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. And what I write about in my new book is, while they were looking under every rock for a Russian, inside the Trump campaign, the Hillary Clinton campaign had two spies in there,

sent there by the United Arab Emirates. They were in there for the entire campaign, and they spied on the Clinton campaign. They had all these conversations with Hillary Clinton. They paid millions and millions of dollars. Actually, the Clinton campaign demanded millions and millions of dollars from them. So they could have private little cocktail parties for them in the in the spies' house. So there was a lot more to it that the FBI never managed to find. But bottom line was, yeah, there were no Russians involved, but there were other countries having spies

involved. Isn't that funny? It must have been right that, I mean, just besides how in the tank for Hillary they are anyway, that one of the reasons that they played this down had to have been, ah, geez, we're right in the middle of accusing the other guys. guy of being a Manchurian candidate compromised spy agent of the Kremlin. And here we have real spies that infiltrated the other side that it's already too late. We already let this happen and didn't prevent it from happening. So let's just let it continue, turn a blind eye, play the whole thing down. I mean, at what point did they intervene and remove these guys from the campaign, Jim?

Well, they never did. They never did. No, they never did. They were there for the entire campaign. It wasn't until a year later after the campaign that they were accidentally, basically, caught. And what makes it even worse is these were two people who should obviously never have been in the campaign in the first place. One of them was a serial pedophile. He'd been arrested numerous times for pedophile activity.

and he was the lead guy in the two-man infiltration campaign. And that's George Nader that you're talking about? Yeah, George Nader. And his partner was a serial fraudster. He was conning people out of millions and millions of dollars. He would eventually be, he originally had been charged for fraud, and then he was charged again later on. So you had these two people, and George Nader was a very professional spy, basically.

He'd even worked for the U.S. occasionally for doing assignments. So he was known, and for the entire campaign, he was there getting very close to Hillary, asking her all kinds of questions for intelligence, putting influence in there that the prince, The Crown Prince in the UAE would ask them to pass on. So they were in there as spies, influence, peddlers, and so forth. And the reason they got away with it was they had lots of money. The Clinton campaign continuously demanded millions and millions of dollars from them for the FaceTime. And they continually gave it.

And, you know, the question is at the end here, these two people are acting very strange. They're suddenly showing up, donating millions and millions of dollars to the Clinton campaign for up front FaceTime and personal cocktail parties in their house, not only for Hillary, but also for her husband Bill, the former president. They both showed up at the spy's house for cocktail parties. And, you know, you would think that having been a former Secretary of State, that you would be sort of witting when it came to people trying to send or sell you influence or trying to spy on your campaign. Having been Secretary of State, you would think you would know a little bit about that. And so the question is why, after this came out, there wasn't more of an investigation into the the Clinton campaign. Why didn't Clinton, you know, be interviewed at least or investigated into what she knew

about these two characters who were obviously spies? In the book, I actually quote the emails going back and forth between the spies and their spy masters. So it's fascinating just looking at this. And they keep saying, well, we had a great meeting yesterday with the big lady. That was their code name for Hillary. And so it's sort of fascinating reading these emails going back and forth between the spies and the spy masters in the Clinton campaign, while the FBI is looking under every rock for a Russian and never finding one.

Again, I titled the book SpyFail because time and time again, the FBI and the intelligence community has failed when it came time to trying to find real spies. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing, right? I mean, when you talk about Bill and Hillary Palin around with people like this, I don't want to hear ignorance, right? Like, they have no excuse. Both of those two know exactly what they're doing. And then so that has to go for the counterintelligence division two.

I mean, I know these guys are cops and not that smart, but come on, everybody knows who George Nader is. And in fact, the most press he got in the last decade was because he arranged a meeting with Eric Prince and I think it was the son-in-law, Jared Kushner, on is, how do you say it? The Seychelles, that island in the Indian Ocean there, and nobody paid attention. As you're saying here, he was embedded with the Clinton campaign the whole time, but he did this one meeting, and it was really scandalous because everybody knows who this guy is, as you say, he's got a reputation going back for decades in D.C., right? Well, sure. Like I said, he actually worked for, or he did assignments.

I quote Baker, the former Secretary of State, as saying, yeah, he did work for us. He worked for us on a very sensitive matter. So he was obviously known to the U.S. And for the kids out there, when he says former secretary of State Baker, we're talking about George Bush senior years, 30 years ago. Yeah. So he's been around. That was the whole idea. He couldn't pass the money himself because it was too obvious.

So he had to get this other character, Andy Kwaija, to act as his sort of frontman. And so the two of them would go in together, and Quaja would pretty much sit at George Clooney's bar in his home and sip champagne, while George Nader pumped Hillary Clinton for intelligence. So the money would go from Andy Quagia to the campaign, and then that would eliminate George Nader from. having his fingerprints on the money, but the two would always show up together, and the two were a pair for the entire six months of the campaign. So, you know, the question is, what's going on here? You get this one guy coming in, he's sitting at the bar nibbling on pretzels, and he's giving millions and millions of dollars, and his partner here, George Nader, is basically just there for asking questions and passing on influence.

All right, so let's talk about the NSA's cyber weapons that got stolen and leaked. How big of a big deal is that? We're not talking about Vault 7 here. That's the CIA. This is the NSA's cyber weapons. Yeah, it's a huge deal. I mean, you know, you have all these stories today about, you know, a few dozen or a few hundred documents kept in a presidential house or a presidential compound or whatever. we're talking more than half a billion documents that were stolen, half a billion documents that

were above top secret that were stolen from the NSA over the last few years, and nobody knew that they were being stolen, nobody knew where they were going, but you're talking about half a billion pages of documents, and some of those ended up in Russia, some of them ended up in North Korea, and they were turned against the United States. They used the documents and were able to use the intelligence against the United States. But in addition to that, the NSA lost three quarters of all its cyber weapons, and these are very dangerous. The weapons were kept in NSA, supposedly very secure, but some employee managed to steal 75% of them, nearly all the cyber weapons, and then put them up

for auction on the internet. Eventually, they ended up in North Korea and Russia. Again, these are enormous failures. And once they ended up in North Korea and Russia, they were used again against the United States. It were targeted against the United States. And eventually it created a what was known as a cyber pandemic. It created a pandemic around the world of cyber attacks, shut down hospitals and medical facilities in England. Then it jumped over to Europe, shut them all down there, cross over to Russia and continually to go around the world. So it became known, well, it became known as the worst cyber attack in world history was called Wanukry.

All right, Jim, so let me ask you about the Sony hack. You saying here that that was North Korea. I guess I disbelieved that because that was what TV said, and that was what the government said. But also, I had read this really interesting thread that said that it was an inside job by an angry Sony employee or some kind of thing like that it's been a few years now i don't remember but they seem to really you know throw cold water on the idea and essentially they blamed kind of blind assumptions for the conclusion that it must have been the north koreans who did it because they were mad about that movie or something like that but obviously you know a hell of a lot more about it than me so what did happen there for

real well uh basically the uh sony wanted uh sony was really hurting in terms of uh their films their films were not making much money. They were losing a lot of money. And they wanted to have a, you know, huge movie. So they came up with this idea of a movie involving the assassination, CIA assassination of Kim Jong-un, who's the leader of North Korea. And so they thought that would be a great idea. Originally, the script was written so Kim Jong-un would not be named, it would be some phony name for a chairman of North Korea. But then they changed it to put his real name in there, which was a really serious mistake. There were a lot of people that were saying, you shouldn't do this, you're going to anger this country. It's got nuclear weapons. And so they

You know, but they wanted to make money, and they thought they'd make more money if they used his real name. So they used his real name, and they created this movie. It was called The Interview. And it got them very worried when all of a sudden, the Kim Jong-un and the North Korean government started making very angry sounds. about this movie coming out. So they got in touch with the head of Sony, and they made a few changes to the movie, but not many. At the same time, they're making the film.

They're actually putting the film together. The North Koreans are actually infiltrating Sony. They've got very good hackers in North Korea, and they were infiltrating Sony's former films or actually their upcoming films and they were infiltrating all their emails and so forth. So there was a very big effort by North Korea to secretly penetrate Sony. At the same time, and obviously Sony, neither Sony nor the U.S. knew about this.

At the same time, James Clapper, who was head of U.S. intelligence, flew to North Korea to have a meeting with the chief spy master, his counterpart in North Korea. And they had a dinner together in a restaurant above a bowling alley. So as they're having dinner in this restaurant above a bowling alley in North Korea, the North Korean spy master is obviously laughing to himself because at the same time he's having dinner with Clapper, he's infiltrating and ex-filtrating Sony. He's stealing all millions and millions of documents at the same time he's having dinner with the U.S. spymaster.

And so obviously the U.S. had no idea about this. This was the largest cyber attack against the U.S. corporation and U.S. history. And at the same time, it's taking place, the chief U.S. spymaster, is having dinner with the chief North Koreans flymaster. So it was, you know, very embarrassing when it came out, the fact that the U.S. had no idea this was going on until the whole thing crashed and all the documents were stolen

and all the computers were turned into basically bricks at Sony. Yeah, well, and Michael Hayden, he's the same guy. I remember your last book begins with him not stopping the September 11th attack. Yeah, that's the problem with the intelligence community. They never fire anybody. General Hayden missed the 9-11 attack, and then after that, he got the war in Iraq wrong by saying the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction, which they didn't.

And then he turned the NSA's e-dropping technology onto American citizens, which was illegal and never produced anything. So after all that, he got promoted. You know, what does it take to actually get fired? It's hard to imagine. And the same thing when his successor became director. and was there at the time that they lost half a billion pages of documents and all the cyber weapons. Mike Rogers, you mean? Yeah, Mike Rogers.

He was director of the NSA. And again, nothing ever happened. He was never fired, never took a star away. They never lost any pay or anything. And again, this would never happen in the corporate world because the corporation would go bankrupt. and the corporation would fold. You know, I mean, if you lose almost all the inventory or you do something totally outrageous that drives the company into bankruptcy, you're not going to be there very long.

But in the government, it doesn't work that way, at least in the intelligence community. You could do the dumbest or the worst activity possible. Miss 9-11, lose all your documents, lose your cyber weapons, and nothing ever happens. Right. They don't even lose their reputation, right? All the ladies on TV news love them. Oh, here's Michael Hayden to tell us what's true.

And then, you know, it's funny because I was... Well, you don't get much real news from the news media about what's going on. I mean, how much tension is the, you know, the focus on the, you know, handful of documents basically being found in a presidential compound? to losing half a billion documents and all the cyber weapons. So there's this imbalance of coverage of what's important. And I think that's one of the key problems. So the public will get a lot of knowledge about something that's somewhat minor

and no knowledge or very little knowledge about something that's enormously major, depending on the, you know, what the Twitter flow happens to be for the day or whether a reporter or a correspondent happens to know a lot about cyber or not. Right. Give me just a minute here. At the Libertarian Institute, we published books, real good ones. So far, we've got Will Griggs-Snowquarter. Sheldon Richmond's coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each other.

and four of mine, fools Aaron, enough already, the great Ron Paul, and my brand new one, hotter than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons. And I'm happy to announce that we've just published our managing editor Keith Knight's first one, The Voluntarius Handbook, an excellent collection of essays by the world's greatest libertarian thinkers and writers, including me. Check them all out at libertarian institute.org slash books. And for a limited time, signed copies of enough already and hotter than the sun are available at Scott Horton.org slash books. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal

with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug assault or anything else you buy from Amazon.com. By way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott. Horton.org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things Comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses.

See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right? What Susie said about Cindy is always going to be easier to cover than some want-a-cry leak that has all these complicated, you know, computer terms and engineering, you know, this and that and whatever. So even the, well, let's go to the current one, right? This guy McGonigal, which that's so funny because I don't know if you remember

on the Old Simpsons, they had the movie about Mendoza, the drug dealer, and the Clint Eastwood character was McGonagall. Oh, really? And he throws the guy out the window and everything. Anyway, so McGonagall, I saw Timothy Snyder, who was a historian and now is a Russiagate hysteric and pro-Ukraine war guy. I saw his Twitter yesterday, said, aha, see? This is why the FBI never got to the bottom of Trump's collusion with Russia

was because this guy McGonigal is a Russian spy in the FBI and he was sitting on all the real truth that never got a chance to come out. And so you got to love the Russia Gators. But can you tell us a little bit about, you know, exactly what he's charged with? Is this just like some simple FARA stuff? Or is he an agent of the FSB under deep cover or what? Well, it hasn't really, a lot of the details haven't really come out much, but apparently, well, at the time, he was the head of counterintelligence, the FBI's counterintelligence unit

in New York, which is actually the biggest one outside of Washington. It was an extremely important job. He was there during the whole Russia Gate investigation, and he's got several charges, one One of them, they're fairly bizarre. One of them is he was taking a quarter million dollars from a former intelligence agent for Albania, and he would fly back and forth to Albania without notifying the FBI. In other words, the FBI has this guy that's one of their top officials, and he's flying back and forth to Albania. He's meeting the Prime Minister of Albania having dinner with him,

and he's not putting it down in his forms that he's going there or that he's meeting these people. And he's taking all this cash. At one point, he was sitting in a car outside a restaurant and the guy comes up with an envelope full of, I don't know, $80,000 or something and handed it to him. So it's all this sort of sleazy stuff that wouldn't even make it to a B-rated movie, I don't think, in terms of believability. So that was one charge, and then the other charge, or one indictment, the other indictment had to do with, after he left the FBI, he became basically a consultant to this top Russian person who was close to Putin and I think it's pronounced Durjapaka I see the name all the time I just don't know I think it's Deripaska is that right me so he became a this is after he left the FBI he became a

like an agent for Derrith Paca Duras Paca, and the whole idea was to try to get the sanctions lifted from him. The problem was he was taking money from him, and he was on the sanction list, and so McGonigal, therefore, was violating the sanctions, U.S. sanctions by taking money from a sanctioned person. At least that's what I sort of concluded from reading that. indictment. So there were two charges. One of them basically had to do with while he was in charge of the New York office and the other one after he left the office. But the one in charge of the New York office just shows how dim-witted the FBI is. I mean, here it is,

this top guy. And he's taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a former intelligence agent for Albania. And he's flying he's flying back and forth meeting the prime minister and the FBI has no idea he's doing this until you know uh years and years after the whole thing's all over and yeah you know there's this thing in the new york times about that just came out about how the FBI tried to flip deripaska and i mean i need to go back and refresh my memory about you know all the accusations about his role in russia gate i think he's one of the many people who we were told was by a causal chain of association, part of Putin's control over the Trump campaign

and Trump the president and so forth, who never really was a Russian agent anyway. Like, he's a rich Russian oligarch, but that doesn't make him FSB or it doesn't make him a handler of American spies for Vladimir Putin or anything like that. And apparently, according to the New York Times piece, off and on, he's worked with the U.S. government, you know, very closely, and they tried very hard to flip him here. and make him one of their guys. So. Yeah, I, I mentioned him briefly in my book because he, you know, he, he was a client of Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for Trump.

And he had a lot of interest in Montenegro. I've got a chapter on Montenegro, the Russian attention. attempted coup in Montenegro. And what was fascinating about this coup, just to back up, Montenegro is a small European country that used to be part of Yugoslavia. And then it's very popular for Russians. Russians go there a lot to use the beaches and all that. But it's also been very close to the U.S.

And there was a point at which the U.S. wanted them to be a new member of NATO, and Russia was absolutely against that because they wanted to build a naval port in Montenegro. It was one of the few places that they could build a port on the Mediterranean because NATO controls, it's basically a NATO lake, which is the Mediterranean. So the Russians needed a place for a port. they were looking at Montenegro, Montenegro, was in the process of trying to decide whether to go with Russia and have them build a port there or go with the U.S. and join NATO. Eventually, they decided to join NATO, agreed to join NATO, and Putin got very angry at that and launched a coup attempt in Montenegro. What makes this very interesting to me is that as this coup plot was going on, the very secret coup plot, the group in Montenegro that was close to Putin in Russia was called the Democratic Front. It was the political party that was close to Russia. It was secretly taking part in this attempted.

coup or the planning for the attempted coup. But what made this interesting to me was the fact that they needed an ex-filtration team in case their coup went sideways, in case these people in the democratic front, everything went haywire and they needed to get out real quickly. So they needed an ex-filtration team. So they hired an ex-filtration team, which happened to be made up of CIA and former CIA and FBI agents. So he had a CIA agent and three former CIA agent and three former FBI agents who flew over to Montenegro and became the exfiltration team for Putin's attempted coup. And the whole thing, again, reads, I have a chapter on this.

It's very fascinating because I have all the inside information from one of the key players in Montenegro, one of the people that was hired. to be the assassin. But it shows that here you get these former FBI, CIA people going over there, helping out in a Russian coup, come back to the United States, and nothing ever happens to them. They're never arrested. They're never investigated. There's never any congressional hearing. And, you know, unless I dug into this, nobody would ever know about it.

And then, so what's the reason for the total investigation? impunity on that. They couldn't even find one sacrificial head to roll for... I have no idea. You know, I looked and looked and looked. There were the FBI sent somebody down

to ask questions of some of the people who are involved. And I actually got a 302, which is an FBI form filled out when you interview somebody that showed that the person was interviewed, or one of the people that was interviewed,

Not one of the players, but one of the people that knew about them going to Montenegro. But that was all. I mean, a couple of people got questioned about it. It was a huge deal in Montenegro. And they were actually, these guys were actually charged in Montenegro. There was an Interpol warrant sent out for them in Montenegro. One of them actually was arrested in Cyprus and on the Montenegrin Interpol warrant, but the U.S. got him off, or basically he got off. I'm not sure exactly how, but the warrant was pulled and he came back to the U.S.

So there's a lot of intrigue in here. And, you know, when you're doing research on this, you could only go to a certain level and then what's happening below. that level you have no idea about and that's where it is. So the idea is I do this chapter and hopefully maybe somebody will be able to get something else or some other information. But the point is here you have former U.S. intelligence and FBI people flying to Montenegro helping out in a Russian coup being actually the exfiltration team. I mean, whoever hires people to be an ex-filtration team for a democratically elected, a democratic country having a, having an election.

So the whole thing is bizarre. There was, like I said, there was never any formal FBI investigation that was made public. There was never anybody arrested. There was never any congressional hearings. The whole thing was brushed under the rug. And the question is why? why wasn't something why wasn't something done are you sure that it's not a lie like everything they say about rush all the time no listen i mean i mean don't get me wrong like obviously

putin would overthrow a government if he thought he had to but i'm just saying they're always accused in russia of all of it you know they supposedly did brexit and overthrew the parliamentary elections of the e u and all this was just all lies well i don't do those things i don't do conspiracy i don't do anything like that i don't do possibly this possibly that could be this could be that i just don't do that it's not my books you don't see those words if if the information's in my book you can count on it it's uh it's valid uh this is all based on fact so there's no you sure got a good reputation with me sir huh i've read your other books and and all your articles over the years you sure have a good reputation here. Yeah, and I work really hard to do that. Yeah, I mean,

yeah, there's a lot of ways I could speculate. I could have speculated a lot of things on all this, but I didn't. You know, this came from court testimony in Montenegro. I had to translate all this stuff from Montenegrin and read court transcripts. I had a, I had all. I had all all the detail from the person who was actually hired to do the – actually, they were going to – part of the coup was to assassinate the head of the Montenegrin government. So all this comes from a very long court case in Montenegro where all these people testified. and, you know, I spend a lot of time on getting all the details right and all the facts right. So it's not speculation. I don't have the word possibly in there. I don't think anywhere. It's just this is what happened. It's not the New York Times either, which, you know,

goes on authority say, authority say, an official said, someone with knowledge of the thing, right? You don't write like that either. No, there's nothing. in there that are, I don't really have a lot of secret sources that I meet in back alleys or parking garages. I do a lot of research, really, really hard research to find out an FOI request and all that kind of thing. And there are occasional sources that I use also, but there are sources that I've had for

for decades. I mean, I've been doing this for a very long time. So I'm very confident about things that I write about and I've never really had any issues in terms of people saying, you know, you got this wrong, you got that wrong or whatever. I work really hard at getting inaccurate and, you know, I wouldn't be writing about this if I didn't know what I'm talking about. Again, this is based on at least the Montenegroen part. It's all based on information that came out in a Montenegrin court, the case went on for months, and he had all these people testifying. So there's a lot of detail in there, but the detail comes from, not speculation, it comes from facts. Yeah. Hey, look, that reminds me of a book that I left

off of the list of all your great books, a pretext for war, 9-11, Iraq and the abuse of America's intelligence agencies, which is a really great one in terms of retelling the story of, or not retelling, telling the story of the neocons, the separate government under Dick Cheney in the W. Bush years that lied us into war in Iraq for the liquid and all of that. Great stuff. Yeah, well, I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, that was a horrible, just a terrible war that should never have happened. And, yeah, it was all these neocons that were pushing forward and constantly, constantly pushing forward. They finally got it. So, yeah, I spent a lot of time in that book. It was, you know, it was teeth gnashing, gnashing material because so many people ended up

being killed, innocent people in Iraq being killed because of this absurd war that should never have happened. Yeah, 20 years later, I'm not over it. I know, you know, a lot of people are, and it's like the Korean War or something now a long time ago, but not here. So, you know, one thing that really bothers me, too, is the fact that, you know, we, we do all these things. We have these wars that was based on lies, basically, the whole Iraq War. And yet nobody's sanctions, United States. We're all these sanctions, you know, we sanction Russia all the time for invading Ukraine or whatever, but we invade Iraq and nobody sanctions us. Because the people doing the sanctions were the people that were helping us, the Europeans and so forth. So, you know,

it's this double standard where we could launch crazy wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places, Vietnam and so forth, and yet we never get punished for. We never get any sanctions from the rest of the world. And we just sort of say, oh, well, sorry about that, move on. And yet, you know, we're the first country to jump into sanctions anytime somebody does something that we don't like. Yeah. I mean, you listen to the D.C. consensus. They can't imagine why anyone in the world would think of America as anything less than the most honest of brokers. You know, I always, I might be ripping this off from someone else clarified, not just America as Superman, but America is Christopher Reeve as Superman.

The Virgin Boy Scout, never tell a lie, you know, perfect, you know, truth, justice in the American way. And, oh, Iraq and Somalia, Afghanistan and all that, I'll never even mind all that. It just doesn't count against us in their eyes. And they can't even imagine how anyone else in the world would look at us kind of sideways. Never mind, hold us accountable. But how could they even think that we have any other motive other than spreading goodness and light when we, for example, pour $50 billion worth of weapons into Ukraine or whatever it is? You know, arm up in Taiwan East for the next war.

And then the other problem is that we do these things. We have like this enormous war in Iraq killing all these people for no reason. I mean, the whole reason originally was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was a danger to the world. So we had to go in there and eliminate Saddam and turn Iraq into a friendly, U.S. friendly country when he never had any weapons of mass destruction. Again, it's one of the worst. blunders of U.S. intelligence and history.

And, you know, as a write in the book, the intelligence community obviously knew that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction because, you know, one of the things that we have are satellites and space that can photograph things on Earth a couple inches wide. And nobody, no country has ever built nuclear weapons. without building a delivery system, the delivery system being a, you know, inter-tree-stage intercontinental ballistic missiles. Those things, you actually have to test outside in the fresh air. You have to, you know, send them into space, see if they work.

And we obviously would have seen that if they were doing that. So we never saw that they were building any kind of ICBM or testing any kind of ICBM. And if you're not building ICBMs, there's no point in having a nuclear warhead if there's no place to put it on. So the U.S. intelligence knew that Saddam could not have had weapons that could have reached the United States or attack the United States or weapons of mass destruction. So, yeah, we went to war, this horrible war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. of people in Iraq and innocent people that should never have been killed. And yet there was no accountability. There was no congressional hearings afterwards about how this happened, how we got into this mess.

Obama basically came into office and said, well, that's, you know, that's history. We're not going to look into it. We're not going to do anything about it. nobody was ever charged. We never had any congressional hearings. Here you're going to have congressional hearings on everything. You have congressional hearings on whether there was some documents in Biden or Trump's presidential compounds or whatever. But we killed, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in a war that should never happen. And we never have a single hearing about how that came about. Yeah. Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's

Scott Horton's show.substack.com, and if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else, but not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scotthortonshow.substack.com. Hey, y'all, libretasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's Libertasbella.com. Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute.org.

I'm the director. Then we've got Sheldon Richmond, Kyle Anzalone, Keith Knight, Lori Calhoun, Jim Beauvard, Connor, Connor, Conner Freeman, Will Porter, Patrick McFarlane, and Tommy Salman's on our staff, writing and podcasting. And we've also got a ton of other great writers, too, like Walter Blancel. Richard Booth, Boss Spliet, Kim Robinson, and William Ben Wagonin. We've published eight books so far, including my latest, Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and Keith Knight's new Voluntarius Handbook. And we've got quite a few more great ones coming soon.

Check out Libertarian Institute.org slash books. It's a whole new era. We libertarians don't have the power, but we do have enough influence to try to lead the left and the right to make things right. Join us at Libertarian Institute.org. And what's funny is they did have reports. I guess whatever hearings they held were in secret or they just had their staff write up reports. But even kind of the Republicans cover up reports about how they lied to send a war in Iraq are damning as can be if you take the time to read them. But you're right. Certainly they never made the big circus out of it. And, you know, one of the most important characters during all that is James Clapper. And I'd have to go back, but I'm sure that this is in a pretext for war. He was the head of the National

Reconnaissance Office at the time. He was the guy vouching for the satellite pictures, pretending that every horse trough was a somehow a chemical weapons laboratory. Any building with a roof must have a secret stash of mustard gas beneath it and this kind of thing. And then he was the same guy who perpetrated the long-forgotten hoax that, oh, no, see, Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. But Vladimir Putin helped him move them to Syria right before the war. And that's why we can't find them. And that was James Clapper, too.

Him and the Neocons, he was vouching for the neocons hoax that that's what happened to Saddam's weapons and mass destruction. And then he's now famous, and people cite this, that he famously is the same guy that lied to Congress under oath and said they weren't keeping records on, you know, all of our metadata. and all of that stuff, spying on the American people. And so he's famous for that, but he had already lied us into war and then lied about his lies of lying us into war before the NSA spying lies ever happened. He later became the director of national intelligence. And he's now on TV every day telling us what's true and false.

Yeah, that's the other thing. These people who are, you know, keeping all these secrets heads of NSA like Hayden and Clapper, the head of the Office of Director of National Intelligence and so forth, and they go on television and make millions. The irony here is that if you're a worker, you know, a regular worker be at one of these agencies, you can't do that.

You can't go on television and just talk about these things, or you certainly can't write an op-ed piece without sending the op-ed piece for review at CIA or NSA or wherever before it goes to press. So if you're one of these people that is, you know, below the director level or whatever, you've got to go through all these procedures before you can actually write anything. But the directors come out and they go on television and get paid millions of dollars to be talking heads without them having to account for anything that they're saying. So it's a stubble standard.

And just going back to the fact that we never had any hearings after 9-11, I'm sorry, after the war in Iraq about how we got into it and why we got into it and who should be blamed for, England, on the other hand, the UK did have, they had, I think, several years worth of hearings, including calling top officials, including the prime minister, to respond to questions about how the UK got involved in the Iraq war. So, you know, we seem to be unique in the world here where we can do these things, but we don't

have to hold ourselves accountable, and nobody else will hold us accountable, which leads to us continually doing these things over and over again. well and in the bizarre world we live in the best shot anybody ever had at thwarting the you know status quo clinton bush you know post cold war world empire was donald freaking trump and the entire government refused to go along with him on the few things that he was good on and he wasn't very good on very many things in the first place and they went as we talked about to the lengths of framing him up on Russia gate to prevent him from, well, first of all, to excuse their failure in the election, but then also, as the FBI told CNN to rein him in. If they can't overthrow him with the

25th Amendment, they can at least rein him in by keeping this pretended investigation going. And then, and it worked, right? I mean, they did, you know, they, they didn't, I don't think they stole the votes, but they certainly did all these, you know, crush the Republicans, October surprise. That was the FBI and the CIA again. And then the FBI had their own October surprise, where they plotted to kidnap the Democrat lady governor

of Michigan and frame these Trump supporters for it when they were the ones who were behind the whole damn thing. And then, so what happened was we got the exact same crew. The Biden government is the Obama government. Those were the

which was, you know, not much different in kind from the Bush people, right? Just the the sort of mirror image of the Bush people. And then so we got the exact same people back. Instead of getting a return to normalcy like we might have gotten with Ron Paul, end the world empire and be a normal country and a normal time, instead return to normalcy means go right back from the craziness of Trump to the world empire of Barack Obama. And so here we are just stuck. As you say, talk about no accountability. Our government right now is at war with Russia. those are the words of the Germans who were part of the war.

We are at war with Russia right now, and it's Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken and Victoria Newland are in charge. The same people who got us into this mess eight years ago, nine years ago now. Well, that's why I write books about these kind of things, the intelligence community and the national security. and I was a columnist at Foreign Policy Magazine for a number of years. And I would just be so frustrated because you see all these things happening behind the scenes and the public doesn't really have much of a knowledge about how idiotic some of these decisions are.

Anyway, that's why I write books because, you know, a lot of things. of the stuff is so hidden, nobody would see it otherwise. Yeah. Well, man, I sure value that. And listen, before I let you go, I want to ask you, Jim, about Russia and China and their spies in America. And I'm not trying to climb on any Cold War bandwagon, but at the same time, these are major powers, and they do have a major interest in spying on the United States defensively and I'm sure offensively. Of course, Ames and Hansen are kind of the apex of that, as far as I know. But, you know, and I know that they framed up poor Wenho Lee so that James Riyadh could get away.

But I wonder if you could tell us about the reality of Russian and Chinese spying in the United States. Well, you know, obviously there's spying, but it's not at the level. I don't think of what people. assume, you know, this whole idea of human intelligence is rather obsolete.

We don't send human spies undercover to Russia at least not very much as far as I know. And they don't really send it over here as people that work in embassies and they

have diplomatic immunity if they get caught. I mean, there were you know, a decade ago there were the spies that were the sleeper agents in the U.S. from Russia, but they didn't really accomplish anything. I don't think none of them ever got anything classified. So the human intelligence aspect is rather obsolete. It's good for movies, but it doesn't really happen much.

The spying that's done is all done electronically. Like I said, it's a stealing of cyber. the stealing of cyber weapons and the infiltration of NSA and so forth electronically. So those are the things, those are the areas that I sort of focus on a lot. I don't have a lot on human spies in the U.S. I wrote, you know, during the Russia Gate era, I focused on Maria Butina because the government, went after her.

They were looking for, they needed a Russian to arrest. And as I said, the Russians don't really send humans over to spy like that. So I knew the whole thing was rather bogus from the very beginning, and I really looked into it a great deal. And I wrote a long piece for the New Republic about Maria Boutini. And I actually have a couple chapters in the book on the case. But it shows how the... And you know what, Jim, thank you for that, by the way,

because nobody else did and it was such an obvious fraud you know she was a pretty redhead like Anna Chapman so they went oh look as you're saying they needed someone to arrest so he went after this poor lady and and man the narrative against her oh selling

sex for secrets and all of this stuff it was so heavy and all the liberal Democrats and the Twitter swarm they loved it so much and you're the only one who said well actually let's do journalism and find out what's going on here and then what was going on here was the exact opposite of what they said they locked her in solitary confinement and all this stuff is monstrous what they did to her and just for a PR exercise so thank you for that

on behalf of probably her and a hell of a lot of other people who noticed that you're the only one who did the work man well that's that's what i actually enjoy doing uh in addition to that i knew maria putina i knew her before all this happened as i said i was a writer uh for foreign policy magazine and so I would go to a lot of functions in Washington where they had speakers and they at one of the functions she was at I was about to go to Siberia somebody said that she had grew up in Siberia so I talked to her about Siberia we got to know each other and it was more than a year later that all this stuff happened so I knew she She wasn't a spy.

I mean, I'm the guy that knows a lot about intelligence. Never once did she ever ask me a question about intelligence. I made the approach to her. She didn't approach me. So all these indicators that would indicate that this person's a spy just weren't there. And then when I looked into it, the whole thing was so absurd. And the government, I go into this thing. a great extent in the book, how the government really needed a Russian to arrest when

Russiagate happened, because they didn't have anybody. I mean, they couldn't even find spies in Hillary Clinton's campaign. So they're looking for a Russian to arrest. She happened to be a Russian who came to their attention. Like you said, she was attractive. She had long red hair. She looked like somebody out of. a novel and so they made this case against her which was total nonsense and then when they

basically the whole thing exploded in court they charged her with being a sort of a red sparrow and then when it came out there was nothing there and so they eventually dropped the major charge against her it was a horrible thing and she had to endure you know solitary confinement I mean the whole thing was so absurd. But anyway, I get into it in a great deal in the book. And again, it's just one of those things that you really do have to dig to find out what really went on behind the scenes. And that's, that's sort of how I create my books. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to focus on these areas that we just talked about. Hey, can you tell us real quick about Alexander Ma?

Yeah, again, it's another absolute failure. And this one was maybe the worst of all, the worst tragic failure. The CIA obviously does a lot of intelligence collection in China, and what they do is they develop sources over there. They develop locals who give them information, local agents. And then all these dozens of them started being arrested and being killed by the Chinese. Nobody could figure out why that was happening. How are the Chinese finding out who these people are that are cooperating with the CIA?

And so it took a long time and it finally came out. It really hasn't gotten any attention. I'm really the only person who's written about this. But I really dug into it. And it turned out that the FBI had been infiltrated by a Chinese mole, a guy named Alexander Ma. He had formerly worked. FBI or CIA? No, Ma had originally worked for the CIA.

Oh, I see. He worked for the CIA for, I don't know, 10, 15 years, something like that. And then he left the CIA and went to the CIA. and went to China sort of mysteriously. Apparently, there's no regulations that the CIA were former agents can, you would think there'd be a regulation where a former agent can't go back to the country that was his target country, but he did. He went back to China, spent a few years there, came back to the United States,

and then returned to China and then volunteered to be a spy for the Chinese, government. And the Chinese government said, well, we need a mole in the FBI. So he applied to be a, to work for the FBI. And having been, you know, previously worked for the CIA, it didn't, wasn't really that difficult. So he was hired by the FBI around 2004, I think it was, something like that. And he worked as a translator in the, in the Hawaii office. the office in Honolulu, which was the office that focused largely on China. And he would take all the information that he could collect, all the secrets. There was no restrictions on him at all.

He'd walk out the door with it. He'd make copies of things. He'd download things on flash drives. He'd just constantly steal all this really damning information on agents and sources in China. And once every couple months, he'd actually fly to Shanghai, you know, the target country. And they would, the Chinese intelligence would put him up in a hotel and he'd be debriefed and he'd give them all the documents and he'd fly back. Come on, you're putting me on.

Why wouldn't he just drop it off? It went on for upwards of 20 years. He was only arrested in 2020. And, you know, so all these people are being. killed in all these agents are being killed in China and nobody knows why and here's this guy that and what exactly was his job at FBI? He was a translator so he would be able to get access to all the information of the wiretaps and so forth. His brother also formerly worked for the CIA and he also became a spy for China and he was based in the U.S. and he would

helped the Chinese find cooperating Chinese who are in the United States. So you had the two brothers formerly worked for the CIA. One ended up working for the FBI and the other lived in California. And they both ended up being top spies for China. And again, none of this has come out. I mean, I'm the first one to write about all this stuff. So it's. Again, that's the title of my book is spy fail because the constant failure of the U.S. intelligence community.

You know, my previous books have always looked at how the agencies like the NSA spied on other countries and spied on us. And in this book, I'm looking at how other countries are spying on us largely because of our own failures. and a lot of times it leads to wars, it leads to people being killed, and that's why I decided to focus on this aspect. Yeah, well, listen, I can't wait. The book is already ordered and on its way here, but at least, you know, I have enough to, you know, satiate my appetite for a little while until I finish my book. But it's going right on the top of my pile and then that way when I actually read the whole thing, we can reprise this interview and go into areas that maybe we didn't get a chance to touch on this time. Yeah, there's a lot of other aspects in the book. I mean, the parts

that have come out were parts that I did for the New York Post and the Business Insider and... Oh, I didn't see that one. The Daily Beast. Yeah, I wrote about the Chinese spy scandal for the business insider and then the what is it the Daily Beast did an excerpt on the

Hillary Clinton infiltration of Hillary Clinton's campaign so it's got a, you know, it's good to get a lot of attention at the beginning there so hopefully you know it'll attract enough attention and people will become aware because what's going on really has to stop.

Otherwise, you know, it's just going to keep going on and going on. There's got to be accountability within intelligence, within the intelligence community. And pretty much as long as I've been writing books, it's never taken place. Yeah. All right. So first of all, here in Business Insider, it's how China planted an FBI mole who was discovered only after gutting the CIA's vast spy news. network. That's January 17th. And then in the Daily Beast, these shady UAE donors gave millions to

Clinton and Trump while the feds dozed. But you know what? Before I let you go, let me ask you one more thing, which is, is there a chapter about Israeli spying in the United States? Because now I'm reminded that you're the guy in the shadow factory. You broke the story about how they were used in Israeli software to run all their spying technology and all of that stuff. Oh, my God. How could I have forgotten that even for a day, Jim? Yeah, there's several chapters in there on Israeli spying in the U.S. So, you know, it looks like everybody's spying on us, and we never are able to detect it, or if we do, we never able to do anything about it. So, yeah, I've got, you know, in addition to everybody else, I've certainly got

the Israelis in there. Great. All right. Can't wait to read it. Thank you. much for coming on the show great to talk to you again and always good to be on your show scott so thanks again for having me on yeah absolutely all right everybody that's the great james bampford the scott horton show anti war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradio.com antiwar dot com scott horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org