Ray McGovern: The Imprisonment of the Palestinian People Was Not an Act of God

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Israel’s current war on Gaza and the Palestinians draws pessimism and hopelessness, reminding two veterans of its origin in another such war in the region in 1967, The Six Day War, which resulted In Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.  Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence  to dissect the relationship Israel has maintained and exploited ever since that imperial conquest with support of the United States, and how the future of American foreign policy appears to once again be led not by informed individuals but rather by selfish and dangerous impulses.

Calling up the Six Day War, McGovern notes it was understood within the CIA as a preemptive war of choice: “The reality is that [Israel]… had carte blanche to do it [the Six Day War], that they were given forgiveness, if not permission, (by the US) before they went up on the Golan. And that’s the situation that exists today with a president who shows himself as being joined at the hip with Bibi Netanyahu,” McGovern explained.

Back then, more than six decades ago, McGovern was in CIA headquarters, advising President Lyndon Johnson,  and Scheer was a journalist reporting from the ground in Egypt, Israel and the newly occupied Gaza and West Bank in the immediate aftermath of the war. In this conversation, the two draw from their experience to show the deliberate, imperial force that has destroyed implementation of the UN-mandated creation of a Palestinian state to be created alongside the Jewish state. 

They explain how the Six Day War, ostensibly fought to prevent an imagined threat from Egypt,  which was in temporary control of Gaza,  and Jordan in the West Bank, was resolved with an eventual peace agreement between Israel and those two Arab  nations. But it became the excuse for Israel’s permanent conquest of the millions of Palestinians tilling the lands of Gaza and the West Bank who had posed no military threat to the survival of a Jewish state, a state justified by the European Holocaust, for which the Palerstinans held no accountability. 

Recalling their own common childhood growing up in the Bronx during WWII, McGovern and Scheer remark on the deepest of ironies that it is Germany, the historical author of the Holocaust, that is now arresting its own citizens for opposing the dispersal and destruction of the Palestinian people who, like the Jews, have been assured in UN declarations of an equal claim to a state of their own.

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Credits

Host:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Introduction:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy. 

Robert Scheer Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest and in this case, no question. Certified former CIA analyst who briefed, I think what was it, five presidents or something? 

Ray McGovern Three. 

Scheer Three. And one of them, Ronald Reagan you briefed, but was it clear he was always awake or he was doing something else. But you briefed him from ’81 to ’85. You did President Ford, President Nixon. You were a Russia expert, you actually went to school quite close to where I grew up. And then I went to school at City College in New York, in Harlem, and you went to Fordham University and we overlapped. And you were in ROTC, you went into the Army. And then as part of your military duty, you were assigned to the White House because of your language skills and knowledge of Russia and China. And anyway, you ended up being the very important chief of the Russian analyst section, right in the CIA. The reason I wanted to talk to you is we’re at one of these moments in history, really frightening, where people are arguing about what is history, what is truth, what do we know? And we’ve had this discussion about the Ukraine and Russia and we’ve had it endlessly. What can we trust in the way of information or facts or what have you? And here we have a narrative about Israel and Gaza. And you wrote an interesting article. You said, wait a minute, what is this Europe pretending they have nothing to do with this? The whole reason for Israel was a grotesque distortion of history, a grotesque genocide atrocity you call the Holocaust, visited upon the Jewish people and many others, but certainly stressing the elimination of Jewish people. One of the most, maybe the most, horrendous event in modern history done by Europeans. And ironically right now as we speak here is was Germany, the country who gave us the Holocaust, and they’re now arresting people if they demonstrate in Germany for Palestinian rights, and they feel totally self-righteous and they’re the second largest arms supplier to Israel. So this whole narrative about who are these Palestinians, what is Israel, what is security? It becomes a garbled history. I want to begin with Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and something called the Six-Day War. By then, you were functioning as a full fledged analyst in the CIA. The official story that Israel put out to the world was they had been attacked, or about to be attacked, by Egypt and by Jordan and Syria and the allied Arab powers, and they had to defend themselves. And as part of their quick victory, in fact, they hadn’t been attacked. I read this quite recently in an article by you, but it’s familiar history and Menachem Begin even admitted it, the former leader of Israel back in ’82, I think, that this was a war of choice, it was a pre-emptive strike and as a result, the Palestinians, who had nothing to do with attacking Israel, who had been occupied really by Jordan, by Egypt and by Syria and denied any statehood, they, in fact, came to be under Israeli control. And so Israel’s bombing of Gaza now and their control of the West Bank is something that came out of a war of conquest that they claimed they were waging to protect themselves against Egypt and Jordan, but actually ended up occupying the Palestinian people. They made a separate peace with Egypt and Jordan, and now it’s these Palestinian people who are being blamed for everything. And they are the subject, and one can argue about the degree to which this represents genocide against the Palestinian people. So how do you see it? And how did you see it when you were in the CIA at the time of the Six-Day War? 

McGovern Robert, there’s no arguing about genocide. It’s a textbook case of genocide. We know what happened to most people think 6 million Jews back during the Third Reich. Are 2 million Palestinians any less important? I’d like to go back two decades earlier when you and I were callow youths in the Bronx, okay? I remember I was nine years old and you were probably ten or 11, you’re much older than I am. And I remember the rejoicing that Israel had its own homeland. My God, it was great. Parades up and down the Grand Concourse. Bob, you remember that? Nobody told us. Nobody told us that there were people already there. Like, not only for centuries, for millennia. Okay. They will call the Palestinians. They were driven out. Most people say between 700 and 750,000 of them were driven out by the Israelis so that they could occupy this land without a people, so to speak. So it goes back to then. And, of course, as I learned these things later on in life, as I got a little bit better educated, I joined the CIA. And then let’s fast forward to 1967. The Israelis were all powerful there in the Middle East. I remember analysts in the CIA sort of dissing the Arabs as incompetent. An Arab tank had four gears, three reverse and at one forward in case of an attack from the rear. You know, this kind of joke about the Arabs, the Jews were supreme. And then, of course, in 1967, they put out this word that they’re about to be attacked by the Egyptians and by the Syrians. And so they had to defend themselves. Well, we know that wasn’t true. But we weren’t allowed to say much about that because it was very sensitive even in government to say, well, the Jews are lying about this. The Israelis were lying about this, okay. Now, during the 1967 war, when the Israelis did take after Egypt and after Syria and destroyed their air force in the first day, then they were going up on the Golan Heights in Syria to take that. And they knew that the U.S. disapproved of that. They know that the U.S. was intercepting messages between the armed forces in the Sinai and the ones at Tel Aviv. And they knew that the ship, the intelligence collection ship that was collecting those signals, it was called the USS Liberty. So, long story short, they tried all they could to sink it. Luckily, a sailor got an S.O.S. out and the Sixth Fleet came to the rescue. The Israelis got out of Dodge. Well, let me just say, 34 U.S. sailors were killed, 171 wounded. Most of the crew actually were wounded. So that was part of this attack. Now, why? Well, because the Israelis are much, much more comfortable asking for forgiveness rather than permission. They knew if they told the U.S. that we’re going up in the Golan Heights to take them from Syria. “No, that’s not a good idea, you’ve got enough now!” And they went up and they took it. Now, as you pointed out in 1982, when the Israelis were still riding very high, you know, Menachem Begin, the former prime minister of Israel, was talking at the National War College in Washington, and he was very expansive. And one of the paragraphs that he said, I’m going to read to you and I have it up here on the side of my thing, so I’m not going to misspeak. Here it is: “In June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” Okay. End quote. Now. So there you go. That’s what happened in ’67. It was a war of choice, as we’re accustomed to say, like the one we did against Iraq. And they ended up with the West Bank, parts of Syria—the Golan Heights—and Gaza. Now they had the Sinai as well, but under a separate deal, they gave that back to Egypt. 

Scheer And parts of Jerusalem too.

McGovern Oh, yeah. They got a slice of Jerusalem, but Jerusalem was not given completely to the Israelis. They did take it over, but it’s an international city even today. So the reality is that they did this, that they had carte blanche to do it, that they were given forgiveness, if not permission, before they went up on the Golan. And that’s the situation that exists today with a president who thinks that, well he shows himself as being joined at the hip with Bibi Netanyahu. And it looks like Biden is actually making the decisions on this because they’re crazier even than the one that Blinken and Sullivan have made. We’re so isolated and this is not going to come to a… Well, as the Chinese used to say, it’s going to come to a no-good-end for us and for Israel. Things are escalating now. And I have to say that the Arabs, the Turks and the Iranians have what we call escalation dominance in that part of the world, just as Russia has escalation dominance vis-à-vis Ukraine. I don’t know who’s running our policies, but when Putin calls them crazy, I guess that’s one thing I would agree with Putin on. They are crazy. Two front war, Far East as well as Ukraine and now this in the Middle East? Crazy indeed. I just hope it doesn’t get out of hand as it may since someone blew up a hundred Iranians, killed 100 Iranians today and wounded another 100, another 200, actually. And the hand behind that is suspect. Well, it seems to be Israeli. Israel has not even denied it yet. I will see how the Iranians react. They have been very cautious. I hope they continue to be cautious. But there’s a chance of another false flag. Let’s say somebody sinks the carrier that would still have, the Eisenhower, sinks it in the Persian Gulf, wherever it is right now. That would be blamed on whom? Israel? No, that would be blamed on the Iranians. And then the neocons will have their war! 

Scheer Yeah, but let me cut to the chase here in terms of the imagery and virtue. And again, it’s almost a sort of biblical proportion. And we have heads of some of our leading universities lose their job. The head of Harvard just today, as we’re recording this yesterday, head of the University of Pennsylvania. What is being said is that, and it’s interesting because you think that the Arab world, so-called, holds the high cards militarily, perhaps. But I happen to be in Gaza and in the West Bank at the end of the Six-Day War. I had been in Egypt. I was trying to cover the war, it ended before there was much coverage to do. But the human tragedy here that you could basically imprison millions of people in the West Bank and Gaza and so forth, deny them their fundamental rights, and yet feel that whenever they fight back in using war and horrible means as was done in this case two months ago. Nonetheless, the idea that you had the right to imprison these people, deny them their fundamental rights, seize their ancestral lands, and you did it in the name of your freedom, your security, right? And the whole reason for the establishment of Israel—and this was where your article, I thought was really quite profound—it was done in retaliation to barbarism in Europe and not Muslim barbarism, but Christian barbarism. And I want to get to the heart of that, that here are people being subject and not just in the last bombing and everything, but for decades of their actual fundamental rights. And they did not attack Israel. They did not have an army, they did not have an air force. And that, in fact, the supposed sponsors of them in Egypt and Jordan didn’t really have any affection for them or protection for them. And then Israel, after picking this fight, then made peace with them and actually was, just on the eve of this, was in the process of getting along maybe better with Saudi Arabia. So this is not about the Muslim religion, this is about the denial of any essential humanity to people called Palestinian who happened to be living there. Is that not really the issue? 

McGovern Well, it is the issue, Robert. The Palestinians have been denied their rights since 1948. That’s why I went back that far. They’ve been driven there as much. There are as many Palestinians driven into neighboring countries as there are living in Palestine proper. 7 million each is what I’m told. And in Gaza, 2.3 million is what most people say. And the clear intent of the current Israeli government is to get those people in Gaza either dead or driven out of Gaza into the Sinai. Now, the White House is making nice noises now about, “oh, we don’t really like this language about driving people out of their homeland.” But this was precisely the case that Secretary of State Blinken made to Egyptian President Sisi right after that October 7 attack by Hamas. He said, look, here’s the solution. We got it all worked out. We drive out the Palestinians from Gaza, put them in the Sinai. We’ll pay for the tents. We’ll get them repatriated. We’ll send them wherever. Just let us get them out into Egypt. Then Sisi said, You’re kidding me. Get out of here. I mean, it was a very acrimonious, but you could tell… 

Scheer You’re talking in a light way about, as you said before, genocide. We’re talking about putting millions of people to flight ethnic cleansing, destroying them and having done so for all these decades. And I want to take it back because the imagery. You can’t talk about the Holocaust or the Holocaust justifies, we’re preventing another one, all of this imagery. I want to take you back to when we were young and World War II and we had the Holocaust then. And by the way, most of that, during that war, it was not reported on very widely. We were not informed about the true tragedy. Our own government was rather late to get involved in World War II. And people who were shouting the cries about the heinous behavior of the Germans were sometimes considered irresponsible leftists or something. And we had very powerful figures in our own country apologizing for Germany. But nonetheless, by the end of that war, when it began to sink in the true barbarism and as you say, it wasn’t only the Jews, there were, you know, tens of millions of Slavic people killed and everything else. Just a horrible thing. There was a kind of growing consensus that Germany should never be allowed to be a normal nation. There was the Morgenthau plan to separate Germany and permanently dismember it. There was a separate occupation between East and West and so forth. And this is something you would know about because you’ve studied the military. Very early on, many of these Germans were recruited to be part of the U.S. in this emerging Cold War and to develop our missile system and to work with us. And we really never had, unless you remember differently, any serious discussion that how did one of the most enlightened Christian, technologically advanced countries, maybe the most in the world, Germany, offer this barbarism. And instead, the whole discussion has moved to what Muslims do or to Arabs in Israel or Palestine. And I want to take you back to that. How was that engineered? How can it possibly be that somehow in response to this, this was the point of your article, in response to this European destruction? And one of the things, by the way, we have a lot of sympathy for Ukraine. You point out that there were more Ukrainian prison guards than any place else from outside of Germany, I guess. There was culpability by France, there was culpability certainly by Italy, by Hungary, by Poland in all this. How did we go to the situation now where as sanctimonious Europe wants to arrest their own citizens if they come out and protest for Palestinian rights? Isn’t this really one of the more bizarre historical moments? 

McGovern It is, Robert. And you know, I know something about Germany. I lived there for two tours, a total of five years. I visited there often. I have a lot of really close German friends. When I asked them, how could you, paraphrasing your own words, the most cultured, the most advanced society in that period of the world, how could you sit back and let this happen? And they would usually say, Oh, I fought on the eastern front against the bad Russians, or they would divert the conversation because there is no answer. They caved. One author described it as sheepish submissiveness. Try to say that together. That’s what happened. The Germans caved and they had a chance to speak out against Hitler and they didn’t. And that’s what’s sort of happening now, because in our country, nobody can speak out for the Palestinians without being branded anti-Semitic or worse. Now, going back to Germany. You know, after the war and I remember it, I was six, seven, eight, and you were a little older. As I say, you’re much older than I am. After the war, the question was, what do you do about Germany? Morgenthau said, well, break it up. Don’t let this happen again. For God’s sake, give the [inaudible] to France and have a demilitarized zone… 

Scheer Secretary of Treasury right? In the Roosevelt administration. 

McGovern Yeah, right under FDR.

Scheer It was called the Morgenthau plan. And the other thing that did come out of it was that Germany should not rearm. And now we are absolutely thrilled and encouraging Germany to build up a big military force as we’re doing with Japan. Ironically, the two axis powers, we want them to be militarily stronger. And as I say, Germany here, their response is, oh, we’ll give Israel whatever arms they want. I mean how did they end up changing the whole narrative that somehow the Palestinians are labeled with anti-Semitism, are labeled with the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, and these Europeans get off scot free. 

McGovern Now, Robert, you’re not a Catholic like I am, so you can appreciate the concept of guilt, like I can.

Scheer As long as you bring it up Ray, the last time I interviewed you, I got in trouble with some listeners when I told a personal story. When I was very young during this very period we’re talking about I can’t remember whether I was five or six or so, but the war was on. Maybe I was a little older, maybe I was eight or nine or so, but some kid punched me in the nose and he said, you killed your Lord. And I didn’t know what he’s talking about. But when I got back to my neighborhood I said, What was that about? And they said, Oh, they think we killed Christ. And it happened that my mother was Jewish. My father was and my father was a German Protestant immigrant. But nonetheless, then my first response the next time I encountered anti-Semitism, which was quite widespread, I remember wanting to say only half for me. But that didn’t work. But it is interesting because it wasn’t until many years and I went to Germany, not the way you did. I wasn’t serving there, but I wanted to find [inaudible], I went to Lithuania, I went to Russia trying to figure out how did this happen? And the role of civilization in condoning this, the very thing that Hannah Arendt wrote about in others was it wasn’t just they were sheepish. There was a justification that the first of all, there was a scapegoating, as there is with the Palestinians. They’re responsible for all of our problems. There was a failure to deal with the inadequacies of your own society. There was a dehumanization. They weakened us, they weakened our economy. They took advantage of… So this we see now, developing an atmosphere where it’s okay to make refugees of an entire Palestinian population and kill a very large number of them, women and children led by. So I really want to visit that attitude. How did it happen that the Holocaust became, not something that shaped our behavior in that part of the world, but rather and holding people accountable and trying to learn the lessons? Because we certainly got into mass violence in Vietnam and elsewhere and killing innocent people on a large level. You know about that, you were in the CIA. But somehow we’re always able to blame another rather than our own dominant culture. How does that work? When you were in the CIA, did you know that the Six Day War was a fraud? 

McGovern Oh, sure. Yeah, we could tell the Egyptian concentrations in the Sinai did didn’t amount to a hill of beans. I mean, we saw the Israelis do what they did. And as I say, our analysts supplied all those Israelis, they are all powerful. Those Arabs can’t do a thing, you know. But let me go back to the anti-Semitism. You and I both grew up in the Bronx and there was anti-Semitism there. We Irish had arrived a generation before and there were jokes and all that kind of stuff. And I heard that stuff. And it didn’t really impressed me as being as noxious as it was and as it still is. So anti-Semitism is something very real. I like to cite, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about FDR and Eleanor. Eleanor says Franklin, There’s a boatload of Jews off the coast of Virginia. Let’s give them visas so they can escape. And Franklin says, no, no, we’re not going to do that. Amd she says well, we have to do that. He said no. So she gives them the visas anyway, because she’s Eleanor Roosevelt. Now, Franklin was asked what about this? Well, the answer was, of course, it wouldn’t be a very clever political thing to let a bunch of Jews in the United States. And that’s what happened. More than one ship was turned away with boatloads of Jews. So when I talk about guilt, it was sort of a joke, Catholic guilt, but it’s American guilt as well. And the British, of course, not only guilty, but Machiavellian and saying let’s get rid of these Zionists. And Zionists goes back to the end of the 1800s, right? So these Zionists, they want a place. Let’s carve a place. We have a mandate in Palestine. They want to go there. Let’s carve it out. They didn’t have any sense of doing justice to the Palestinians. So that’s one thing now, the other thing that I have to really mention here is, is white supremacy. Now we know the Nazis were racists. A lot of us are, too. Let’s face it. What’s the big divide in the world now? Is the lily white West embodied in NATO, okay, against the rest of the world. What’s peculiar about the lily white? They’re white! Look at them all. The Turks may be a little blend, okay, but they’re white. The rest of the world, 80% people of color. You could include Russia in there. You’re really isolated in this white supremacy sort of thing, but it’s still reign supreme. Biden still says we are the strongest… We’re talking about the American, the United States of America, the strongest country that ever existed in history. Did you hear that? Ever existed in history? So this is the supremacy. And part of it is racial. And part of it is superiority or supremacy is the right word. I had to copy it down here because I get superiority and supremacy mixed up. And it’s supremacy that’s working, worked in Germany, and it’s now working in the Israeli government, supported by other white folks who consider themselves not only exceptional, but indispensable. So that’s how I kind of look at how this could all be possible. There was guilt back on now. Now we’re so committed to defending our ally and our ally, Israel, by the way, it’s not an ally. I can explain that to you later. It’s not an ally. You have to have a defense treaty with another country to be an ally. So we’re so interested, we’re so committed to defending that. Why? Well, you can’t get elected in the United States if the Israel lobby puts its money for your opponent. That’s proven true now in primaries, for God’s sake okay? So, money is getting people elected. It’s getting people removed from Congress. Money is funding what remains of the mainstream media are heavily influenced by Zionism. And of course, if you go to our government, our president brags about being a Zionist. Does he know what that means? Does he know that being a Zionist has nothing to do with a Jew? It has everything to do with supremacy. And considering other people, as the Israelis have just said, human animals, that can be done with what we wish. So we’re in quite a fix now because as I said before, I’m beginning to think that Biden is really making the decisions now. He’s got his head screwed on wrong on this, and it’s not going to be long before there’s a flare up in the Middle East, whether it’s in the Red Sea or whether it’s a false flag attack, blaming the Iranians and then the people who are ruling our country. The other people who are in this frame of mind, Secretary Nuland, Sullivan, Blinken. They’re all Zionists, and they’re going to try to persuade Biden well, okay, you said you’d defend Israel. You got to defend it against Iran. And the best thing we need to do is go after Iran. What I fear is there will be a false flag attack blamed on Iran against the carrier that we have now still in the area, the USS Eisenhower. That would be blamed on Iran and the impulse will be okay, Joe Biden, you said that you’d support Israel for as long as it takes. Now, we’ve got to go in with ground troops. We got to go in real big and defend Israel because they’re entitled to their own state and blah, blah, blah. So it’s really, really a very dangerous situation, especially because of what happened today. Now, yesterday, a very prominent top leader of Hamas was assassinated in Beirut. Today, more than 100 Iranians were were killed and 200 injured at a celebration for Soleimani. He was the guy that Trump ordered to be executed in Baghdad because he was planning an imminent terrorist operation. Guess what he’s really doing in Baghdad. Two days later, the prime minister of Iraq said, look, he was here to talk with me about a rapprochement between our countries and Saudi Arabia and Syria in the area. That’s what he is here to do. He wasn’t planning any terrorist operation. So here’s Soleimani, that was exactly four years ago. They’re having a memorial for him. And there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people there. These bombs go off. The Iranians so far are saying we’re going to find the perpetrators and we’re going to punish them. And so far, the Iranians have shown a judicious restraint. I don’t know if they’ll be able to do that much longer. This is pretty much a provocation that they will not be able to avoid. And my real fear is that the Israelis will make up something and do a provocation and blame it on the Iranians. And then we in Washington will be totally uninformed, misinformed and bless our president and saying, yeah, go ahead, put U.S. forces in that area because we have to defend Israel. 

Scheer Well, a depressing point on which to end this. But I want to challenge one thing you said about the racism aspect, because, of course, there were… The population of Israel has changed and there are more people living in Israel who are not necessarily white, who are Jewish, and they have a quite similar history to other people in other Arab countries that they are from or neighboring countries where you mentioned Iran, as the old Persian Empire. And the irony here is that Netanyahu is able to appeal more to that religious oriented group or people who were actually, you know, sometimes treated very shabbily in the Arab and Persian world. Not always, bu I want to get at: how do you have a rational discussion? This is what I want to talk about you. We started out with just sort of playing words about intelligence. We had the Central Intelligence Agency because you folks are supposed to figure things out in a rational, informed way. Hopefully, people on the free press side, I put myself there, we’re supposed to be doing our homework. We’re supposed to be thinking about things and sort it out. And I think the bottom line here is what information can you trust? This is really what is so confusing, because I must tell you, as naive as I was then, when I was running around as a lone reporter, I was with Ramparts magazine. I was, yes, critical. I talked to a lot of people. But nonetheless, it never occurred to me before I went—when I went, I started to see signs of it—that this was a staged war. I actually, at the start of it, thought what Israel was attacked, that there was somehow a justification of this. I’m being honest about it. I didn’t have all the CIA information. And the first shock to me on this was I landed at Cairo airport. It was hard to get in. I happened to be with somebody who was Arabic speaking, helping me get in. I had some doubts about whether I was going to get out. And we actually were held at gunpoint for hours that first night until somebody said, no, no, they actually were invited to come rather than that we were going to… But the interesting thing was at the airport, the Israelis had managed to, they were very proud of it after, when I got to Israel, I had people bragging about it, they only hid the real planes, not the dummy planes. There were fake planes and so forth. They had such deep knowledge of Egyptian intelligence, of the Egyptian military. They knew exactly who the different people and they had bought off a lot of people or had deals with a lot of people and so forth. And so the David Goliath image collapsed those first weeks that I was in Egypt. It was bizarre. Where was this military monolith? And that really the problem with Nasser was he was a nationalist and he had nationalized the Suez Canal before and he was challenging British and French colonialism. All of that was left out. He really wasn’t that focused on what was happening with Israel. And the decision of Israel to be allied with Western colonialism was what triggered it. But the amazing thing is there was an idealism to Israel and the old Labor Party, and some of these people were leftists and so forth, which has all been wiped out. And this is now a different Israel. I wonder if whether you have that same sense. And it’s very difficult to know where does the religious part, which after all, does not uniformly endorse creating your own second coming. And where is it old fashioned nationalism? And my only concern now in talking to you is do we have any smart people, informed people, figuring this stuff out in the CIA? And that the president might listen to or the people in the State Department? 

McGovern My answer to that, Robert, is probably not. And there’s a history to that. The analysis division of CIA was corrupted one generation ago, and it has never recovered, to my knowledge. That’s that’s why the president could be told that Russia had already lost the war in Ukraine, can you imagine? It was 180 degrees away from reality. So, no, what you have to do is look for people like John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago professor, people like Sachs, Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia. People who had their head screwed on right, who have been around for a long time and you a really solid record of speaking truth to power. Now, the irony, of course, is that these people are well known in circles that are really interested in the truth. But when I asked John Mearsheimer, who nine years ago said the Ukraine crisis is the fault of the West and explained out exactly how it happened and what would happen, namely that it would end up destroying the country of Ukraine. I asked him, I said, John, this is about a year ago. John, you were in Washington just last week. Did anybody get in touch with you to consult with you and ask you your opinion? He said “Ray, are you kidding?” He says, “No Ray, I’ve been in this business 35 years. No one in Washington is ever asked me for my opinion on these things.” Now, here’s the dean of the Realist School of International Relations. Okay. Widely respected. Now, in my day, we had enough humility to get these guys in a room and invite them and talk to them, even if they were devil’s advocates or devil themselves or they had really contrarian opinions, we wanted to hear them. Now they don’t even try to talk to these people. They’re under this little kind of a supremacy little thing, and they’re only going to tell President Biden what he wants to hear. And my great regret is that this guy, what’s his name, Bill Burns, who is head of the CIA now and is not a dumb guy. I mean, not a dumb ass at all. I mean, I know him. He knows a lot and he’s become a cog in the wheel. If the president wants to say, oh, Russia has lost in Ukraine, well, Bill Burns will say, “Oh, yes, sir. And besides that, the Russian armed forces have been shown to be as weak and corrupt as any armed forces in the world.” Huh? It’s just the opposite. So Bill Burns has become a little cog in the wheel. Let’s say there’s an honest analyst somewhere in the bowels of the CIA, is he going to get promoted if he promotes a different idea, the kind of John Mearsheimer has? No, he won’t. So the whole thing in intelligence is corrupt. Don’t look to our analysis division for any any sensible solutions or even views because they aren’t there. They’ve been suppressed. It happened. It started with Bill Casey. I was there at the time. Bill Casey came in and he said the Russians are responsible for all terrorism worldwide, aren’t they? And we looked and we said, well, no, they’re not. What did he do? He went to the Defense Intelligence Agency and got a little group and they put out an estimate saying the Russians are responsible for all terrorism throughout the world. That’s what he did. He got an acolyte in there named Robert Gates, and that was 1981, ’85. And the whole analysis directorate was run by malleable managers who in turn promoted malleable managers. And when Bush and Cheney said, we want to attack Iraq, give us some evidence to justify it, they whomped up some crazy evidence about weapons of mass destruction, ties with al Qaeda. Yeah, it couldn’t be worse. And if I say this with a lot of anger, it’s also a lot of sadness because it was a reputable profession in my day, at least in Soviet analysis. Our leaders really were interested in what we thought the Russians wanted. And I had a role in in arms control when we told Nixon and Kissinger that the Russians were really interested in arms control, and if they played the Chinese off against the Russians, well, that’s likely to result in some really good arms control treaties, which happened. That was sort of the acme of my career. I was in Moscow when the ABM Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, was signed, because I had worked on that and so had my branch. So there’s a lot of good that the CIA could do. I don’t know if that’s the case anymore. I doubt it, given what I see of Bill Burns and others. One little other thing. There’s a superstructure now called the National Intelligence director, okay? Director of National intelligence. So she, her name is Avril Haines, she sits over at the CIA, DIA. All 17, can you believe it, intelligence agencies. Okay. Now, what did she say in her wisdom just one year ago? “We are very much optimistic about the counteroffensive that Ukraine is mounting this spring as the Russians are running out of ammunition. They have no indigenous capability to produce the ammunition they need. We’re looking at a pretty optimistic outlook for 2023.” Her words in public. I assume she was telling Biden the same thing in private. Again, they couldn’t be… They’re exactly 180 degrees. It’s the U.S. and Ukraine and NATO who’s run out of ammunition. And it’s the Russians that have the incredible production capability not only to produce more troops, but to produce more weaponry of a sophisticated kind that even our president has admitted there’s no defense against. So we’re in a pickle. We’re in a really bad place here if you talk about intelligence. If you want real information, well, look to John Mearsheimer, look to Jeffrey Sachs. You could read RayMcGovern dot com. My son, who runs my website, really gets very angry if I don’t mention that. I put everything on there and old as I am, I still remember some stuff and sometimes it’s relevant. So yeah, I have to tell you that the State Department is totally corrupt. So is the CIA. There’s nobody able to say anything reasonable, even if they’re able to reason to it by virtue of their own intelligence. 

Scheer That’s pretty frightening. And let me just conclude on one point, though, because Henry Kissinger died recently and you actually were an advisor to President Nixon and then Ford and then Ronald Reagan, somebody, actually, I interviewed both Nixon, but I got to know Reagan even before he was governor and before he was president. And the fact is those guys look pretty good compared to we are at. I mean, I know people are going to tear my hood off for saying this, but Nixon was able actually, Nixon deserved, I think, the credit for the opening to China, which is now both Trump and Biden wanted to close down. And Kissinger certainly supported it, I give Nixon more credit because he actually wrote about it in Foreign Affairs magazine before he even met Kissinger that we should be able to reach out to China and exploit the Sino-Soviet dispute, that communism was not monolithic. And we did have arms control. And Ronald Reagan met with Gorbachev and they had an understanding it would be good to get rid of nuclear weapons. Those look like the good old days now. And even yes, Vietnam was this terrible war but at least they understood to try to put some limits on it. Now we’re in a situation where, one of those limits is that you we’re not taking on a nuclear power, now we have just wild abandon. You know, let’s provoke them, let’s put a stick in the eye of the bear. So I’m asking final question. Are you more afraid about the future of humanity than ever before? Or do you think there’s a bright spot? What is it? 

McGovern Well, let me mention two possible bright spots that appeared just in the last few days. One is that for some reason, the U.S. Navy was ordered to bring the USS General Ford back to Norfolk out of harm’s way. Now, not many people know that. Am I talking about straw in the wind? Yeah, it’s a straw in the wind. Number two, the Israelis announced they’re pulling out several brigades out of Gaza. Straw in the wind? Yeah. Does it mean much? Well, together they might mean something. And that’s all I have to offer with respect to good points. Now, bad points [inaudible]. You mentioned, well, let me go back to President Kennedy, who is responsible for getting me down from Fordham to briefing the White House eventually. You know, he made a big point in the June 10 speech, 1963. I had just joined the agency. He said, look, what we never want to do is face another nuclear power with a choice between humiliating defeat and using nuclear weapons. Okay. Does that makes sense? Of course it makes sense! What about now? Well, as you point out, Robert, we are now engaged in a war with a nuclear power and Russia is not losing. Russia is winning hands down in Ukraine and that will become obvious to even The New York Times in the next month or two, okay. So what am I worried about? I’m worried about what Biden might decide to do now. It’s going to be a humiliating defeat on the part of the United States, Ukraine and NATO. Are they going to say, oh, darn, that was a bad idea, Russia won. I don’t think so. The mentality is what else we got? Two months ago, President Biden says, hey, Secretary Austin, I have the Ukrainians have run out of 155 millimeter shells, let’s give them some bars! And he says, well, sir, sorry, but we’ve given them a lot and they keep shooting them up and actually, we don’t have anymore. What else we got? Well we have these cluster ammunition, we have the cluster shells… Oh, well give them those! Now, the war is coming to an end with the Russians winning. Now, what’s Biden going to say now? Not Milley, but Austin and the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff say, well, we don’t we don’t have anymore 155 millimeter shells, neither do the Europeans. And we can’t even get any more money from Congress so what? Okay. So what do we do? Well, up there in the top shelf, they’re right underneath the 155 millimeter cluster munitions, those are the mini nukes, okay? Now that those are the ones that have the padlock on it. I know the combination. Okay, let’s use a mini nuke. That’ll show the Russians we really mean business. And we won’t be seen to have lost a war before the election next year. Now, why do I think that that crazy idea might have currency? Because there’s a personal stake in this for Biden, for Blinken, for Hunter Biden and for Sullivan. What do I mean? I think you know what I mean, if they lose the war, then they’re going to lose the election. If they lose the election and that other guy comes in, they could actually lose their freedom. They could go to jail. I know enough about what’s available in court documents and testimony in Congress to show that not only Hunter but Joe, his dad and Blinken and Sullivan have played fast and loose with the law so that they could end up in jail. So what am I saying? They have a personal incentive. History is replete with examples, with people in power having personal incentives to do crazy things, to fend off threats to their own political life and their own freedom. So if I am now, doesn’t matter what I think, if I am right and my job for 30 years was to put myself in the shoes of Soviet or Russian leaders, if I’m right, then Putin is looking on this. He’s riding high in Ukraine, he’s exploiting the troubles in the Middle East. And so what’s he going to do? Well he’s feeling his oats, but he’s got to worry. He’s got to worry about what these guys might do. Mini nukes? Oh, yeah, there were only about a 10th of the size of what we dropped on Hiroshima. Okay, so if I’m Putin, I’m going to be talking to my military advisers. They’re going to say, Wow, what would they do to avoid a clear defeat? And the military advisers said, we don’t know about intentions. We don’t care about intent. We care about capabilities. They can do this. So my notion is that Putin, despite all his recent bravado and despite saying the U.S. is now turned into not a partner but an enemy, and we got him by the short hairs in Ukraine. Despite that, he’s got to be very, very sensitive to what these guys, Biden, Blinken, Sullivan and Nuland, might do to stave off defeat in Ukraine, defeat in the election and possible personal ramifications if that other guy comes in and is as vindictive as many people think it would be. After all, there’s lots of cause to be vindictive. 

Scheer So I’m going to wrap this up. People think about foreign policy and diplomacy, everything is a very rational, precise scientific subject. And we used to have analysis about winnable nuclear war and what you can do in war. You’ve just opened a curtain to madness, absolute madness and people out of personal ego and stupidity and arrogance destroying, really, life. And it’s a frightening image but you’ve been up close to power. And I just want to end this by saying, as a journalist, I witnessed the limits or the restraints on journalism. At the end of the day, I had to listen to what people were telling me and write it down. I had to ask questions, but it was Moshe Dayan or Allon in the West Bank or whether I believed them when they said no, we’re not going to be here when you come back in ten years. We can’t occupy a people and still have our identity. Obviously, we can’t turn this into a prison camp. Well, it was turned into a prison camp and the whole memory of that old Labor Party more idealistic Israel is gone now. We have no power or control. And the interesting thing is, it was around Nixon, it was sort of an idea of the mad man theory, which we’ve just revisited with you just now, that you have to show that you can go crazy, that you can do terrible things. Maybe this is what Netanyahu is about. Maybe this is what Biden will be about. And there really has no answer to that. It’s just nuttiness and it’s uncontrollable. 

McGovern Yeah, Robert, let me mention that there’s an incredible documentary called The Movement and the Madman. Okay. When I say incredible, it’s hard to believe that a movement such as we’ve been used to in the past was able to deprive the madman from doing really stupid things in Vietnam. The madman was going to be Richard Nixon. He talked with Kissinger. This has all come out now in confidential documents. Nixon and Kissinger were planning this madman theory where they would give Hanoi the idea that we were going to use nuclear weapons to finish them war. 1967. Okay. It was all planned. And what happened? A million demonstrators in Central Park, hundreds of thousands of other demonstrators. And we know from these documents that have been released that turned the tide. What Nixon wanted to do with Kissinger agreeing was move troops up into North Vietnam to the border of China. Now, you remember, you’re older than I am. You remember what happened last time we went all the way to the border of China and Korea, right? Okay. So that’s what he wanted to do. And he wanted to threaten that he was going to nuke the North Vietnamese. So it was the demonstrations that prevented that. And that’s documentary now and it’s in this wonderful video. It’s called The Mad Men and the Movement, or vice versa “The Movement and the Mad Men.” I suggest everyone get a hold of it. It’s online. It’s in the Internet. You can get a copy of it.

Scheer Since you mentioned Ray McGovern dot com. 

McGovern Oh, yeah. Well, I do a lot of tweeting now on X and that’s @RayMcGovern and a day later all of these things plus more, my lectures and so forth, that will appear on Ray McGovern dot com. That’s our website. My son who runs it says that I should add if you don’t get it. You don’t get it. But I’m too humble to say that, Robert. 

Scheer Okay, thank you. And I didn’t know that I would spend this much time in my life with a guy from Fordham University. But I guess you had some major intellectuals there and got some things right. So from an old City College guy. Thanks for doing this, Ray. 

McGovern My pleasure, Robert. 

Scheer I hope our pessimism is all wrong, but not optimistic. Take care. Oh, let me just say for good. I have to give… Thank you to Laura Kondourajian and Christopher Ho at KCRW, the excellent NPR station in Santa Monica who posts these shows. And Joshua Scheer is our executive producer, and Diego Ramos writes the introduction. Max Jones does a technical video part, and I want to thank the J.K.W. Foundation in memory of Jean Stein, a very independent and important writer for giving some funding to help us get these things out. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

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