deep state
deep state
Yeah. Yeah. Hi, this is dark journalist today, I have a special episode for you. We're going to dive into the subterranean covert world of the Deep State with the man who coined the term Berkeley Professor and best selling author Peter dale scott. Now Professor scott's new book, The american Deep State is a powerful crowning achievement in his lifelong work of exposing hidden forces inside and outside of government that have hijacked public policy and corrupted the political process. In America. Now, Professor Scott is linked what he calls deep events such as 9 11 and the JFK assassination to an obscure official structure called the doomsday network that represents secret unconstitutional unchecked power. Are we ready to look at what he's discovered? Here we go. Professor Peter Dale scott. Deep State C. I. A secret government and the doomsday network. Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of americans? No sir. It does not. Not wittingly Britain's Guardian newspaper obtained a copy of a secret court order authorizing the data collection. The document shows the information is being collected indiscriminately and in bulk we really are in a period of insanity in right now. America is going crazy about terrorism and is responding in ways which are increasing the terrorism. And some people are very happy to do that because it's intensely profitable. You know, in preparing to interview Professor Scott had occurred to me just how influential as many books on the deep state that operates under the public state has been on the alternative media. His innovative terms and meticulous research often goes uncredited. Of course, the mainstream media tries hard to keep his findings on how intelligence agencies organized crime and corporate interests often collude toward the same goal buried under absurd terms like conspiracy theory. But I can tell you that the best authors in the field of covert politics understand that Professor Scott's work is the gold standard in this field. So let's get started. Yeah, Professor, it's great to have you here. First off, I want to say that the american Deep State is your greatest book. Thank you. Now, I thought we'd start our discussion today by having you define what the Deep State is, What is it encompass and how would an average person understand its role in our daily lives? Okay, well, we can begin by saying that there is a gap and attention between the institutions that are defined by the constitution are responsible to the constitution on one level. And then the second level institutions like the CIA and the NSA which operate in secret. There's something about secret power that is, it's not controllable and it's very important that the CIA's budget has never been exclusively the budget voted by Congress. So it's a level of the deep state higher than the public state. And then I want to go to a third level. Well, we skip to the forest level, which are ultimately Roosevelt himself said to a friend back in 1933. You and I know that a financial element has been controlling this country since the age of Jackson. Well, that is a, you know, uh, that's the ultimate level, I think is extreme wealth and, uh, the institutions that deal with extreme wealth. But in between there's a, a third you for public level CIA level. And then companies like booz Allen Hamilton, that interface with the CIA recruit from CIA and are recruited by the CIA. And then they also work with corporations all over the world and with banks all over the world. And the same thing happens, there's an enter action of a revolving door both between these corporations and the CIA. And also between these corporations and the highest level of banks and nature oil companies and so on. And so the awesome is a level you have A levels of government, some of which are written about in the media and some of which are not written about in the media. You very rarely see booz allen Hamilton in the headlines. But if you write in what I would call a deep history of say, american relations with Egypt, the CIA is going to be in that history and the booz allen Hamilton are going to be in that history. Right? So, ordinarily we're looking at the public side of our society, elective government, Law and Order, Justice, Daily news reporting and that kind of thing. But underneath there are these deep state forces that are operating in contracting for intelligence agencies in corporate financial and political circles and they are having an impact with very little transparency. So there is a lot of things in the deep State that I talk about in this really way because we we think of history as taught in universities is archival history, working with documents and that gives us I mean that's a good method and we get good history but we get limited history because a lot of what's going on in the deep State is undocumented right? And when people like me trying to write deep history, we have to resort to all kinds of techniques to fill the vacuum at because we don't have as a rule every now and then we're lucky and we get a document here. Yes. Well there have been some breakthroughs I would say with Freedom of Information Act requests. Even if they are few and far between now. Can you think of a document that when it came out it just made you stop and say this is major A key one. We have the CIA document after the Kennedy assassination, instructing the media on how to handle it. And they use the phrase conspiracy theory. As far as I know, that's the first time that we have a document that talks about conspiracy theory. CIA telling the newspapers how to attack people like me right? And the basic instructions from the CIA to their media assets was call them conspiracy theorists and that will have the effect of marginalizing them and take some of the heat off. Right? Exactly. Well we don't get many of those documents. We get a few but we have to look around the known world that we see and we read about in the newspapers and I think actually most americans have some awareness of this. You know, if they live in a city like Chicago, sure, maybe not now, but 50 years ago the mob was in City Hall and anybody who had anything to do with City Hall knew that because they had to pay certain people off and so on. Right. It's not in the official history of Chicago. Well, this is interesting because you've done some real investigation on how organised crime is a component of the deep state and has these connections that we don't hear very much about. That's where I really began with this kind of analysis because I wrote a book called Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. That's an excellent book. The biggest gap in the warren report was when they were saying that ruby was a loner when ruby was obviously somebody very clued in with the mob and that's half of it also very clued in with Dallas high society and above all clued in with the Dallas police and that we actually have testimony from Dallas police officers saying they used Jack ruby as an informant of the drug traffic and we have somebody else who told the FBI that a big drug deal only went through in Dallas after Jack ruby gave the okay on it. Now the warren commission received these documents and then they said he was a loner. Well, um, that taught me that you have to see more to politics than what's on the record, organized crime was where I went in. That led me to the drug traffic, led me through the CIA. Yes. And you found that interface between the CIA and organized crime. Uh, in your book deep politics in the death of JFK, you outline all of these intelligence connections that Oswald had and how through these connections, he was set up to appear in a certain way as a kind of leftist loner. And that this method was actually used in 9 11 also, but there it was applied to 19 people instead of just one. Yes, I think I do. I have more than one book where I draw attention to the analogies between Kennedy assassination and 9 11. And this is one of them that the what I call the designated Cope. Yeah, that's a great people who are already known to the agencies in the CIA in particular. And in both cases, the C. I. A. Was covering up both on Oswald and on the scope of the alleged hijackers to make sure that they would not be rounded up before the deep events that they are attached to. Because then being the designated culprits, I see. So, on a certain level, they're being protected. Right up to the point where they can be used in a scapegoat roll. Right? And that's a matter of history now with Oswald, but it should be a matter of grave concern and actually is right now, People campaigning to get those 28 pages from the joint congressional investigation of 9 11 least. Because it will show, uh, we pretty well know a good deal of the story by now anyway. But it would be an official documentation of the Saudi money going to these alleged hijackers, the CIA's project protection of these hijackers. The lying saying that they had given money to the information to the FBI when in fact they had refused to give as they should have given the information to the FBI. All of that would come out. That would be one way I think of ending the state of emergency were in to see the really corrupt way in which it was instituted 9 11 in the first place. Right? So you could almost say that Oswald in the hijackers share this kind of archetype of how to portray someone as an off balance fanatic, but with no outside connections to any state sponsors or intelligence organizations. Yeah. One of the things that you've said in relation to the state of emergency that we're still in is that we've actually been under it for 13 years already. But a lot of people don't seem to know that Or that North. Com has since 2008, an Army division based here in America that's set up to deal with public unrest. So these are two things you don't hear a whole lot about, but are critical in your view. Yes, I mean, I think the, you know, one of the difficult periods of american history was the Reconstruction era when the south was in effect subjugated and occupied by an army and the reconstruction ended with a disputed election, which a president was elected. I deal to end the occupation, which they did. And so we had a century of Jim Crow thankfully more somewhat over now. Um, but we also had to call me tattoo sacks, which became part of the effective american style of government that you do not use the military in a permanent way for law enforcement and homeland security and upended that um the division has been there since 2000 and eight, but North com has been there since 2000 and two was part of the being planned for by C. O. G. Three things have been planned for warrantless surveillance. We know about that now, warrantless detention and most people are not aware of that. I'm just yesterday I found a very knowledgeable man. I'm not aware that something like 1000 Muslims may be more were rounded up after 9 11 without a warrant without charges held interrogated in the case of one man. I talked badly beaten until there was blood in his europe. And this is you know reminds me of the jews in Germany also being persecuted and punished and people after he said oh I didn't know americans would say honestly they didn't know about these medicines but they should they should because it is a blot that the we have habeas corpus is mentioned in the constitution but it was just torn into shreds by C. O. G. Planning. And so you have warrantless surveillance, warrantless detention and the permanent militarization of homeland security originate with plans for martial law that we don't quite have that. But we do have in our military component not only to law enforcement and dealing with with disturbances but also surveillance and military are involved in the surveillance of people like you and me. Exactly they shouldn't be. Yeah. Now on C. O. G. Uh this is something you've done some amazing research on and really brought to light but there's a common misconception out there that C. O. G. Was something that was around during the Cold War and then sort of went away in the nineties. But that's not the case is it? No. And just to clarify cogs continuity of government in which the government would implement emergency planning in the event of an incredible emergency. An atomic attack. Original right? An atomic attack. Exactly the decapitation of the government. The constitution says oh if you lose the president and the vice president becomes the president but supposing a bomb lands on Washington and you lose the president and the vice president and the speaker of the House. This was very legitimate planning to deal with an atomic attack because We were threatening atomic attacks from time to time. And so so so it was Russia. But what happened in the right after the Reagan Revolution in 1982? They started the this was Casey and I think Vice President Bush and certainly all over North who is the executive officer. They started conceiving of C. O. G. Continuity of government planning to deal with domestic crises. Uh The North was very keen on rounding up Hispanics who were supporting the sandinistas but Hispanics in this country, citizens in this country. And they passed an executive order towards the end of Reagan's administration. But which said that C. O. G. Planning was to deal with any emergency, not just an atomic emergency. And then in 1994 there was an unfortunate story in the new york times by I believe, tim Leader that said that there was, it actually said that all of this socog planning had ceased and it was true that they decided to not where after the fall of the Berlin wall, they ceased planning for an atomic attack. But they did not at all cease planning for the implementation of C. O. G. And in fact they intensified it. And what was really disturbing here was that In 1994 we had a Democratic President Clinton right? And according to a very good book by Andrew Coburn, Clinton didn't really know what was going on. But the planning continued. And this is to me very significant that two of the key planners being in there ever since 1982 and we're in there up until Bush was elected, or if that's a word in 2000 were Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. They spent 20 years planning for the implementation of C. O. G. And then on 9 11 while the president was out of the capital, those same two men implemented it And because they had the power to do it, because the executive order said it was for any emergency and they said 9-11 is an emergency. And they proclaimed when the president got back, he proclaimed officially an emergency. And that's the emergency was still under. And that's why there is a permanent army brigade stationed inside the United States to deal with any dissident rally that might get out of control. We're in a kind of, I don't want to say police state because we used to have police running us. But no, now we have the military in charge of homeland security and that's uh, in contravention of the comet tattoos, was it we used to have. So it's a very significant change and my book hopes that we would do something about this. And the very first step as far as I'm concerned, is to have a debate in Congress to end this state of emergency. Very interesting. Now, a couple of points I want to pick up on their, when you're talking about continuity of government planning going on behind the scenes. Now, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were at times when they were making these plans, not even in government. Uh, they were private citizens and high ranking corporate positions. Is that right? Exactly. They were chairman of organizations the whole time. That was the status of Rumsfeld. Uh in the 1980s. Most of the 1980s Chinese was a Congressman from Wyoming, right, uh why I single Congressman should be picked out to plan for this is planning for suspension of the constitution. This is very serious planning. Never authorized by Congress. It was the it was all done by executive order. And then in the 90s under Clinton Cheney was of course briefly secretary of defense with the first President Bush, but then he was the ceo of Halliburton. Halliburton had a huge stake in what was going on because they were heavily involved in the development of US oil investments in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. And one of the chief consequences of 9 11 has been putting U. S. Troops into Afghanistan and then Iraq which was of major importance for the oil companies in Kazakhstan. They wanted to have U. S. Troops around to make sure that the president of Kazakhstan would listen to the United States and not just to Russia which also had troops in in the area. So Halliburton was not disinterested in this. But yes you had to ceos of private U. S. Corporations planning for the U. S. Suspension of the U. S. Constitution. And it was done according to Andrew Coburn in the 90s, it was different from the 80s 1980s. It had Democrats and Republicans But the group the in the Pentagon who were planning specifically on military responses in the 1990s. According to Coburn, nearly all Republicans who really had who despised Clinton. So it was like a government in waiting for the what we got in the year 2000 thanks to the Supreme Court. Right, right. And one of the main players, if we want to predate the 90s and take a look at the 80s was all over north, who of course was a key figure in the Iran contra scandal right now. What can you tell us about North and some of his positioning in relation to C O G? Uh, you mentioned one intriguing thing in the book that he was very involved in called Rex 84. Can you tell us about that? Right? I should have said that from the very beginning. Um well, fema was created under carter and uh, I think that their role was political from the beginning. I don't want to get into the carter era, but in the Reagan era, they were the support group for uh, C O. G Planning. The executive officer for the C O. G. Planning was North, who of course was also the operations man on the around one of the biggest budget items of C O G. Planning was to set up an alternative communications network which was independent of the basic government communications network. This is sometimes called the doomsday network. That's the pentagon's on term for it as the seat of government. If there had been an atomic plan, would it be in what they call the dues? They played? I have a like the cover of my book which I hope you can see. Yeah that doomsday plane over the White House because that actually happened on 9 11 and nobody has ever been able to explain why the plane was there over the White House which of course is prohibited airspace. No airplane ever is supposed to be there on that particular day. There was Um anyway uh sorry what was the question again? Oh yes it was about Rex 84 next 84. That was an exercise. The the E. X. In there is an exercise but it was an exercise in rounding up americans. So that is a clear sign that we've changed the emphasis on the continuity of government planning to kind of civilian control. And that's of course the feature of Oliver North's activities. Uh But there's a close intimacy between the C. O. G. Planning and the Iran contra affair because the most of most of the certainly the early stages of sending arms to Iran was not authorized. And Oliver North had a solution to that. He used the emergency network that had been set up for C. O. G. For the practical job of getting arms sent through Portugal without the U. S. Ambassador to Lisbon being aware of this so that it was the underpinning for what Oliver North was doing and this is maybe getting a bit ahead of your questioning. But one of the things I say in my book is that the Ceo G network, the doomsday Networks Figures in all of these major deep events. Um 9 11 itself. It was implemented on that day. That's why the president and the vice president all through that day. Where didn't stay in town together. First of all, Cheney who was in Washington, told Bush to stay away. And then when Bush came back, he went by, Bush went by the way too often Air Force Base, which gives the base for the doomsday planes. And then when he came back, Cheney went away and he went away for 90 days and lived inside a hollowed out mountain which was part of the planning for C. O. G. And he took a huge staff with him. Almost 100 people and what they did is off the books. But I bet we can speculate with some certainty that that's where they will find the Patriot act urged out of nowhere. And certainly something Project Endgame, which was a massive program for building detention centers, which was a kind of implementation of what had been exercised in rex 84 back 17 years before. And who do you think they're planning to detain in these centres? According to the documents? Well, I can say with more confidence about the 1984 period, they were very focused on Hispanics because they didn't want domestic protests to what Reagan was doing with the Sandinistas. Okay. And there was a group called suspicious and it came under attack from a number of directions. The FBI the CIA set up something they shouldn't have set up, um but specifically the detention centers were would have been rounding up members of CIS purpose and if there were not nationals and deporting them back to Central America and that did actually happen. And it was really sending people off to a death sentence. If you took somebody from cystitis in America sent them back to El Salvador, you had a ruthless military dictatorship in El Salvador and you know, they all kinds of killings going on, then none were killed. Jesuits were killed. Bishop was murdered. It was a very bloody time in Central America and I regret to say that the things that Vice President Bush and William Casey, who was the head of the CIA at the time and all of the north and particularly things they were doing were war crimes. And I don't know if we'll never get some kind of accounting for that, but they were definitely war crimes. Yeah, that's fascinating. Now when you speak about deep events and how they were linked with this Doomsday network, let's take a snapshot of all the major deep events that have happened, starting with the JFK assassination bringing us up to the present. What would you say the five most crucial deep events that have happened in american history? Yes. Well, when we come to the Kennedy assassination, what's that got to do with the doomsday networks? The answer is whether many, it's quite a complex answer, but I'll just single out one salient details to stand for the rest. And that is that the secret Service agent who came down from Washington to plan the parade route, which ended up going by the school book depository where lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot at the president, That secret Service agent was using the White all his communications were on the White House communications Agency network, which was a branch of the Doomsday network. Ha. And and if I could jump fast forward to the 9 11 before I fill in what's in queen that network, I'm sure it was used again on 9 11 and the 9 11 commission looking for key decisions that were made like the inflammation implementation of C. O. G. Uh, they reported that they could find no record of the phone calls. And in another book I wrote Road to 9 11, which I summarized in this book, I made an argument that Cheney, you know, spent right in the middle of all this crisis. He was not in the what we call the P. E. O. C. Or the emergency operation center underneath the White House. He was somewhere else at a telephone that was, I'm quite convinced adduced the network telephone and the 9-11 Commission report records that yes C. O. G. Was implemented on that day. And then they have a foot note to say that we're in which they say they did not look into C. O. G. Well that's like saying they didn't look into the very heart of 9 11 really key decisions I think were made on the Ceo gig network. And they I don't think they were ever given that access to that network. So they tried to cover that up by saying it's okay we just didn't look into it but they didn't look into it because they couldn't look into it because they didn't have the clearances. All right now let's go back after the Kennedy assassination. And this man instant Lawson who was this key Secret Service agent by the way? Not the only person I have a whole article. That's complicated. I'm to come to Watergate and the key burglar James. McCord was also part of the secret Air Force unit that was planning for rounding up. I could read you the description if you like. We know the what his job was there and it was part again, he was part of the doomsday networks. That's interesting. John Dean who is the man who caused so much trouble for Nixon inside the White House says in his book worse than Watergate. He mentions that he was in charge of C. O. G. Planning when he was in the pentagon before he went to the White House. So he actually took part in the C. O. G. Planning. So you have two key figures john Dean and James McCord both part of this Tuesday network, the doomsday network. When we come to the the prevention of the re election of carter, I really don't have very much to say there but I will speculate this is okay I think maybe. And here you're speaking about the october surprise. Arms went to Israel then, right. And many books say that the networks that were used to send arms to Israel in 1980 we're the same networks that were used to sand arms to Israel in 1985 86. That brings us in other words to Iran contra. Absolutely no doubt that however north was part of the new Wednesday planning in 1985 86. We have these documents like rex 84. Um, and there's absolutely no doubt that he used what it was called. I think Flash Board by the time, that was his name for it, but he was using a network outside of the regular communications network to negotiate these arms deals. So I suspect so I have no proof That if they set up in 1985 was the set up in 1980, then the Secret Network would would have been used in two. Because there were so many um there were so many deep state personnel involved in the this negotiating of the arms deal. And you know, William Casey was not yet the director of central intelligence intelligence connections and he was definitely a key figure In 1980 and flying to Paris and negotiating with with Iranians about getting arms to Iran in exchange for a commitment not to release the hostages that had been seized in the US. embassy. And this this this proved to be true. They were not to be released until Reagan was inaugurated. The day that Reagan was inaugurated is the day that Iran released the hostages. That's a kind of corroboration that this deal was made fascinating. And we have Vice President Bush, deeply involved in these operations. He he was North boss, right. They had a structure. There's a lot of different initials for different committees and things. But over and over its Vice president Bush's responsibility and all of the North is the executive officer. It is interesting how Bush sr shows up over and over again in these deep events. And I guess we need to remember that he was the CIA director in 1976. And that's one thing that got my attention when you wrote that 1976 was a crucial year in deep state activity. And you tied it in with all these, uh, Saudi arms shipments. And in a previous book, I read you were going to skip the Ford-era completely. But eventually you realize all of these important things happen there and it was a critical period of time to cover. And uh, that that really all happened in my thinking when I was writing the road to 9-11 and I ended up devoting a whole chapter to what I call the Well, I saw it anyway, is, yes, the critical period changed. A number of things happened there. Uh, First of all, Congress had started to look into what the CIA I was doing and elements of the CIA and Vice President Bush, when he became the director was a key figure in this. They essentially went offshore. You know, Congress is going to look at us. Well, then we'll get, we'll have other people do things for us. That's the year in which something called the Safari Club was created. Right, Right. And can you give just a quick description of what the Safari club was and who was in it? The Safari club is coming together of the heads of intelligence. Um The America doesn't figure in the masthead of the Safari club but they're behind it pulling the strings. One key figure is alexandria daemon, who is the head of stick, which is the french intelligence network and he becomes a key figure advising Reagan and even before Reagan is inaugurated as part of the kitchen cabinet advising Reagan. And then after that is the head of Savak in Iran. And this is very significant because the U. S. Ambassador to Iran at this time is Richard helms who formerly had been the head of the C. I. A. And then you get the head of Saudi intelligence and the head of Egyptian intelligence and they start doing covert operations. And to give one key example, they get very involved in Angola, why Angola, why involved in Angola? Because Congress had passed the so called Clark amendment I think in 1975 which prohibited the C. I. A. From conducting any more operations in Angola. So they got around the problem by having other people do what the CIA had and they were in quotes contact. This is where the deep state comes in because these were not formal connections between the CIA and the Safari club. This was a network of old boys like Richard helms. Uh and of course George H. W. Bush, uh When he was head of CIA in 1976, was not a stranger to the agency and he was not a stranger to the Middle East because he had run this offshore drilling company, Zapata Petroleum Tracks in the Persian Gulf. It was kuwait. And so he was very much at home in that part of the world. And they just bypassed the regular bureaucracies. Well, it sounds like the covert players formed their own kind of shadow CIA with their own rules. But do we know how the Regular CIA leadership was viewing their activities Stansfield Turner was nominally the head of the CIA under carter, but he didn't really know what was going on. He got rid of some people, uh Theodore Shockley being the most famous one. And those people who said they were just going home to write a book, they got involved with the Safari Club and advised them So. And that's one of the two big things about 1976, but the other one perhaps even more important, this restructured the whole or prevented a restructure of the Cold War. The CIA had been advising for some time. This is the intelligence side of the CIA as opposed to the covert operation side of the CIA. And there's always been tension between those two sides. They were saying that the soviet Union is not the enemy that it once was and this was anathema to the people who wanted to keep the Cold War going. Sure. This resulted in the head of the CIA at that time. Help me, Bush's predecessor, Director Colby. Yes, William Kobe was fired because he was putting up these intelligence reports and Bush was George W H W. Bush. The father was put in his head of CIA and then he created something called Team B, which he brought in a bunch of these. These are the advance neo con, these are the predecessors of the people who created the project for the new american century in 2000, which really called for all the things that were implemented after 9 11 And back in 76. Uh they said no, the CIA has been wrong all along. And the CIA, sorry, the soviet union is a major threat and the they're spending a lot of money. In fact they were spending a lot of money but it was defensive. They were America had been spending so much against them. And you know when the missile crisis approved that America was on top and right, the figures were trying to get parity and I think they previous team had admitted that, but if this got expanded into no, the soviet union wants to take over the universe, certainly take over the globe. And we're still debating this a bit among the soviet historians. But I think the consensus now is pretty much that the Team B assessment was wildly off base and that the original CIA assessment was closer. But the effects of this were huge because carter had been elected on a promise to reduce the defense budget That would exactly returning to normalcy past. And not only did he not reduce it because the of all these ominous threats from Team B. He expanded it. We talk about the Reagan increases in the defense budget. They became huge under region, but they didn't begin under Reagan. They began under carter that again, shows you how the president is not really the man who runs the country and the processes that go on in the deep state or in this case in the CIA can determine his agenda in a way which he will not be happy with. It's another example where presidents don't set agendas and I think that we've seen it with Obama recently. Yeah, He made a Middle East speech and back in 2009, which was very promising. But almost everything that's happened since then has worked against rather than in the spirit of his original speech. Definitely. That's when I say now the Deep State is thoroughly ensconced in our government and as I said in american war machine. There's a mindset in Washington and the president doesn't choose the mindset. The mindset chooses the president uh regime under Now. Well that really rings true when you look at the state of things. Now a couple of things that you have in the book about how the Deep State basically hijacked the C. O. G. Planning and also fema which is an agency that was originally set up to deal with natural disasters like floods and earthquakes for example. So essentially the Deep State figured out if we take over these two government functions we can implement these authoritarian style policies through them. Now. Is that a fair statement? My problem is what you just said. You're you know, you're in the ballpark. Okay, goodbye. My problem is I do not deposit that there has been a secret conspiracy To take over the government. All right. I think there are processes always going on. I you know, I was four years in the Canadian government and I spent six months in Washington in 1987 trying to help Senator Kerry investigate countries and drug trafficking. And that is a very good investigative report that Kerry put together, going back to it now. It seems pretty advanced. Every not in power, it was much better than in power. And that's unfortunately often the case with politicians. Yes. Well, it seems like all that he wants to do now is go in and attack Syria basically. Now, anyway, the what goes on in government, particularly american government, which is so huge, nobody really controls it. I do think that people at certain moments made some key decisions. I think, you know, I can't prove this. But I think there was a high level decision that who made it, I don't know. But that Kennedy had to go. It was a high level decision that Nixon had to go. It was a high level decision that carter had to go. But they were always ad hoc things. Not like this is step one in establishing the deep state. It was just know the president has to go. But once these processes are in motion then they acquire their own logic. For example, if the if the governing media of this country commit themselves to the position that the president was killed by alone, not with no connections to anything even though he had extensive CIA files and the eye files. Yeah. Then they're committed to lying for eternity really. You know, they to for them to tell the truth about the Kennedy assassination would mean to have to say we participated in a lie. A lie for the public good. But nonetheless a lie. So that's just an example of what I mean about processes acquiring their own logic. And I think it's not been a single group. You know, when I talk about how the C. O. G. Doomsday network has been involved, that's not always the same people, you get overlaps. There are overlaps between people and the Kennedy assassination and people in Watergate. And fact, I had already written a manuscript about the Kennedy assassination before Watergate. And in it I had mentioned a man called frank Fiorini who under a different name turned up on the front page of the new york times is one of the Watergate burglars interesting. And this is frank Sturgis. Yes, frank's yes was frank Fiorini. Uh and there are examples over and over and over, but there is, I think no example of somebody involved both in the Kennedy assassination and also 9 11. No, these are processes, the instruments are there, the machinery is there? The personnel keep changing. Um But Yeah, I think Cheney and Rumsfeld were part of the 1976. Well, no, that's why I That's why I wrote that chapter. They were definitely part of this transition in 1976, because it really happened when Donald Rumsfeld was chief of staff under Ford in the White House, and Cheney was his number one assistant. So they in around 1976, right through the COG planning right down to the implementation on 9 11 and the Iraq war in the Afghanistan war. So their key players in the sense because they were in the ford administration during that crucial transition right then they were key to setting up cogs in and out of government. And then Cheney shows up as Defense Secretary under Bush one vs Saddam and Desert Storm. Right? So we have all that and then later they show up in the project for new american century running ads that say, you know, we need a new catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor to get people to support their vision of America and America's role in the world quickly for what they were planning privately. Yes, exactly. Is that link between the neck and the C O G planning and there was a kind of plan brought up when Cheney was Secretary of Defense in 1992 and see the deep state has many factions in it. Somebody thought this was too extreme and leaked it to the new york times. And so it didn't happen In 1992. It had to wait until George W Bush after 2001. There's one other thing about Cheney when there was a, you know, frequently we have these deep events and then we get a commission or we get an investigation in the case of Iran contra. Uh, there was a joint special committee of Congress that quote investigated close quote Iran Contra. And it was, from my point of view, largely a whitewash because they didn't really get into the drug aspect of it, which was huge. And Cheney was the Republican senior Republican congressman on the House side of that, he produced minority report at the time, uh which essentially said Reagan was right to do all these things and not he all he violated where these post Watergate reforms, which were terrible. We should never have had them. And that has always been Cheney is the the two changing was the intellectual if you like a theorist. And frequently again he took he was on a plane was a bunch of journalists and he took time out to say how wrong congress had been to try and establish limits and congressional restraints on the CIA. And so that yes, he he has been a theorist but this is not all attributable to one man or two men. 10 process the deep state interference for the public state. Well, it's very interesting that one of the key mechanisms that the deep state likes to use to intrude on the public state is CIA operations. First of all, one thing we have to realize is that the connect connections the CIA is connected in one direction with Congress and government, but it's incorrect connected in another direction with Wall Street and big oil and other major U. S. International corporations. And the history of the CIA really begins on Wall Street with Allan Dallas when he is a lawyer being drawing up a kind of charter which then goes to Washington and becomes the national security act. So um Truman originally did not want to CIA. And when Donovan had a plan to perpetuate the O. S. S. That was the wartime predecessor of the CIA, Truman threw it out and eventually he accepted a C. I. A. But he was very careful hit no walls. The CIA was full of Wall Street people at the vice director level. But the head of it, um Truman never chose someone from Wall Street. He always chose someone from mid America in the western states where he himself was from. And then after Kennedy was assassinated, Truman made a very important intervention which was immediately challenged in the media. But I think he spoke truth. He said like two weeks after. So after the Kennedy assassination said when I set up the CIA, I never intended them to get into these covert operations. Right? I think history will bear amount on that. Well, let's take a look now at how the CIA got into the business of covert operations. You know, we have the National Security Act that creates the CIA in 1947. So where is the first major covert action that sets the tone for all of these secret projects to come? Um The very first covert operation was in 1948 when they put money into the Italian election to help defeat the Communist Party. Well, that was a Wall Street operation, which then the CIA took over at the insistence of Allen Dulles who was still a lawyer on Wall Street, wow, so Dulles at the time, didn't even have an official government position yet. Right. And then they said, well we're going to do this sort of thing. Well we have to set up something. But they didn't set it up in the CIA. They set up something called the Office of Policy Coordination, which a meaningless words. Uh and they and that became very it immediately had a much bigger budget than the CIA and it did a lot of really dangerous things, some of which has still never really been properly recorded like fighting a civil war in the Ukraine, Which is coming back to haunt us now in 2015 because that the source of the tremendous hatreds inside the Ukraine today and they got into tension with the CIA. And the result was they said, we have to get the OPC under control. And uh so they emerged into the CIA and the effect of that was that the it wasn't a case of the CIA taking over OPC it was much more the opposite that OPC came in underneath and then took over the CIA. And the CIA has been dominated by its operations officers ever since. So could we say that the OPC was basically the covert arm of the CIA and then at a certain point it gets the upper hand on the entire agency. Yes. But the CIA had a hand in controlling the OPC at the beginning. But so did the Defense Department. So did the State Department. I see. So the OPC were really on the loose setting up their own actions and the CIA basically tried to get a handle on them by emerging them into the agency. But it sounds like it backfired in a sense. The CIA did not control OPC in that era and the same head of CIA, general beetle smith was adamant in calling for getting the OPC under control. It came under control into the CIA just as Eisenhower was elected president and that meant that Allen Dulles came in as you head of the CIA and was immediately started planning major covert operations like the overthrow of Mosaddegh in Iran, which was a favor to the oil companies and also the overthrow of of Arbenz in Guatemala one year later and 50 for which was a favor to United Fruit and International Railways and Schroeder brothers. But Schroeder brothers were also the bankers for Anglo Iranian oil. So you were, you were benefiting the same people in the deep state. Allen Dulles was the beginning of the era of major covert operations. Truman was, Saint Truman was asked to authorize the overthrow of Mossadeq and he refused and said he sent Harmon too Tehran to work out a deal and Herman proposed. But I think was the sensible deal which was that anglo Iranian should split its profits with the Iranian government and more acidic accepted an anglo Iranian refuse because even though that's what was happening with in Saudi Arabia with a ram code and the Saudi government, the british were too stiff next. They didn't want to seek to maybe too dependent actually hung. But they were pretty poor at that time anyway. They didn't accept it. But the important thing is that Truman is right. He didn't authorize that kind of operation. He never did, interesting. Dallas became the D. C. I. For those things to be the trademark of CIA. Well when you think about Eisenhower who worked with Dulles and the CIA in that period with some major intel actions going on like Guatemala and Iran, Do you think he came to see the threat of all this covert activity? Because of course at the end of his term, he gave a public address on television with a farewell warning about the military industrial complex. And if we go back and watch that, you can't really find another speech with the president warning about the military. The way he did. It's interesting the way he wrote it. He didn't use his regular speechwriters. It was done, it was almost a plot against the deep state to get that into the record. Just as the same thing with president Kennedy. You know, he made the speech which may have led to his murder In June of 63 the American University speech where he said, we are all mortal, really called for an end to the cold war. And he too had to a very secret way get that speech into the record. Eisenhower was leaving Anyway and Kennedy was still six months 5 months later. Um, but Eisenhower was I think never a hawk. I mean, these things happened under his presidency, but I think he delegated covert operations to his vice president with a young politician called Richard Nixon and was not very interested in what happened. A couple of key decisions came up to him and one was through the to back the friendship bien bien fou and use atomic weapons. And calls for this were coming from within his apparatus. And he, you know, he was an experienced warrior and he knew the horrors of war. His basic, his basic thrust was to keep big wars out of the picture. And the downside of that was he wasn't very interested in small time covert operations. Small from his point of view, overthrowing the prime minister, the elected prime minister of Iran, or the elected prime minister of Guatemala. That was just something he didn't get involved in. The key commitments that got us into war in Indochina. They again began under Eisenhower, but I don't think he was aware of them. In fact, key decisions were made on days when the first key decision was made, when he was on a golf course in Scotland, playing golf. So why did a decision have to be made on that particular day? Because Richard Nixon could make it when Eisenhower wasn't not the only case of that happening. So they were using the president basically as a figurehead and leaving him out of the loop on these key decisions. But here's what I think is interesting about this era of the deep States. We have Eisenhower warning about these forces in his speech. Then you have Truman denouncing the CIA that he set up after Kennedy is assassinated, you know, and Truman says, I didn't create the CIA to be this out of control agency. And then you have president Kennedy who said he was going to smash the CIA into 1000 pieces. So all of these presidents who worked closely with intelligence are saying that this covert influence in CIA is a threat to american freedom basically, carter said that it was his policy to reduce the size and strength of the CIA. And Turner did it mostly by taking early resignations and so on. But he uh there were people in the agency who felt targeted by him, rightly. So I mentioned Shockley before. I'll mention him again, a Theodore Shockley. Uh uh he let's say he was eased out. He wasn't exactly fired, but he was made uncomfortable. He left and he immediately joined up with the people who were working in the Safari club to conduct offshore operations. That didn't have to go to Congress for approval. So, yes, the carter is another victim to, Yes. Okay. So carter also knew they were dangerous. Well, what's fascinating is this, it looks like the deep state relied on the CIA. Then when the CIA got into trouble in the 19 seventies being investigated over and over again for these unsanctioned operations, then it sounds like the Safari club became where the focus of the Deep State went as far as intelligence is concerned anyway. So you were saying it was almost like a government in waiting because there were these ex. C. I. A figures kind of biding their time and making deals, making arrangements waiting for that chance to get back in power and to utilize that public state for their covert planning again. Does that sound correct? Yes, pretty much I want to add to it something which is not mentioned enough in my book. And this again involves Shockley. That because Congress in the seventies established congressional control over the CIA. Then the military started getting involved in covert operations and they set up something called the Joint Special Operations Command or J. Sock sock. And Shockley had a hand in that. And another man called General Stilwell Who had been fired as a result of this flap back in 1952, he was fired by Beetle Smith for his involvement in Thailand and over to the military. And one of his last actions was to be an advisor in the setting up of J. Sock and what's going on now is a lot of us covert operations and not some of them not really so very covert drone attacks, which was the planning is secret, but people, if there's a drone attack, it's not a secret. And the more and more of these things are being handled under Socom Special Operations Command, the Joint Special chase off the Joint Special. There's a whole new bunch of initials in the pentagon to deal with this kind of warfare, which is a kind of byproduct of Congress establishing oversight over the CIA. Okay, so I think we've tracked the deep state now to the point where Carter loses reelection in 1980 due in part to the Shenanigans around the October surprise. So then when you get into the Reagan era and you've touched on Oliver North already, but some interesting things are happening in the Reagan era. Suddenly drug traffic explodes. There are major reports implicating the CIA and drug running. So people with connections to the Deep State are firmly back in power. So we have the Contras in Nicaragua running drugs. We have barry seal and his ties to the drug operations in Mena Arkansas and the Reagan administration. Now, I know you've done some amazing research on this. And uh, so let's get into that because I want to show how the drugs are related financing wise to the Deep State. Well, yes, I don't say enough about that in this book because I had said a lot about it in my last book. But you have to remember that the dollar was under severe attack In the 70s and early 80s because of these oil price hikes. So when Reagan was elected president, interest rates were 17%. The economy was in a terrible Miss Mess. And the Treasury started selling bearer bonds, which meant anybody could come in for cash by a Treasury bond. Well, this became a number one form of laundering of drug money. And the Treasury was advised at the time, um you're going to this is going to result in the laundering of drug money. They wanted the drug money, they needed an influx of capital to help bring down the interest rates and get business back to normal. And after about six or seven years, they then stopped issuing bearer bonds. But the atmosphere of drugs in the US. economy in 19 early 19 eighties isn't just the CIA, the CIA use it. They don't get the money themselves, but they work with people who finance their own private armies with drugs. And that was the case with the contras, right? So they could say that basically we're getting better intelligence this way. We have to work with these kind of lower elements in these lawless places. And that is the public explanation for what they're doing, basically. And if it's a lawless place where you happen to be against the government like in Nicaragua, then then you work with a leading opposition which is usually the local drug traffickers. And that was Bermudas and people who are the head of the contras. Well, there were different contra factions and there was a drug connection to every faction because that was one of the ways of financing the countries and before that, You know, the largest army that the CIA ever backed was home back in the 1970s in Laos. And the CIA even gave them their own airline to help get it was to get the arms in. Yes. But what do those planes go out with? The single long agricultural product was opium. And this airline flew it out. So it was it was being established going right back to what I was talking about in the early 50s and operation paper. You bring arms in the plains, bring your drugs out and you don't you don't have you can say we don't have anything to do with the drugs because the case of operation paper, those planes which later were known as their America planes, we're actually 60% owned in Taiwan. So you can say no, that's a Taiwan flight coming out. It's a CIA right. CIA was running the airline. Well you have a very interesting corollary between the drug traffic around the Vietnam war and then Afghanistan which is the new drug war and to a certain extent both of these conflicts were drug wars. I would say that and I do say in my book, one of my books, it's a rerun of Laos. Okay. Yes. And you know, we get a lot in the papers about how the taliban are financing themselves by drugs and they are. But everybody in Afghanistan and certainly established government results. That is the major part of the Afghan economy. Just as before, it was the major part of the Ocean Economy. And the head of the Ocean Army was also the head of the Ocean Greg. A should see. But drugs were actually legal. The only difference is that drugs For until 1971 were legal in Laos, where Okay, were illegal in Afghanistan. But that of course it's good for prices. That helps prices go up. One of the yeah, go ahead. Well, one of the most interesting details that you point out actually is that under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, drug production had gone way down, which is amazing, virtually eliminated. Yes. In one year, Bang, wow, there was some drug production, but it all came from the areas which were not yet. We're never controlled by the taliban. Up in the north, the northeast was the drug producing area in that period. And that was those people who people became our allies against the taliban. So we're basically allying ourselves with the drug cartel in Afghanistan versus the taliban, as we do. Yes, it's right. That's fascinating. And after we got into Afghanistan, of course, suddenly the drug production level is off the charts again. Yes, and is again, now, it's huge. It's, I don't have the figures for this year, but It went uh, it more than doubled from the highest year before. Uh, Karzai went. And initially, you could almost say there was a humanitarian justification for it because the country was so wrecked by 10 years of civil war that if people had not been able to grow drugs, they would have starved. So maybe for a year or two, you can justify allowing the drug traffic. We've been there for over a decade and we're going to leave the country, the number one heroin producer in the world, which it wasn't before the CIA became involved in. It's very interesting though, when we were involved in the southeast AsIA, that was the number one opium area producing in the world. And when Nixon recognized china and cut his connections with Taiwan and then the drug production there plummeted at the same time, it started rising in Afghanistan. And you actually, the levels are total levels are not all that different. I believe that there are very powerful drug forces in the world that the CIA they don't control these forces but they are working with these forces. And they, what's interesting is that the drug, first of all the drugs started going up in Afghanistan and there sooner or later. Sure enough, the CIA turned up in a big way in Afghanistan. Now Brzezinski was the adviser to carter who authorized operations, which he himself said may lead to a Russian intervention in the civil war. I don't know that Brzezinski knew anything about the drugs, but I think that in the deep state there are forces that saw this whole thing coming and were able in other words, eliminating the drugs in Southeast AsIA didn't have the effect of eliminating the drug traffic. It had the effect of moving it. And the same thing I second with cocaine in latin America. You know, George H. W. Bush proclaimed the war on drugs in latin America in specifically in Colombia. And I predicted in 1990, I said, we we start this war. I predict that we will have more cocaine and not less. And within 10 years my prediction was born out, looking troubled, troubled in Colombia. You wanted to go down and the drug war, but they don't want to end the drug war because it is part of the establishment of how America has a presence in the rest of the world. And yes, we need one of my chapters is America must end itself generating wars. But there is a self generating war because you're driving profits up and more people come in and on terrorism is a self generating war because you create can terrorists for everyone that you murdered with a drone attack? Yes, absolutely. Well, before we leave this topic of drugs and this is so interesting recently, there was a movie that came out based on a true story about journalist Gary Webb called Kill the Messenger. And of course anyone into tracking this subject knew about web long before the movie came out because of his excellent book dark alliance where he outlined how elements in the CIA were running drugs into major american cities and the movie came under nonstop attack in the mainstream media. Yes. I was actually a consultant. That's great. Well you really know that story and I am proud to say that one of my recommendations was adopted in the movie. Excellent. It's a very good movie. It's pretty true to I mean if I have to say is that essentially true? I would say yes it's essentially true. Why is it being attacked in the media because the media attacked there. You have they destroyed Gary. They put him in a position where he couldn't make any money. And I think it was a suicide. Yeah, suicide. Of a man who had no income. Yes, I understand what you mean, that there are ways to eliminate someone without actually planning out their assassination. Yes. Yes. Sure. But when you think about web first of all, for the person who is watching this and doesn't really know much about media manipulation, why would the media want to destroy a figure like Gary Webb who was exposing the shady network between central american drug running and intelligence operations and potentially being involved with shipping crack into Los Angeles. Why would the media have a vested interest in taking a guy like that down? What are called the mainstream media And I call the governing media our media that work very closely with the CIA and hardly a day goes by. When you don't see a story from Washington, says a high level official who declined to be identified said that's the CIA putting stuff into the media and the media. If you want to be an important newspaper, you depend on that connection. And the CIA does favors for the media by giving them stories that the media then thing. And the media defends the CIA consistently. I mean, no, I say consistent. Not 100% of the time, but yes, I would say consistent and most of the time they do. And in the case of Gary Webb, the CIA later boasted how they put out little sheets of advisories, two things to say about Gary Webb and the new york Times, the Washington post. The L. A. Times, they all chipped in and attacked Gary Webb particularly scandalous in the case of the L. A. Times. Because Gary Webb relied very heavily on an L. A. Times story Ricky ross. The cave crack in L. A. Right. He used that story and then the same reporter working for the L. A. Times then attacked Web and said that's a great exaggeration. The things you claim for Ricky ross. And that same reporter I believe since then has somewhat repented and apologize. I mean played this double role. You know, I I had the same experience with some of the people that are mentioned in Gary Webb book because my job When I worked for a little think tank in Washington in 87 and part of what I was doing research and sending stuff up to I didn't deal much with Carrie. I dealt mostly with the his executive assistant on the committee, but I also did stories to give to the press. And I began to see a pattern these people. So yes, we're very interested. Is there anything more you know, tell us, no, we're going to do a huge story. And then they wouldn't do the story and the people who wouldn't do the story with the people who became the character assassins dealing with Gary Webb. A few weeks later, I'm not going to name names, but I could name names and and that's their job. You know, they work for a newspaper that is part of a control system. And I think I have a small apology in my book where I say I haven't dealt with all of the aspects of the deep state because I wanted very much to look at corporations and the intervening with the level of the public state and the level of the CIA and the NSA up at the very top of the corporations and the banks And in between those are these consulting firms like booz Allen Hamilton which are full of people who come from the CIA and go back to the CIA or go back to industry come from industry. They're all interacting and this is private intelligence contracting agencies. Yes. I call them, you know, we have private military corporations. We have private intelligence corporations anyway. I don't say enough about the media because that was going in this right to a different direction. But they are part of the deep state and they have their own, you know, and Bagdikian and people have written about how the corporatization of the media that all focus in in the end on Wall Street and people who are on the boards of the media are on the boards of big corporations and the banks. And that is the deep state. The the media are as much part of the deep State as say booz allen Hamilton as part of the deep state. Yeah, well you have these major media companies and T. V. Stations in new york along with the national newspapers there. And we have Wall Street right in the middle of all that. And you're saying they intertwined very closely and are really part of the same mindset. Yeah, well, have to be careful. I'm not saying this to you. I'm saying to myself very careful when you talk about the mindset because you often see conflicts. I mean Rupert Murdoch and news corp and Fox news there on a slightly different paths from say, the new york Times and CBS news, right? And when Rupert Murdoch's family got into some big trouble in England over crimes. The new york times did a lot to expose that. So, exactly, a single mindset uniting Rupert Murdoch with
