← The Bulwark
The Bulwark
U.S. Intelligence is Winning the War in Ukraine (w/ Michael Weiss & Marc Polymeropoulos)
00:16:30
Loading summary
Transcript8 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hi, this is Michael Weiss. I'm the editor of the Insider, an independent Russian news outlet and a frequent guest on the Bulwark with Tim Miller. I was just on yesterday to talk about, among other things, the big beautiful memorandum of understanding signed between the United States and Iran. And today I'm hijacking Bulwark takes with my friend and co conspirator Mark Polymeropoulos, a veteran CIA officer, somebody I'm sure you've seen on Ms. Now, he's a contributor there and he's also, I think, been on the Bulwark before. Is that right, Mark?
- [00:28]
B
That's right. I have. It's awesome to be with you. We're going to talk about some rather amazing things that happened today as we just watched the Trump presser. Also a bit about about Ukraine. And if listeners are lucky, we could talk about our favorite dive bars because one thing that intelligence officers and journalists have in common is their love of going out to a good dive bar.
- [00:47]
A
That's right. Christopher Hitchens used to call it Mahogany Ridge, where all the best sources are made. We were actually going to just focus exclusively on espionage and covert action, a subject I write about as a journalist, a subject Mark has practiced as a clandestine officer. But we can't move on to that before, you know, one of the things Mark and I do is talk to each other every day offline about the state of the world. And we both have backgrounds in the Middle east and Europe and Russia. And Mark, I mean, this Iran thing. So as we sit here, it is now Wednesday, June 17th, just after 1:00 clock in the afternoon. Trump is at the G7 in France. He's just given a speech, a press conference at which he said, and I'm losing track now, but keep in mind, here are the things that I noted. Number one, the Iranian regime is no longer radical. It is rational. They're going to behave beautifully. We can make a deal with them. They've seen the error of their ways. This is going to be a new dawn of peaceful coexistence and equilibrium in the Middle East. Sounds to me rather darkly like what the right used to accuse the Obama administration of trying to do, normalize relations with Iran. But he also said, and this I think is kind of the Marquis stuff, number one, Iran, Iran has every right to have ballistic missiles because Saudi Arabia has them. One of the operational objectives of going to war with Iran was to eliminate the missile program. Now they can have it. He also said they might be allowed to enrich uranium for civilian energy purposes. Last I checked, we were going in to get all of the nuclear dust, eliminating the nuclear program, another operational objective of this war. And then he also said, the money that'll be released to them, it's not really our money, it's their money. It's just frozen and they're gonna have to get it back in one form or another. I mean, these are all of the things that Donald Trump used to say was borderline treasonous. When the Democrats are doing, and now he's not only doing them, but he's actually saying out loud that which we used to think, well, that could possibly be the COVID or the sort of subtle policy, but he's just coming out and saying everything. This, like, if you're a, if you're a pro Israel hawk, if you're a fdd, if you're a Mark Thiessen, I mean, this is like you're fighting the tallest building in the world and you want to jump out of the tallest window. This is the guy who is going to like deliver justice for 50 odd years of Cold War with the Islamic Republic. He was going to do regime change and now he's acting as defense counsel for the Islamic Republic.
- [03:20]
B
It's almost as if Donald Trump is acting as a Democratic plant right now. I mean, that press conference was so out there. And you and I, of course, as we always do, and I think our respective wives, you know, consider us having a bit of a side affair going on because I think I talk to you more than I talk to my wife with our chats all day. But this, I think both of our phones exploded because, you know, he really, in one fell swoop, in a matter of minutes, threw out every kind of justification for the war. And of course you had Marco Rubio standing right behind him wishing he was somewhere else. But a couple of things here. One is, I think that, you know, Bibi, Prime Minister Netanyahu, plus all the Iran hawks, you know, you better watch out for the skyscrapers on Tel Aviv because they're going to all be hopping off. That was insane in particular, I think. And you know, forget the nuclear piece just for a moment, the idea of the missiles, ballistic missiles not being an issue, it was so fundamental to the Republican outrage over the jcpoa. It's also something that Israelis really care about because they were subject to ballistic missile attacks. And by the way, the Gulf partners as well. So this was like peak, just insanity and crazy and in some ways, and I mean, this what I'm going to say, because there's a part of me that Sympathizes in any kind of effort to do something against the regime. I was at CIA for 26 years. I battled the Iranians and their proxies on the streets of the Middle East. When I think about friends when I was in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraq in particular, friends who were killed by these explosively formed projectiles, the EFPs, this is the Iranians supplying them to Iraqi Shia groups. You know, when. When I see Iranians taken out, when I see, you know, any president confront Iran in some fashion, there's a part of me that approves to it. Of course, the way they did this was rather insane and crazy. And now he's taken kind of all of this justifications for it and thrown it out. So let's go back to that notion. Like this is. It's Democratic campaign fodder. I mean, I don't know how, if you're on Fox News trying to justify anything, if you're a Republican politician, how you're going to look at what we just saw several minutes ago and say, this is the man, this is the Messiah. Or as the Israelis might consider it, this is someone who has taken on the regime, when in fact he just basically wrote not only a surrender document with the mou, but a surrender speech right there in front of all of us to witness.
- [05:40]
A
Well, and one of the other things that we went to war for, supposedly stated by General Kaine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was to eliminate Iran's support for terrorist proxies. What does this MOU do? And again, they haven't released it. The Americans haven't released it yet. Bloomberg put out the points. They say that this is the thing, and it's obviously being circulated at the G7. So I'm sure the Europeans have been leaking to the press, but you can tell based on the White House talking points which were leaked to me yesterday or the day before, that one of the elements of the MOU is it's a ceasefire, not just with respect to Iran, but also with respect to Lebanon. And that means that not only are we. We have. We abandoned an operational objective of get the Iranians to eliminate their support for groups like Hezbollah. We are now counting on Iran to control Hezbollah and rein them in in Lebanon. And we, in exchange for that, will do the same thing with respect to Israel. You know, for all of the kind of conspiratorial stuff we've been hearing the last few months, oh, Bibi and the Israel lobby convinced Trump to go to war. And they, you know, Israel has a kind of stranglehold on the American body politics, Donald Trump is talking about the Israelis like a vassal state. They have no sovereignty, they have no autonomy. They don't have freedom of action. They can't retaliate to missile strikes without his by your leave. Right. He's saying Bibi can't lift a finger unless I tell him to do so. He's treating the Israelis the way that Iran treats groups like Hezbollah. This is an utter catastrophe for the Israelis.
- [07:02]
B
So, you know, you bring up a great point. And, you know, I have friends who are former Israeli intelligence officers. I worked with them. I still keep in touch with them. To say they're having an apocalyptic meltdown right now is an understatement. And, you know, when I worked with the Israelis for many years in the field, there was always something that just was kind of foundational, and that was the idea that they had autonomy to protect themselves, especially the border when it comes to Lebanon. Now, US Presidents over the years have objected to some things that they did. When the Israelis bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, President Reagan withheld some military equipment. And so that was a bit of a kerfuffle. But I'll never forget. I'm going to just tell a quick story. I'll never forget. I was actually in Israel at the time with Israeli intelligence officers when one day we Woke up in 2007, and guess what wasn't there? What wasn't there was a nuclear reactor that North Korea was building in the Syrian desert that we were working collectively on to try to figure out what to do about it. President Bush, in fact, told the Israelis, let's take care of this diplomatically. And they said, sure, sure, sure. And then one day, it wasn't there anymore, because that's what they do. They, you know, you know, America is a partner, but when it comes to Israel's defense, particularly on its borders, they don't mess around. And so, you know, I think maybe a lot of us are going to look at some of the other things that are, that are going on now, particularly the financial relief that this MOU apparently is going to give Iran right away. But for the Israelis, this is now an existential threat. This MOU is a, is a document which is causing just absolute heart palpitations. And I don't care what you say about, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu, whether you like him or not, I'm talking about kind of Israeli national security that is certainly at risk. And I think that's something that, that, you know, we should care about. And again, it's Almost as if we're siding with Hezbollah on this. I mean, it's just amazing not allowing the Israelis, by the way, who were hit again today, five Israeli soldiers were killed by one of these first person FPV drones in southern Lebanon or were injured. Ordinarily, this would cause a significant reaction, but according to Trump, the Israelis can't hit Hezbollah, particularly in their stronghold in the southern suburbs, in the Dahya in Beirut. So this is just a mess all around, you know, top to bottom. And again, you know, if you want to torture yourself, watch the press conferences. But if you want to have some fun, pour yourself a drink, pop some popcorn and watch Fox News tonight, because I want to see how they react to that press conference, which was absolutely insane.
- [09:26]
A
Yeah. Well, you've got Jack Keane, General, very pro Trump, and he just came out straight away and he said, everything I'm hearing sounds disastrous from my point of a complete reversal of all of the things we set out to accomplish with this operation Epic Fury. But you raised an interesting point about how the Israelis often ask forgiveness rather than permission. So we tell them, don't do something. They go and do it and they say, look, we had to. This is in our interest to do it. We took out Iraq's nuclear reactor, then we took out Syria. You know who else does the same kind of thing? The Ukrainians. Right. And it's a very interesting and very similar relationship. And I want to talk about this because you and I talk about this all the time. We obviously have people that we know, former CIA officers who were integral in. I think the expression you use is putting in the plumbing in Ukraine, going back now more than a decade, 2014, 2015, after the revolution of dignity which basically ousted Viktor Yanukovych, technically, he fled the country and went to Russia along with some of his security chiefs, having stolen billions of dollars in Ukrainian taxpayer money. There was a real reluctance on the part of American intelligence to crawl into bed with the Ukrainians because we saw them as completely infiltrated by the Russians. And there's a great piece, we always come back to it. It's kind of a touchstone in this, in this sort of area by Adam Entus at the New York Times about the kind of spy wars. Right. Which delves into some of this history. And I wanted to talk a little bit about this because it's actually important and it gets lost in the noise of how we're covering Ukraine right now, which is, in characteristic American fashion, in a very inter directed, you know, everything filtered through domestic politics. And Trump, right So we all talk about Ukraine. Like, Donald Trump has abandoned Ukraine. He has cut military aid to Ukraine by 99%, according to the Kiel Institute of World Economy, which is a German think tank. So now what we do is we sell weapons and ammunition to our European and North American allies, like Canada, and in turn, they then donate the stuff to Ukraine. So Donald Trump says, we don't give anything away now. We sell it and they buy and they buy and they pay in full. Right. So we're not actually helping Ukraine gifting anything to them anymore. But another thing that has been a constant throughout this second term, and a constant very counterintuitively so, because you would think he would have severed this relationship. Intelligence sharing between CIA and the Ukrainian services, particularly their military intelligence service known as Gurgaon, has not only persisted, but has deepened and expanded. And that's something that you and I have both been able to confirm on the American side, but more importantly on the Ukrainian side. And I wanted to get into this with you because, you know, John Ratcliffe is somebody, I think we both have mixed feelings about, you in particular because of his CIA's cover up of Havana syndrome, of which you were probably the most well known victim. The refusal to acknowledge this thing is real and the refusal to say the Russians are doing it, even though I think it's more than even an open secret now in the intelligence community that that's true. But one thing Ratcliffe has done very expertly, I'd say, is he's managed Donald Trump. And the way I'm told it goes is, you know, whenever Trump is feeling like he's ready to cut the ties with Ukraine, Ratcliffe goes and plays golf with him at the weekend and manages to has some kind of mesmeric hold on Donald Trump to say, actually, Mr. President, we need them and what they're doing is pretty cool. And the way it was described to me. And again, this is going to sound very paradoxical to listeners who just assume, and rightly so, Donald Trump has a real antipathy toward Ukraine and a particular dislike of Volodymyr Zelensky, because I think he sees him as somebody who caused his first impeachment, even though that's not true for some reason. When Ratcliffe says to Donald Trump, this is how many Russians are being killed per month and we're helping the Ukrainians do it, Donald Trump's eyes widen. He gets excited by this. Right. He actually plumps to the idea of chopping the Russians down. And I think it's because he's desperate for a deal with Putin. He wants to be liked and respected by Putin, just like as we've just discussed. He wants to be liked and respected by all of our adversaries, including the Iranians that he went to war with. But he never wants to be the junior partner in that relationship. Right. He wants to show the other side who's boss. And I think the COVID aspects of our Ukraine assistance, which is ongoing, as I say, I mean, we still provide targeting pacts to the Ukrainians, not only to strike Russian troops inside occupied, occupied territory of Ukraine, but to strike Russians inside Russia, all the energy infrastructure, the oil terminals and refineries. I mean, that stuff is coming from us. I mean, so let's, let's talk about this because this is sort of the unsung, I think, victory of whoever it is. You want to call it the deep state, or you want to call it the kind of quiet little cabal of pro Ukraine actors in this administration. Ratcliffe is one, Rubio is probably another. Alexis Grinkevich, the supreme allied commander of NATO, is certainly another one. How is this working? What do you tell us a little bit about this relationship when it was built and why?
- [14:26]
B
I love this story and I'll tell you a couple of reasons why. But let's also, I know we're going to give Adam and to some credit, that New York Times piece was as I read it, I mean, he did it. I think he interviewed 200 plus officials, including a lot of former intelligence and perhaps even in current. So it does give kind of the idea and we'll go to that in a second. But I also want to give you some credit too, because you have reported on this at the Insider and your substack. And I think it's actually, it's a very important story because it also shows the nuance of foreign policy and of the intelligence world. But let's start off with, though, just the notion why Ukraine is kind of an issue and a positive issue for U.S. intelligence officers. And I think it goes back to all of us spent years and years in the gwat, the global war on terrorism, which started out in my view, as a righteous war. You know, the fight against al Qaeda. And obviously we stayed very, very long, a long time in Afghanistan. I have friends who were killed. I was involved in operations which had tragic consequences. And so you leave there feeling kind of mixed. And again, this started after the events of September 11th. That's a hell of a long time ago. 2014, 2016 comes along and here's this conflict in Ukraine and you know, I was involved in this only from the headquarters side as a senior officer. I was the deputy operations chief and then the acting operations chief, Europe and Eurasia. And so. And what we were doing at the time is exactly right. You're putting the plumbing in. So we're building capacity for the Ukrainian intelligence service in a really, I'm going to just say it like in a non sexy fashion. That's equipment, that's training, that's identifying officers who we know are, you know, are not subject to, you know, possible recruitment from, from the Russian side. Everything that you kind of would worry about. But there's. But on the, I would say emotional, even spiritual side. And this means something for people. This is a David versus Goliath story. And it started, of course, with, with, you know, not, not in the Russian invasion that we think of when Russia kind of took the east. And so, you know, this is years prior. And so what you're doing is you're seeing this incredible kind of, you know, a band of Ukrainians fighting against the big evil, evil Russians. And that resonates.