January 18, 2025 • 42 mins
As the government has been weaponized against the people, there's been a microscope on the FBI and DOJ. But what about the CIA? In this special, Jesse Kelly sits down with Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online, where they uncover three important CIA scandals you may have never heard of.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
There's a great line in the movie The Good Shepherd.
I like that movie. No one else did.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
But it's a movie kind of about the formation of
the Central Intelligence Agency and the guy who's forming it.
He turns to somebody and he says, I really want
this agency to be America's eyes and ears, not its
heart and soul. But over time, Central Intelligence Agency, they've
(00:33):
gone way beyond their purview and in many ways they
have become the heart and soul of this country. So
we're about to dig into this. We're going to look
back on some of the scandals, and they're not all
from ancient times. Many of these are very recent. Let's
figure out exactly what this agency is and what they've
(00:54):
been doing, shall we.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Mike Ben's is going to join us to do that next.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Well, if you're going to talk about CIA scandals of
the CIA, I'm not sure that you could find a
better guest than my friend. Mike Ben's, executive director of
the Foundation for Freedom Online, is exposed so much it's
jaw dropping at this point in time. Okay, Mike, before
we get into the scandals, we have so destroyed the
(01:25):
intelligence operations in this country that people don't even really
understand what CIA is supposed to do.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
What are they supposed to do.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Well.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
The CIA is supposed to be a plausibly deniable support
organization for the US Department of State on national interest
grounds and the US Department of Defense on national security grounds,
which is a long way of saying that in nineteen
forty eight, when the rules based international order was set up,
(01:59):
we needed a way for the State Department to operate
a cloak and dagger plausibly deniable black ops shop in
order to do the sources of things that would cause
a diplomatic scandal if it turned out the US government
was responsible for. So the US government needed a way
to make things happen without looking like the US government
(02:21):
did it. And that's when it's State Department related, that's
usually on US economic grounds or political grounds. And when
the CIA work is related to military, it's usually involving
paramilitary groups or terrorist groups or other unseemly factions that
we are providing military support to.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
So there's both a political and.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
A military component to what the CIA is supposed to do.
The problem is is because they are a professional political
subversive organization literally set up to inaugurate organized political warfare.
That's the exact term that George Kennon used is nineteen
forty eight memo the inauguration of organized political warfare to
(03:04):
give the CIA its remit that political warfare can boomerang
back on Americans when the US foreign policy establishment thinks
that Americans are domestically going to vote for someone who
will undermine their preferred foreign policy agenda. That's what you
saw in the nineteen sixties when the CIA was playing
(03:25):
around at home to influence left wing groups to stop
the anti Vietnam War movement. That's what you're seeing today
as the CIA is working to basically do the same
thing to the right wing when it comes to the
anti war or the nationalist rather than globalist wing of
the Republican Party.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Now, nineteen forty eight to the sixties is not, by
any stretch of the imagination, a long period of time, Mike, So,
why did they face inward so quickly or did they
really just face inward from the very beginning.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
Well, you could argue that they did from the very beginning.
I think it was that the nineteen sixties is when
there really was a break in the bipartisan consensus when
it came to the construction of the American Empire. There
was a fair amount of optimism from the late nineteen
(04:23):
forties into the early nineteen sixties about the purpose of
American state craft and establishing America as the global hegemon
in the face of the Cold War with Russia. In
the nineteen sixties, the rise of the civil rights movement,
the rise of Third World people's movements, and anti imperialist movements,
(04:44):
also influenced to some degree by the popularity of Marxism
in US universities, led to a breaking of the Republican
Democrat consensus, as this ascendant coalition within the Democrats pushed
against US interventionalism around the world and pushed against the
(05:08):
war in Vietnam, and then that resulted in scandals during
the CI's history, Starting in the early nineteen sixties, there
was something called Operation Chaos, which was a big disaster
for the CIA when it was revealed the CIA was
personally intervening in campus politics by sponsoring groups like the
(05:29):
National Students Association to effectively bribe young people to write
counter propaganda against the harder left faction. The CI was
busted constructing front groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
where they were taking high level US musicians, writers, thought leaders, poets,
(05:50):
visual artists, musical artists into a sort of CIA artist club.
This included not just classical musicians, musicians, writers from high
level magazines, but also feminist thought leaders like Gloria Steinem,
and this was all. Gloria Steinem herself would later describe
(06:12):
her role in the CIA sponsored Congress or Cultural Freedom
as saying that the reason it was so important for
the CIA to focus on culture was because you can
think of culture as permanent politics, the kind of when
culture is established, it sets the boundaries for what politics
ken and can't do. And so a group like the CIA,
(06:32):
whose role is political subversion first and foremost, sets its
sights on control over the culture, which sets the bounds
for the politics. During that same period, in the nineteen
sixties and seventies, the CIA was busted in other scandals
like assassinations of foreign leaders. They assassinated the president of
Congo La Mumba, they assassinated Allende in Chile. They were
(06:57):
busted with constructing assassinations weapons like the heart attack gun
that was held up by Senator Frank Church and the
Church Committee hearings. They were busted in scandals like mk Ultra,
which involved effectively behavioral modification programs both at the individual
and at the group level to be able to control
the psychology of both individuals and political groups. All this
(07:21):
came to a head in nineteen seventy five. In nineteen
seventy six, during the Church Committee hearings, which established, for
the first time in US history, a Senate Intelligence Committee
and a House Intelligence Committee to be able to have
congressional oversight of the rogue CIA. Jimmy Carter rode to
power in nineteen seventy six on the back of all
(07:44):
this left wing resentment against the CIA. He went to
war with the CIA. He fired thirty percent of the
CIA's operations wing in a single night. Thirty percent in
a single night. It was called the Halloween massacre because
it was done on October thirty five. First that He
then crippled the CI's budget and put a CIA director
(08:04):
in Stansfeld Turner, who was basically like the left wing
cash Patel for the New Left Democrats, who basically put
huge bumper cars on what the CIA couldn't couldn't do
at the time. In the nineteen seventies, Bill Barr was
working for the CIA. Bill Barr would go on to
be the Attorney General of the United States twice, including
(08:28):
during Trump's term. Bill Barr wrote in his biography that
he had wanted to become He told his high school
guidance counselor that he wanted to run the CIA be
the director of the CIA when he grew up. He
then worked for the CIA directly out of college and
went to law school at George Washington University Night School.
(08:52):
He went to night law school while he worked for
the CIA, and he said that he only decided he
didn't want to run the CIA when Stansfeld under Jimmy
Carter took power and put the reins on what the
CIA couldn't do. Basically, as soon as Bill Barr encountered
a CIA leadership who wanted to restrain its cloak and
(09:14):
dagger dark arts powers, Bill Barr said he lost interest
in running the CIA at that point, which I think
is just kind of funny. But that then led to
Ronald Reagan's tenure in the early nineteen eighties. He of
course came to power on the back of the Iran
hostage situation, which the intelligence community in the US argued
would have been prevented if the CIA had had its
(09:36):
old powers back. So Ronald Reagan quickly went to work
trying to get the CIA's old powers back, but ran
into a Democrat controlled Congress who wouldn't let it happen.
So he then put the intelligence community through a reorganization
that we still lived through today, where he basically diffused
the CI's old powers into a pair of institutions, USAID
(09:58):
and the nash On Dama for Democracy, so that just
as the CIA was created to give a layer of
plausible deniability to the State Department USA, and the National
Dama for Democracy became the main plausible deniability layer for
the CIA, So it was pushed into this NGO layer.
(10:19):
And so I think several of the scandals we're going
to be talking about today are at that diffused layer
rather than directly at CIA. It's at the CIA liaised
rather than CIA run layer, which is where most of
CIA work happens nowadays.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Which brings us to the first of the scandals, the
fake vaccination Drive.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
What did they do?
Speaker 4 (10:44):
Yeah, this was a major international scandal. So in twenty eleven,
the CIA set up a hepatitis vaccine clinic, and they
set up a ring of these in Pakistan, and they
publicly advertised this to the Pastakistani people, that these clinics
existed in order to vaccinate the local population against hepatitis,
(11:10):
in the face of USA promulgated media that there was
a happatitis outbreak in Pakistan, so everyone needed to get vaccinated.
But it turns out it was actually these were all
fake vaccination clinics. The CIA was only luring people into
these vaccine clinics in order to collect their biometrics. Now,
the official story as bad as that is, as bad
(11:33):
as the official story is officially, when the CI got
busted in this, basically Pakistani intelligence noticed that there was
a lot of strange goings on at these vaccine clinics
and ultimately discovered that the whole thing was a US
intelligence operation that the US later confessed to to maintain
relations with the Pakistani government and publicly apologized for duping
(11:57):
everyone with these fake vaccine clinics. They said, the only
reason we did it is because we were looking for
Osama bin Laden and so we were collecting everyone's biometric
in DNA information. They were basically they had a blood
sample of the Osama bin Laden family because Osama bin
(12:21):
Lan's sister had recently died in Boston, so they collected
her blood and they tried to collect the basically the
blood of everyone in Pakistan to identified their way to
the up to the Obama, the Osama bin Laden family.
(12:41):
But of course, even that cover story, as scandalous as
that is, on its own, I think is quite a
whopper of a lie unto itself. You see, as this
was playing out, David Betraeus had announced a doctrine that
he called identity dominance, which was part of US counterinsurgency
doctrine that they were having a problem with being able
(13:05):
to contain gorilla, an anonymous group activity where people were
showing up in large crowds and protests, it was hard
to be able to pinpoint in targeted strikes all the
troublemakers in the area. So they wanted to collect the
biometric data and the biological data of what they said
(13:28):
was eighty five percent of the population in Iraq, in Syria,
in Pakistan, in all these Central Asian conflict zones. And
so while the US military had announced that they wanted
eighty five percent of the country's DNA and eyeballs so
that they would be able to have identity dominance and
(13:49):
pick out basically anyone in a crowd, be able to
instantly ID anyone who was a troublemaker. They were running
these vaccine clinics in order to to collect that, which
I think if they were busted in Pakistan, there's an
open question of how many vaccine clinics were playing this
(14:10):
role around the world. You know, there's a lot of
terrorist groups. There's terrorist groups in Africa, there's terrorist groups
in Eastern Europe, there's terrorist groups in South America. How
many of these public health facilities have been operating as
CIA fronts adjacent to that? In twenty fourteen, so that
was under the Obama administration. Also under the Obama administration,
(14:32):
in twenty fourteen, the CIA was busted running a fake
HIV AIDS clinic which was set up nominally to help
solve the HIV breakouts in Cuba, and it turned out
that those clinics were actually operating as a paramilitary transport
(14:57):
hub where the US was sending weapons and paramilitaries into
Cuba under the front of a aid's clinic. So you
see these public health facilities that are held in foreign
countries and yet they're operating as intelligence and paramilitary fronts,
(15:19):
because no one would think to look at a vaccine
clinic or an HIV clinic as a hub of CIA activity,
and so it's allowed to go on for years. But
how many other countries have they done this? And if
they've been caught there?
Speaker 2 (15:35):
I can't help with all this talk about vaccines, think
back to COVID. Did what they do have any impact
on how that propaganda was pushed here?
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Do you think, Well, it's it's hard not to see it.
And in fact, it's not just that it was the
same sort of playbook in a certain way, because what
came along with COVID vaccines was contact tracing every you know, everything,
(16:06):
all of your phone data, everything moving into the QR codes.
They can temporary, they can temporaneously rolled out at DHS,
under which TSA is tucked Mandatory eyeball scanning in domestic travel,
So the same way that US marines used to go
around in Iraq and Syria and Pakistan lifting up people's
(16:30):
eyeballs all over the country in order to snap a
picture so that the US military would have their eyeballs
in a database. So anytime they showed up on a
drone camera participating in a protest activity against US government operations.
They every single hostile, you know, adversary to the State
Department could be idd in terms of who they are
(16:52):
and where they live. The same thing did indeed come
home under the COVID era. There's only the question now
of what exactly they're doing with that data, but undeniably
they have collected it. But I would like to point
out one other aspect of this, which is that Henry
Kissinger in two thousand, who was the US Secretary of
State as well as National Security Advisor US Secretary of State,
(17:16):
is this sort of symphony orchestra conductor of CIA operations.
The CIA answers most directly to the State Department because
they are nominally it's the National Security Council, but because
they serve the State Department, they have to synchronize with
the State Department. So the State Department reads all the
CIA analyst memos and coordinates the covert activity in the region.
(17:38):
So that's in sync with the overt action being done
by the State Department. And so Henry Kissinger is a
very senior figure who looms large over the CI's evolution
in the twentieth century. In the year two thousand, he
wrote a book, and the final chapter of the book
includes a blueprint for the twenty first century, and he
talks about the importance of humanitarian interventions as a modality
(18:05):
to project US soft power because of its success in
the nineteen nineties in giving US intelligence access to places
they would not have access to if they did it
under the banner of national security or military intervention. And
he gives the examples of Cuba, Haiti, several African countries,
(18:28):
and Yugoslavia, basically talking about how these public health structure hubs,
and these poverty relief programs and these all these different
humanitarian expenditures of USAID money to build up institutions in
foreign countries ostensibly to help the poor or the sick,
(18:50):
were an extremely effective method to gain political control over
seven to ten different countries over the nineteen nineties, and
Henry Kissinger called for radical upscaling of that capacity in
the twenty first century in order to continue the momentum
they just had overthrowing the government of Yugoslavia and balkanizing
(19:12):
Yugoslavia into Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovnia, Kosovo, and so Doctor Peter
Hotez actually started out his career as a Hotes who
would become this very senior, almost spokesman figure during the
COVID era. Folks, remember he's the kind of crazy doctor
(19:33):
with the frizzy hair and the bow tie, who's sort
of like a discount Bill Ny, the science guy but
for the Pentagon and working out of this strange lab
at Baylor University, and the guy who wrote a whole
book about how anti vaxers are effectively should be treated
like terrorists and that no one should be able should
(19:55):
be debating anti COVID or vaccine skeptical or lockdown skeptics
on Joe Rogan. He famously turned down all these debate
requests because he was afraid of getting blown out but
his covers. He didn't want to legitimize someone. Well, in
two thousand and four, this is twenty years, I guess,
fifteen years before COVID broke out. In two thousand and four,
(20:16):
doctor Peter Hotez began writing a series of articles that
he called vaccines as Instruments of foreign policy, and everyone
can look this up. They're published on PubMed. He wrote
about five articles on this topic, and he specifically cites
Henry Kissinger's book in two thousand and he as a doctor,
(20:37):
as a medical professional, says, we need to double and
triple down on vaccine diplomacy because it's a useful instrument
of US statecraft to be able to project US soft
power into foreign countries by establishing a hub of influence
under cover of public health. He says, vaccines basically, whether
(20:59):
they work or not, they get you in the door.
You now have a US money pumping through the veins
of that economy. These institutions can then put pressure on
the local governments in the same way that Pfiser puts
pressure on our media ecosystem. Here are advertising networks, Pfiser
funds politicians. Once you get the money in and the
(21:21):
hubs of influence built up, then it doesn't really matter
if the vaccines work or not.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
They have a dual use.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
And so Peter Hotez wrote that in two thousand and four,
and then he continued to write about that topic for
the rest of his career, and he comes out as
the leading, you know, spokesman in many respects other than
Anthony Fauci himself in a handful of Little minis ours.
But then you see the strange role of the CIA
(21:50):
throughout all of COVID. You know that the Wuhan Lab
was actually funded to the tune of fifteen million dollars
by USAID, which is one of the most free CIA cutouts.
And we'll be talking I think about USA and some
of these other scandals. You had Avril Haines, who was
the deputy director of the CIA, who took part in
(22:11):
the Event to one pre planning exercise just two months
before COVID broke out. Avril Haynes, who is now Biden's
Director of National Intelligence. She was the deputy director of
the CIA, the number two of Obama's CIA, who gave
a whole panel dissertation at Event to one on the
(22:34):
importance of pre censoring anyone who on media or social
media who questioned the origins of this mystery outbreak. In
this hypothetical exercise about a coronavirus breaking out in China
in October twenty nineteen, two months before the breakout of
a coronavirus in China in December twenty nineteen that would
(22:57):
go on to be called COVID nineteen, you have the
initial censorship all being done by these CIA front groups
like Graphica, whose chief strategy officer worked for twenty five
years from the CIA, and who was incubated in the
Minerva Initiative, which is the US Department of Defense's Psychological
Operations Research Center. So that was the first organization to
(23:20):
begin censoring COVID nineteen narratives online. They started that work
right as the outbreak happened. December sixteenth, is one of
their own documents say they started doing their censorship work,
and so the whole thing was laced with CIA top
to bottom. Now it's unclear whether that was simply to
contain the scandal of a military generated coronavirus from these
(23:46):
the DARPA grants in twenty eighteen that created the capacity
for these fern cleavage sites and the jumping from that
to human But the fact is is the CIA is
all over that story, just like they were all over
the fake vaccine clinics in Pakistan and the fake HIV
clinics in Cuba. But it really begs the question of
(24:08):
when you look at the size of the public health sector,
that it's you know, most of US expenditures are spent
on public health. We have this vast apparatus in Africa,
this vast apparatus in Eastern Europe, this vast public health
apparatus in Central Asia, this vast public health apparatus in
the Western.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Hemisphere, in South America.
Speaker 4 (24:29):
How many if these are just the ones they got
busted for, and these are professional intelligence agencies and organizations
whose job is to hide this. If they've been busted twice,
are there two hundred of these that they haven't been
busted in? How much of the economy, how much of
the economic lifeblood is serving as a sort of protected
(24:51):
soft power influence for US intelligence?
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Are Okay, let's get to number two here.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
Se Well, sorry, last thing, if I can just get
this out. Donald Rumsfeld, who was George Bush's Secretary of Defense,
the head of the entire US military. What was he
doing right before he right before he became the head
of the Secretary of war, He was running he was
a pharmaceutical bro He was running Gilead. He was the
(25:22):
CEO of it, which is the same organization that would
come back with these COVID pharmaceutical treatments, and it was
run by Donald Rumsfeld. So once again it's the military
and medicine.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Let's go to number two.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Mike Cia creating a fake Twitter in Cuba.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
Wait what Yes, So this is another one of these
CI scandals during the Obama administration. And this one is
really amazing because it just speaks to so many different
levels of the Truman show that can get created around
your life where you think everyone you meet is you know,
your your friend or a random stranger, when it's you know,
(26:09):
and indeed an entire structure around you can be a
careful creation of US operations. So what happened in the
Zunzanio scandal is Cuba had banned Twitter in the in
the late two thousands because they were concerned that it
(26:31):
was that US social media was a tool of the
US state in order to turn Cubans against their government. Now,
by the way, I don't like the Cuban government. I'm
as anti communist as they come. This is not to
you know, when when I break down this scandal, This
is not to be sympathetic to to you know, to
communist governments. This is only so that you sort of
(26:54):
kyc you sort of know your customer when it comes
to what the CIA and its spinouts do. So in
twenty eleven, the Arab Spring was well underway where the
US was in the process of using Twitter and Facebook
(27:15):
to topple governments around the world, particularly Middle East North Africa.
We were out five years into this CIA State Department
Digital Diplomacy Initiative, which was this idea that you could
run CIA operations not just out of US embassies and
consulates and CI station houses, but that you could actually
(27:36):
run operations online through social media. Because everyone you want
to recruit for street protests or to raid the presidential
palace in a color revolution could be recruited on Facebook
and could be mobilized in Twitter hashtags, or could be
mobilized through viral YouTube videos.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
And so, while the Arab.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
Spring was going on into Asia and Egypt, and this
was extremely successful in Middle East North Africa, the State
Department it got the brilliant idea that they could bring
the they could bring about a Cuban spring in Cuba
if only they could get US social media platforms into
the country. And so what the CIA did through USAID
(28:22):
is they took these humanitarian relief funds that were earmarked
by USAID for Pakistan and they redirected them through a
byzantine set of shell companies to create to be delegated
to this private sector CIA contractor called Creative Artists Creative
(28:44):
Artists International or Creative Associates International CII, not CIA CII,
And what CII did under the direction of USAID and
the Central Intelligence Agency is they created a direct Twitter knockoff,
literally copied the exact user interface of Twitter. At one
(29:06):
point in the scandal, the State Department actually directly reached
out to Jack Dorsey to help co run it. Jack
Dorsey reportedly declined, and so they descended on Cuba, using
the front of being two music promoters at Creative Associates
International to convince Cuban nationals to run this in order
(29:31):
to evade the scrutiny of the Cuban government, so it
looked like it was a Cuban social media company set
up by Cubans rather than a CIA operation using fundsier
mark for Pakistan, then transferred to a CIA contractor and
then transferred to friendly Cubans in Cuba. And so Zunzanio
(29:54):
means means mocking bird or means hummingbird. So basically it's
the took the Twitter bird idea. They took you know,
the like button, the retweet button, They took the same
user interface, and they recruited about sixty thousand Cubans onto
this platform and the documents I can actually read some
of the direct quotes here because it's just incredibly shocking
(30:17):
how how devious this whole thing went down. So there
was a surveillance dimension to this CIA social media Twitter knockoff,
where they collected a vast database I'm reading a direct quote,
A vast database of Cubans, Ands and Neo subscribers, including
their age, gender, and receptiveness and political tendencies to be
(30:42):
built in the future. And this is according to our
These these leaked documents that you can find online. These
are pup these are now you know, leaked USA documents.
They created a database of every user's political tendencies for
political purposes in order to use that data to micro
(31:03):
target efforts towards anti and pro government users.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
So basically they.
Speaker 4 (31:10):
Segmented all the users according to data to how receptive
each user would be to programming and algorithms in their
news feed to form what they called smart mobs, that is,
to form rental riots if they were given programming to
meet up and join this protest. And so they initially
(31:34):
lulled people to the platform the way they got sixty
thousand users in the first place in Cuba is according
to the USA documents, is they started with non controversial
content such as sports, music and hurricane updates to build
up subscribers, and then introduced political messaging to encourage smart
mobs and anti government dissent. So basically they knew that
(31:58):
if the algorithms favored overthrowing the government from Jump Street,
nobody would join. But if they safely got hundreds of thousands,
which was their goal of people to the platform, and
then once they were already on and locked in and
dependent on it, they switched up the algorithms to promote
anti government sentiment, to get them to hate their government,
(32:21):
to get them to take to the streets and riot
that they'd be locked in in a captive audience to
do so. So if they're doing that with Cuban Twitter,
I think this goes a long way towards explaining the
era we just went through with the massive CIA infiltration
(32:42):
of actual Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, where a huge
chunk of the trust and safety team in all three
of the US major social media companies came to be
infiltrated by folks with direct ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
All Right, Finally, I have to ask before I let
you go for the grand finale, what did they do
in Bangladesh?
Speaker 3 (33:08):
Well, this is incredible.
Speaker 4 (33:09):
So this just happened three months ago, So earlier this year,
the US overthrew the government of Bangladesh. There was a
long standing prime minister named Sheik Hasina, who was a
very popular, democratically elected prime minister who was basically at
(33:30):
political war with the United States. She refused to allow
the US to build a military base in Bangladesh. She
sort of was refusing to allow Bangladesh to be used
for soft power projection purposes by the US into China
and India. And there were several conflicts with Meandmark and
neighboring regions. So the US wanted regime change. If there's
(33:54):
so many components of this story, it's it's mind boggling.
But actively the longest short of it is in twenty eighteen,
the CIA, USAID, and the US State Department all provided
tens of millions of dollars to the political opposition group
called the Bangladesh National Party the BNP in order to
(34:18):
win the election against Hassina, the prime minister. But they lost,
and they lost very badly. It was a very lopsided,
one sided election, and so the State Department was very
dejected about losing the twenty eighteen election. So a CIA
cutout called the International Republican Institute the IRI, this was
(34:38):
set up. The IRI is the GOP offshoot of the
National Down for Democracy NED. NED was the central lynchpin
of the nineteen eighty three reorganization of the CIA. It
was conceived in William Casey's office, that was the CIA
director under Ronald Reagan in order to be able to
(34:59):
fund groups backed by the CIA without them getting direct
funding from the CIA. They'd be funded instead by the
IRI and the NDI, which is the DNC offshoot of
the nd So this.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Is a bourne died in the wole CIA cut out.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
Literally its existence is owed to a letter from the
CIA director to set them up as a means to
funnel money to CI back groups without having the CIA
claim the CIA's direct fingerprints on it. So the IRI
submitted a memo to the State Department in twenty eighteen.
They called it a baseline assessment. And this is a
(35:36):
standard thing that's done when US intelligence is trying to
get the lay of the land in a region, for
how to run an operation, they do a baseline assessment
of all the assets that they have in the region
that can be instrumentalized in an operation. And in their
baseline assessment, they wrote that it would be politically and
feasible for BNP to win the next election organically, that is,
(35:59):
they simply didn't have the votes. They lost too badly
in this previous election.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
So they needed.
Speaker 4 (36:04):
Instead a strategy to quote destabilize Bangladesh politics and to
overthrow it in a color revolution through street protests combined
with poaching members of the Bangladeshi military to coop the
Prime Minister out of office.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
But there's a cute trick here that they.
Speaker 4 (36:22):
Pulled, which is so they in this baseline assessment, they
surveyed all the different groups within Bangladesh who hated the
government that was just elected. And what they settled on
were two racial minority groups in Bangladesh.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
The LGBTQ community and.
Speaker 4 (36:39):
Student groups at Bangladeshi universities who primarily listened to music
like hip hop and rap. And so what the IRA
the CIA cutout then proceeded to do over the next
over the next six years, was built up a network
of two hundred and seventy assets across the l LGBT community,
(37:01):
across the Bangladeshi rap and hip hop community, and across
the community leaders of these two racial ethnic groups in
order to drive up anti government dissatisfaction and get them
to take to the streets in protests hundreds of thousands
of people strong in mostly peaceful protests that included violence, arson, riots,
(37:27):
and attacks on police in order to throw shake Casena
out of office, which they successfully did. They literally raided
the presidential palace. She had to flee the country in
a helicopter. She was replaced by a guy who was
a former Clinton Global Initiative fellow who Sheaike Hasina. The
(37:49):
ousted Prime Minister had tried to indict on corruption probes
and was only stopped when then Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton personally threatened to have the IRS it her son,
who is living in the.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
US if she proceeded with that.
Speaker 4 (38:03):
But I just want to read just before we sign
off on this, I want to read a few direct
quotes from these leaked documents from the IRI about their
involvement in the CIA running the rap game in Bangladesh.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
This is incredible.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
I'm now reading the direct grants that were given in
twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. So here is a
Bangladeshi hip hop artist named Tofiki Ahmed, and here is
what Iri writes to the State Department. Tofiki Ahmed released
the first of two music videos under the IRIS Small
Grants program for his song Tooy Perish which means you
(38:40):
Can Do It, which targets youth in Bangladesh with a
message of perseverance in difficult times and encourages them in
every possible way, including protests and street movements. The video
was produced by IRI and released on YouTube and Facebook.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Then they have a.
Speaker 4 (38:59):
Second entry another grant another US taxpayer money distribution to
rappers in Bangladesh to Overthrow the government.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
To vik Achmed.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
Released his second music video titled Dot E Da Kaar.
The song's lyrics are address a variety of social issues,
including poverty and workers' rights. The song was designed to
reveal social issues in Bangladesh and build up disappointment and
dissent to government so as to call for social and
(39:29):
political reforms. So the song was designed by the Central
Intelligence Agency to build up disappointment and dissent with the government.
They even include links to the music videos, which are
pretty hilarious, if I if I can say, but they
ended up recruiting eleven different hip hop artists, giving them,
putting them on CIA payroll, and then blaring them to
(39:52):
hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi students in a sort of
Derek Zulander style call to listen into this music and
take to the streets to overthrow their government. I should
note that the Obama administration CIA did the same thing
in Cuba with a rap group called the Santa Cedro Movement,
but this happened starting in the Trump era and then continued.
(40:14):
But it's just very funny also when you consider that
this is the IRI, which is the gop wing of
the CIA. Oh and their work with the LGBT community
was amazing as well. They spent US tax payer money
on transgender dance festivals in order to normalize within the
political opposition in Bangladesh. Because these these transgender and gay
(40:37):
groups were at the forefront of the street paramilitary activity,
they were effectively acting as a local antifund. So you
had the Republican CIA promoting transgender dance festivals with CIA
rap themes in order to do a BLM style overthrow
the government.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
That's you. You You are the best man. That was
a freaking wealth of information.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Thank you. Keep him on for another hour. I think
we should probably wrap up, don't you. We'll do that.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Next we have to bring the Central Intelligence Agency to heal.
And that gets very, very difficult, doesn't it, Because we're
talking about taking on an agency whose job, as we
just heard Mike Ben's layout, whose job has been to
(41:33):
destabilize governments regime change around the world. So we need
the government to take on the agency who is specially
trained to take on the government. I realize that creates
a big problem, but it can be done.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
What we need is a.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
House and Senate and president with the courage to do so,
because you cannot have a bunch of unelected spy chiefs
running the United States of America. And we most definitely
cannot have the civilian oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency
afraid to do oversight. It doesn't work that way. Otherwise
(42:12):
you might as well just hand them the keys to
the country. So going forward, we're going to need courage.
I think we can do it, do it again,
There's a great line in the movie The Good Shepherd.
I like that movie. No one else did.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
But it's a movie kind of about the formation of
the Central Intelligence Agency and the guy who's forming it.
He turns to somebody and he says, I really want
this agency to be America's eyes and ears, not its
heart and soul. But over time, Central Intelligence Agency, they've
(00:33):
gone way beyond their purview and in many ways they
have become the heart and soul of this country. So
we're about to dig into this. We're going to look
back on some of the scandals, and they're not all
from ancient times. Many of these are very recent. Let's
figure out exactly what this agency is and what they've
(00:54):
been doing, shall we.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Mike Ben's is going to join us to do that next.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Well, if you're going to talk about CIA scandals of
the CIA, I'm not sure that you could find a
better guest than my friend. Mike Ben's, executive director of
the Foundation for Freedom Online, is exposed so much it's
jaw dropping at this point in time. Okay, Mike, before
we get into the scandals, we have so destroyed the
(01:25):
intelligence operations in this country that people don't even really
understand what CIA is supposed to do.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
What are they supposed to do.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Well.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
The CIA is supposed to be a plausibly deniable support
organization for the US Department of State on national interest
grounds and the US Department of Defense on national security grounds,
which is a long way of saying that in nineteen
forty eight, when the rules based international order was set up,
(01:59):
we needed a way for the State Department to operate
a cloak and dagger plausibly deniable black ops shop in
order to do the sources of things that would cause
a diplomatic scandal if it turned out the US government
was responsible for. So the US government needed a way
to make things happen without looking like the US government
(02:21):
did it. And that's when it's State Department related, that's
usually on US economic grounds or political grounds. And when
the CIA work is related to military, it's usually involving
paramilitary groups or terrorist groups or other unseemly factions that
we are providing military support to.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
So there's both a political and.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
A military component to what the CIA is supposed to do.
The problem is is because they are a professional political
subversive organization literally set up to inaugurate organized political warfare.
That's the exact term that George Kennon used is nineteen
forty eight memo the inauguration of organized political warfare to
(03:04):
give the CIA its remit that political warfare can boomerang
back on Americans when the US foreign policy establishment thinks
that Americans are domestically going to vote for someone who
will undermine their preferred foreign policy agenda. That's what you
saw in the nineteen sixties when the CIA was playing
(03:25):
around at home to influence left wing groups to stop
the anti Vietnam War movement. That's what you're seeing today
as the CIA is working to basically do the same
thing to the right wing when it comes to the
anti war or the nationalist rather than globalist wing of
the Republican Party.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Now, nineteen forty eight to the sixties is not, by
any stretch of the imagination, a long period of time, Mike, So,
why did they face inward so quickly or did they
really just face inward from the very beginning.
Speaker 4 (04:01):
Well, you could argue that they did from the very beginning.
I think it was that the nineteen sixties is when
there really was a break in the bipartisan consensus when
it came to the construction of the American Empire. There
was a fair amount of optimism from the late nineteen
(04:23):
forties into the early nineteen sixties about the purpose of
American state craft and establishing America as the global hegemon
in the face of the Cold War with Russia. In
the nineteen sixties, the rise of the civil rights movement,
the rise of Third World people's movements, and anti imperialist movements,
(04:44):
also influenced to some degree by the popularity of Marxism
in US universities, led to a breaking of the Republican
Democrat consensus, as this ascendant coalition within the Democrats pushed
against US interventionalism around the world and pushed against the
(05:08):
war in Vietnam, and then that resulted in scandals during
the CI's history, Starting in the early nineteen sixties, there
was something called Operation Chaos, which was a big disaster
for the CIA when it was revealed the CIA was
personally intervening in campus politics by sponsoring groups like the
(05:29):
National Students Association to effectively bribe young people to write
counter propaganda against the harder left faction. The CI was
busted constructing front groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
where they were taking high level US musicians, writers, thought leaders, poets,
(05:50):
visual artists, musical artists into a sort of CIA artist club.
This included not just classical musicians, musicians, writers from high
level magazines, but also feminist thought leaders like Gloria Steinem,
and this was all. Gloria Steinem herself would later describe
(06:12):
her role in the CIA sponsored Congress or Cultural Freedom
as saying that the reason it was so important for
the CIA to focus on culture was because you can
think of culture as permanent politics, the kind of when
culture is established, it sets the boundaries for what politics
ken and can't do. And so a group like the CIA,
(06:32):
whose role is political subversion first and foremost, sets its
sights on control over the culture, which sets the bounds
for the politics. During that same period, in the nineteen
sixties and seventies, the CIA was busted in other scandals
like assassinations of foreign leaders. They assassinated the president of
Congo La Mumba, they assassinated Allende in Chile. They were
(06:57):
busted with constructing assassinations weapons like the heart attack gun
that was held up by Senator Frank Church and the
Church Committee hearings. They were busted in scandals like mk Ultra,
which involved effectively behavioral modification programs both at the individual
and at the group level to be able to control
the psychology of both individuals and political groups. All this
(07:21):
came to a head in nineteen seventy five. In nineteen
seventy six, during the Church Committee hearings, which established, for
the first time in US history, a Senate Intelligence Committee
and a House Intelligence Committee to be able to have
congressional oversight of the rogue CIA. Jimmy Carter rode to
power in nineteen seventy six on the back of all
(07:44):
this left wing resentment against the CIA. He went to
war with the CIA. He fired thirty percent of the
CIA's operations wing in a single night. Thirty percent in
a single night. It was called the Halloween massacre because
it was done on October thirty five. First that He
then crippled the CI's budget and put a CIA director
(08:04):
in Stansfeld Turner, who was basically like the left wing
cash Patel for the New Left Democrats, who basically put
huge bumper cars on what the CIA couldn't couldn't do
at the time. In the nineteen seventies, Bill Barr was
working for the CIA. Bill Barr would go on to
be the Attorney General of the United States twice, including
(08:28):
during Trump's term. Bill Barr wrote in his biography that
he had wanted to become He told his high school
guidance counselor that he wanted to run the CIA be
the director of the CIA when he grew up. He
then worked for the CIA directly out of college and
went to law school at George Washington University Night School.
(08:52):
He went to night law school while he worked for
the CIA, and he said that he only decided he
didn't want to run the CIA when Stansfeld under Jimmy
Carter took power and put the reins on what the
CIA couldn't do. Basically, as soon as Bill Barr encountered
a CIA leadership who wanted to restrain its cloak and
(09:14):
dagger dark arts powers, Bill Barr said he lost interest
in running the CIA at that point, which I think
is just kind of funny. But that then led to
Ronald Reagan's tenure in the early nineteen eighties. He of
course came to power on the back of the Iran
hostage situation, which the intelligence community in the US argued
would have been prevented if the CIA had had its
(09:36):
old powers back. So Ronald Reagan quickly went to work
trying to get the CIA's old powers back, but ran
into a Democrat controlled Congress who wouldn't let it happen.
So he then put the intelligence community through a reorganization
that we still lived through today, where he basically diffused
the CI's old powers into a pair of institutions, USAID
(09:58):
and the nash On Dama for Democracy, so that just
as the CIA was created to give a layer of
plausible deniability to the State Department USA, and the National
Dama for Democracy became the main plausible deniability layer for
the CIA, So it was pushed into this NGO layer.
(10:19):
And so I think several of the scandals we're going
to be talking about today are at that diffused layer
rather than directly at CIA. It's at the CIA liaised
rather than CIA run layer, which is where most of
CIA work happens nowadays.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Which brings us to the first of the scandals, the
fake vaccination Drive.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
What did they do?
Speaker 4 (10:44):
Yeah, this was a major international scandal. So in twenty eleven,
the CIA set up a hepatitis vaccine clinic, and they
set up a ring of these in Pakistan, and they
publicly advertised this to the Pastakistani people, that these clinics
existed in order to vaccinate the local population against hepatitis,
(11:10):
in the face of USA promulgated media that there was
a happatitis outbreak in Pakistan, so everyone needed to get vaccinated.
But it turns out it was actually these were all
fake vaccination clinics. The CIA was only luring people into
these vaccine clinics in order to collect their biometrics. Now,
the official story as bad as that is, as bad
(11:33):
as the official story is officially, when the CI got
busted in this, basically Pakistani intelligence noticed that there was
a lot of strange goings on at these vaccine clinics
and ultimately discovered that the whole thing was a US
intelligence operation that the US later confessed to to maintain
relations with the Pakistani government and publicly apologized for duping
(11:57):
everyone with these fake vaccine clinics. They said, the only
reason we did it is because we were looking for
Osama bin Laden and so we were collecting everyone's biometric
in DNA information. They were basically they had a blood
sample of the Osama bin Laden family because Osama bin
(12:21):
Lan's sister had recently died in Boston, so they collected
her blood and they tried to collect the basically the
blood of everyone in Pakistan to identified their way to
the up to the Obama, the Osama bin Laden family.
(12:41):
But of course, even that cover story, as scandalous as
that is, on its own, I think is quite a
whopper of a lie unto itself. You see, as this
was playing out, David Betraeus had announced a doctrine that
he called identity dominance, which was part of US counterinsurgency
doctrine that they were having a problem with being able
(13:05):
to contain gorilla, an anonymous group activity where people were
showing up in large crowds and protests, it was hard
to be able to pinpoint in targeted strikes all the
troublemakers in the area. So they wanted to collect the
biometric data and the biological data of what they said
(13:28):
was eighty five percent of the population in Iraq, in Syria,
in Pakistan, in all these Central Asian conflict zones. And
so while the US military had announced that they wanted
eighty five percent of the country's DNA and eyeballs so
that they would be able to have identity dominance and
(13:49):
pick out basically anyone in a crowd, be able to
instantly ID anyone who was a troublemaker. They were running
these vaccine clinics in order to to collect that, which
I think if they were busted in Pakistan, there's an
open question of how many vaccine clinics were playing this
(14:10):
role around the world. You know, there's a lot of
terrorist groups. There's terrorist groups in Africa, there's terrorist groups
in Eastern Europe, there's terrorist groups in South America. How
many of these public health facilities have been operating as
CIA fronts adjacent to that? In twenty fourteen, so that
was under the Obama administration. Also under the Obama administration,
(14:32):
in twenty fourteen, the CIA was busted running a fake
HIV AIDS clinic which was set up nominally to help
solve the HIV breakouts in Cuba, and it turned out
that those clinics were actually operating as a paramilitary transport
(14:57):
hub where the US was sending weapons and paramilitaries into
Cuba under the front of a aid's clinic. So you
see these public health facilities that are held in foreign
countries and yet they're operating as intelligence and paramilitary fronts,
(15:19):
because no one would think to look at a vaccine
clinic or an HIV clinic as a hub of CIA activity,
and so it's allowed to go on for years. But
how many other countries have they done this? And if
they've been caught there?
Speaker 2 (15:35):
I can't help with all this talk about vaccines, think
back to COVID. Did what they do have any impact
on how that propaganda was pushed here?
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Do you think, Well, it's it's hard not to see it.
And in fact, it's not just that it was the
same sort of playbook in a certain way, because what
came along with COVID vaccines was contact tracing every you know, everything,
(16:06):
all of your phone data, everything moving into the QR codes.
They can temporary, they can temporaneously rolled out at DHS,
under which TSA is tucked Mandatory eyeball scanning in domestic travel,
So the same way that US marines used to go
around in Iraq and Syria and Pakistan lifting up people's
(16:30):
eyeballs all over the country in order to snap a
picture so that the US military would have their eyeballs
in a database. So anytime they showed up on a
drone camera participating in a protest activity against US government operations.
They every single hostile, you know, adversary to the State
Department could be idd in terms of who they are
(16:52):
and where they live. The same thing did indeed come
home under the COVID era. There's only the question now
of what exactly they're doing with that data, but undeniably
they have collected it. But I would like to point
out one other aspect of this, which is that Henry
Kissinger in two thousand, who was the US Secretary of
State as well as National Security Advisor US Secretary of State,
(17:16):
is this sort of symphony orchestra conductor of CIA operations.
The CIA answers most directly to the State Department because
they are nominally it's the National Security Council, but because
they serve the State Department, they have to synchronize with
the State Department. So the State Department reads all the
CIA analyst memos and coordinates the covert activity in the region.
(17:38):
So that's in sync with the overt action being done
by the State Department. And so Henry Kissinger is a
very senior figure who looms large over the CI's evolution
in the twentieth century. In the year two thousand, he
wrote a book, and the final chapter of the book
includes a blueprint for the twenty first century, and he
talks about the importance of humanitarian interventions as a modality
(18:05):
to project US soft power because of its success in
the nineteen nineties in giving US intelligence access to places
they would not have access to if they did it
under the banner of national security or military intervention. And
he gives the examples of Cuba, Haiti, several African countries,
(18:28):
and Yugoslavia, basically talking about how these public health structure hubs,
and these poverty relief programs and these all these different
humanitarian expenditures of USAID money to build up institutions in
foreign countries ostensibly to help the poor or the sick,
(18:50):
were an extremely effective method to gain political control over
seven to ten different countries over the nineteen nineties, and
Henry Kissinger called for radical upscaling of that capacity in
the twenty first century in order to continue the momentum
they just had overthrowing the government of Yugoslavia and balkanizing
(19:12):
Yugoslavia into Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovnia, Kosovo, and so Doctor Peter
Hotez actually started out his career as a Hotes who
would become this very senior, almost spokesman figure during the
COVID era. Folks, remember he's the kind of crazy doctor
(19:33):
with the frizzy hair and the bow tie, who's sort
of like a discount Bill Ny, the science guy but
for the Pentagon and working out of this strange lab
at Baylor University, and the guy who wrote a whole
book about how anti vaxers are effectively should be treated
like terrorists and that no one should be able should
(19:55):
be debating anti COVID or vaccine skeptical or lockdown skeptics
on Joe Rogan. He famously turned down all these debate
requests because he was afraid of getting blown out but
his covers. He didn't want to legitimize someone. Well, in
two thousand and four, this is twenty years, I guess,
fifteen years before COVID broke out. In two thousand and four,
(20:16):
doctor Peter Hotez began writing a series of articles that
he called vaccines as Instruments of foreign policy, and everyone
can look this up. They're published on PubMed. He wrote
about five articles on this topic, and he specifically cites
Henry Kissinger's book in two thousand and he as a doctor,
(20:37):
as a medical professional, says, we need to double and
triple down on vaccine diplomacy because it's a useful instrument
of US statecraft to be able to project US soft
power into foreign countries by establishing a hub of influence
under cover of public health. He says, vaccines basically, whether
(20:59):
they work or not, they get you in the door.
You now have a US money pumping through the veins
of that economy. These institutions can then put pressure on
the local governments in the same way that Pfiser puts
pressure on our media ecosystem. Here are advertising networks, Pfiser
funds politicians. Once you get the money in and the
(21:21):
hubs of influence built up, then it doesn't really matter
if the vaccines work or not.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
They have a dual use.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
And so Peter Hotez wrote that in two thousand and four,
and then he continued to write about that topic for
the rest of his career, and he comes out as
the leading, you know, spokesman in many respects other than
Anthony Fauci himself in a handful of Little minis ours.
But then you see the strange role of the CIA
(21:50):
throughout all of COVID. You know that the Wuhan Lab
was actually funded to the tune of fifteen million dollars
by USAID, which is one of the most free CIA cutouts.
And we'll be talking I think about USA and some
of these other scandals. You had Avril Haines, who was
the deputy director of the CIA, who took part in
(22:11):
the Event to one pre planning exercise just two months
before COVID broke out. Avril Haynes, who is now Biden's
Director of National Intelligence. She was the deputy director of
the CIA, the number two of Obama's CIA, who gave
a whole panel dissertation at Event to one on the
(22:34):
importance of pre censoring anyone who on media or social
media who questioned the origins of this mystery outbreak. In
this hypothetical exercise about a coronavirus breaking out in China
in October twenty nineteen, two months before the breakout of
a coronavirus in China in December twenty nineteen that would
(22:57):
go on to be called COVID nineteen, you have the
initial censorship all being done by these CIA front groups
like Graphica, whose chief strategy officer worked for twenty five
years from the CIA, and who was incubated in the
Minerva Initiative, which is the US Department of Defense's Psychological
Operations Research Center. So that was the first organization to
(23:20):
begin censoring COVID nineteen narratives online. They started that work
right as the outbreak happened. December sixteenth, is one of
their own documents say they started doing their censorship work,
and so the whole thing was laced with CIA top
to bottom. Now it's unclear whether that was simply to
contain the scandal of a military generated coronavirus from these
(23:46):
the DARPA grants in twenty eighteen that created the capacity
for these fern cleavage sites and the jumping from that
to human But the fact is is the CIA is
all over that story, just like they were all over
the fake vaccine clinics in Pakistan and the fake HIV
clinics in Cuba. But it really begs the question of
(24:08):
when you look at the size of the public health sector,
that it's you know, most of US expenditures are spent
on public health. We have this vast apparatus in Africa,
this vast apparatus in Eastern Europe, this vast public health
apparatus in Central Asia, this vast public health apparatus in
the Western.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Hemisphere, in South America.
Speaker 4 (24:29):
How many if these are just the ones they got
busted for, and these are professional intelligence agencies and organizations
whose job is to hide this. If they've been busted twice,
are there two hundred of these that they haven't been
busted in? How much of the economy, how much of
the economic lifeblood is serving as a sort of protected
(24:51):
soft power influence for US intelligence?
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Are Okay, let's get to number two here.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
Se Well, sorry, last thing, if I can just get
this out. Donald Rumsfeld, who was George Bush's Secretary of Defense,
the head of the entire US military. What was he
doing right before he right before he became the head
of the Secretary of war, He was running he was
a pharmaceutical bro He was running Gilead. He was the
(25:22):
CEO of it, which is the same organization that would
come back with these COVID pharmaceutical treatments, and it was
run by Donald Rumsfeld. So once again it's the military
and medicine.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Let's go to number two.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Mike Cia creating a fake Twitter in Cuba.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
Wait what Yes, So this is another one of these
CI scandals during the Obama administration. And this one is
really amazing because it just speaks to so many different
levels of the Truman show that can get created around
your life where you think everyone you meet is you know,
your your friend or a random stranger, when it's you know,
(26:09):
and indeed an entire structure around you can be a
careful creation of US operations. So what happened in the
Zunzanio scandal is Cuba had banned Twitter in the in
the late two thousands because they were concerned that it
(26:31):
was that US social media was a tool of the
US state in order to turn Cubans against their government. Now,
by the way, I don't like the Cuban government. I'm
as anti communist as they come. This is not to
you know, when when I break down this scandal, This
is not to be sympathetic to to you know, to
communist governments. This is only so that you sort of
(26:54):
kyc you sort of know your customer when it comes
to what the CIA and its spinouts do. So in
twenty eleven, the Arab Spring was well underway where the
US was in the process of using Twitter and Facebook
(27:15):
to topple governments around the world, particularly Middle East North Africa.
We were out five years into this CIA State Department
Digital Diplomacy Initiative, which was this idea that you could
run CIA operations not just out of US embassies and
consulates and CI station houses, but that you could actually
(27:36):
run operations online through social media. Because everyone you want
to recruit for street protests or to raid the presidential
palace in a color revolution could be recruited on Facebook
and could be mobilized in Twitter hashtags, or could be
mobilized through viral YouTube videos.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
And so, while the Arab.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
Spring was going on into Asia and Egypt, and this
was extremely successful in Middle East North Africa, the State
Department it got the brilliant idea that they could bring
the they could bring about a Cuban spring in Cuba
if only they could get US social media platforms into
the country. And so what the CIA did through USAID
(28:22):
is they took these humanitarian relief funds that were earmarked
by USAID for Pakistan and they redirected them through a
byzantine set of shell companies to create to be delegated
to this private sector CIA contractor called Creative Artists Creative
(28:44):
Artists International or Creative Associates International CII, not CIA CII,
And what CII did under the direction of USAID and
the Central Intelligence Agency is they created a direct Twitter knockoff,
literally copied the exact user interface of Twitter. At one
(29:06):
point in the scandal, the State Department actually directly reached
out to Jack Dorsey to help co run it. Jack
Dorsey reportedly declined, and so they descended on Cuba, using
the front of being two music promoters at Creative Associates
International to convince Cuban nationals to run this in order
(29:31):
to evade the scrutiny of the Cuban government, so it
looked like it was a Cuban social media company set
up by Cubans rather than a CIA operation using fundsier
mark for Pakistan, then transferred to a CIA contractor and
then transferred to friendly Cubans in Cuba. And so Zunzanio
(29:54):
means means mocking bird or means hummingbird. So basically it's
the took the Twitter bird idea. They took you know,
the like button, the retweet button, They took the same
user interface, and they recruited about sixty thousand Cubans onto
this platform and the documents I can actually read some
of the direct quotes here because it's just incredibly shocking
(30:17):
how how devious this whole thing went down. So there
was a surveillance dimension to this CIA social media Twitter knockoff,
where they collected a vast database I'm reading a direct quote,
A vast database of Cubans, Ands and Neo subscribers, including
their age, gender, and receptiveness and political tendencies to be
(30:42):
built in the future. And this is according to our
These these leaked documents that you can find online. These
are pup these are now you know, leaked USA documents.
They created a database of every user's political tendencies for
political purposes in order to use that data to micro
(31:03):
target efforts towards anti and pro government users.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
So basically they.
Speaker 4 (31:10):
Segmented all the users according to data to how receptive
each user would be to programming and algorithms in their
news feed to form what they called smart mobs, that is,
to form rental riots if they were given programming to
meet up and join this protest. And so they initially
(31:34):
lulled people to the platform the way they got sixty
thousand users in the first place in Cuba is according
to the USA documents, is they started with non controversial
content such as sports, music and hurricane updates to build
up subscribers, and then introduced political messaging to encourage smart
mobs and anti government dissent. So basically they knew that
(31:58):
if the algorithms favored overthrowing the government from Jump Street,
nobody would join. But if they safely got hundreds of thousands,
which was their goal of people to the platform, and
then once they were already on and locked in and
dependent on it, they switched up the algorithms to promote
anti government sentiment, to get them to hate their government,
(32:21):
to get them to take to the streets and riot
that they'd be locked in in a captive audience to
do so. So if they're doing that with Cuban Twitter,
I think this goes a long way towards explaining the
era we just went through with the massive CIA infiltration
(32:42):
of actual Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, where a huge
chunk of the trust and safety team in all three
of the US major social media companies came to be
infiltrated by folks with direct ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
All Right, Finally, I have to ask before I let
you go for the grand finale, what did they do
in Bangladesh?
Speaker 3 (33:08):
Well, this is incredible.
Speaker 4 (33:09):
So this just happened three months ago, So earlier this year,
the US overthrew the government of Bangladesh. There was a
long standing prime minister named Sheik Hasina, who was a
very popular, democratically elected prime minister who was basically at
(33:30):
political war with the United States. She refused to allow
the US to build a military base in Bangladesh. She
sort of was refusing to allow Bangladesh to be used
for soft power projection purposes by the US into China
and India. And there were several conflicts with Meandmark and
neighboring regions. So the US wanted regime change. If there's
(33:54):
so many components of this story, it's it's mind boggling.
But actively the longest short of it is in twenty eighteen,
the CIA, USAID, and the US State Department all provided
tens of millions of dollars to the political opposition group
called the Bangladesh National Party the BNP in order to
(34:18):
win the election against Hassina, the prime minister. But they lost,
and they lost very badly. It was a very lopsided,
one sided election, and so the State Department was very
dejected about losing the twenty eighteen election. So a CIA
cutout called the International Republican Institute the IRI, this was
(34:38):
set up. The IRI is the GOP offshoot of the
National Down for Democracy NED. NED was the central lynchpin
of the nineteen eighty three reorganization of the CIA. It
was conceived in William Casey's office, that was the CIA
director under Ronald Reagan in order to be able to
(34:59):
fund groups backed by the CIA without them getting direct
funding from the CIA. They'd be funded instead by the
IRI and the NDI, which is the DNC offshoot of
the nd So this.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Is a bourne died in the wole CIA cut out.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
Literally its existence is owed to a letter from the
CIA director to set them up as a means to
funnel money to CI back groups without having the CIA
claim the CIA's direct fingerprints on it. So the IRI
submitted a memo to the State Department in twenty eighteen.
They called it a baseline assessment. And this is a
(35:36):
standard thing that's done when US intelligence is trying to
get the lay of the land in a region, for
how to run an operation, they do a baseline assessment
of all the assets that they have in the region
that can be instrumentalized in an operation. And in their
baseline assessment, they wrote that it would be politically and
feasible for BNP to win the next election organically, that is,
(35:59):
they simply didn't have the votes. They lost too badly
in this previous election.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
So they needed.
Speaker 4 (36:04):
Instead a strategy to quote destabilize Bangladesh politics and to
overthrow it in a color revolution through street protests combined
with poaching members of the Bangladeshi military to coop the
Prime Minister out of office.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
But there's a cute trick here that they.
Speaker 4 (36:22):
Pulled, which is so they in this baseline assessment, they
surveyed all the different groups within Bangladesh who hated the
government that was just elected. And what they settled on
were two racial minority groups in Bangladesh.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
The LGBTQ community and.
Speaker 4 (36:39):
Student groups at Bangladeshi universities who primarily listened to music
like hip hop and rap. And so what the IRA
the CIA cutout then proceeded to do over the next
over the next six years, was built up a network
of two hundred and seventy assets across the l LGBT community,
(37:01):
across the Bangladeshi rap and hip hop community, and across
the community leaders of these two racial ethnic groups in
order to drive up anti government dissatisfaction and get them
to take to the streets in protests hundreds of thousands
of people strong in mostly peaceful protests that included violence, arson, riots,
(37:27):
and attacks on police in order to throw shake Casena
out of office, which they successfully did. They literally raided
the presidential palace. She had to flee the country in
a helicopter. She was replaced by a guy who was
a former Clinton Global Initiative fellow who Sheaike Hasina. The
(37:49):
ousted Prime Minister had tried to indict on corruption probes
and was only stopped when then Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton personally threatened to have the IRS it her son,
who is living in the.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
US if she proceeded with that.
Speaker 4 (38:03):
But I just want to read just before we sign
off on this, I want to read a few direct
quotes from these leaked documents from the IRI about their
involvement in the CIA running the rap game in Bangladesh.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
This is incredible.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
I'm now reading the direct grants that were given in
twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. So here is a
Bangladeshi hip hop artist named Tofiki Ahmed, and here is
what Iri writes to the State Department. Tofiki Ahmed released
the first of two music videos under the IRIS Small
Grants program for his song Tooy Perish which means you
(38:40):
Can Do It, which targets youth in Bangladesh with a
message of perseverance in difficult times and encourages them in
every possible way, including protests and street movements. The video
was produced by IRI and released on YouTube and Facebook.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Then they have a.
Speaker 4 (38:59):
Second entry another grant another US taxpayer money distribution to
rappers in Bangladesh to Overthrow the government.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
To vik Achmed.
Speaker 4 (39:07):
Released his second music video titled Dot E Da Kaar.
The song's lyrics are address a variety of social issues,
including poverty and workers' rights. The song was designed to
reveal social issues in Bangladesh and build up disappointment and
dissent to government so as to call for social and
(39:29):
political reforms. So the song was designed by the Central
Intelligence Agency to build up disappointment and dissent with the government.
They even include links to the music videos, which are
pretty hilarious, if I if I can say, but they
ended up recruiting eleven different hip hop artists, giving them,
putting them on CIA payroll, and then blaring them to
(39:52):
hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi students in a sort of
Derek Zulander style call to listen into this music and
take to the streets to overthrow their government. I should
note that the Obama administration CIA did the same thing
in Cuba with a rap group called the Santa Cedro Movement,
but this happened starting in the Trump era and then continued.
(40:14):
But it's just very funny also when you consider that
this is the IRI, which is the gop wing of
the CIA. Oh and their work with the LGBT community
was amazing as well. They spent US tax payer money
on transgender dance festivals in order to normalize within the
political opposition in Bangladesh. Because these these transgender and gay
(40:37):
groups were at the forefront of the street paramilitary activity,
they were effectively acting as a local antifund. So you
had the Republican CIA promoting transgender dance festivals with CIA
rap themes in order to do a BLM style overthrow
the government.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
That's you. You You are the best man. That was
a freaking wealth of information.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Thank you. Keep him on for another hour. I think
we should probably wrap up, don't you. We'll do that.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Next we have to bring the Central Intelligence Agency to heal.
And that gets very, very difficult, doesn't it, Because we're
talking about taking on an agency whose job, as we
just heard Mike Ben's layout, whose job has been to
(41:33):
destabilize governments regime change around the world. So we need
the government to take on the agency who is specially
trained to take on the government. I realize that creates
a big problem, but it can be done.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
What we need is a.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
House and Senate and president with the courage to do so,
because you cannot have a bunch of unelected spy chiefs
running the United States of America. And we most definitely
cannot have the civilian oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency
afraid to do oversight. It doesn't work that way. Otherwise
(42:12):
you might as well just hand them the keys to
the country. So going forward, we're going to need courage.
I think we can do it, do it again,
Host
Jesse Kelly
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