Jeff Nyquist and I talk about infiltrations of the highest magnitude in Britain and in older British networks in the US that still exist.
Transcript:
Sprecher 1
Hey, this is Jeff Nyquist. I’m with Alex Benesch. We’re doing another edition of Friends and Enemies talking about espionage, spying, grand strategy, and the sociology of the post-Cold War Cold War. How is it going, Alex?
Sprecher 2
Oh, I’m good. I’m good. How are you?
Sprecher 1
I saw you did a piece on Lord Mountbatten about how there’s really serious reasons to believe that Mountbatten had been compromised by Soviet intelligence. Maybe we could start talking about how British aristocrats and big shots were vulnerable to Soviet recruitment. Blackmail going back to the end of World War Two. How does that work?
Sprecher 2
Well, it’s it’s one of the scariest things, I guess. I mean, people obviously know about, let’s say, your standard moles in high places such as the Cambridge guys, and they could cause massive damage. I mean, how many operations did Kim Philby give away? And these were operations where commandos were trained to then move back into the Soviet bloc, trying to stir up trouble for the communists. And there were so many operations and they all got blown because of this one guy. And then there were these other guys. And what happens is if you have several moles, they can protect themselves and they also can protect each other. So, for example, you hear there is a defector coming from the Soviet Union. So you can just try to intercept the guy, warn the Soviets so they can murder the guy.
And so especially in Britain, this became a large problem because of the way they handled intelligence and the way they assign trust to a person. So there were some really high ranking jobs above MI5 and MI6, jobs that did not have even a formal vetting process. So if you come from a certain family and the family goes back a long time and all this sort of stuff, you just got the job and and so there were no questions asked.
And this system seemed to work quite well against the Nazis. And so this is kind of where the modern the modern reputation came from of British intelligence, because Germany was thoroughly infiltrated. And this there will be quite a bit of there was quite a bit of success there. Well, I mean, it shouldn’t have been that complicated, mind you, because there was so many aristocratic people in in Nazi Germany, high ranking aristocrats who had even joined the Nazi Party and were doing important work, such as communicating, facilitating communication between the Nazis and the Italians, for example, like the Italian king and Mussolini.
And so if you have if Britain is at war with Germany and there’s all these relatives running around in Germany, that makes intelligence work quite a bit easier. And so this is how the British did intelligence. But when, you know, the Kim Philby’s happened blond Burgess McLean and all the others, this caused quite a stir. And initially people found these silly excuses in Britain.
So, for example, with the atomic spies, the notion was that people like close folks were foreigners because they originally came from Germany and they were, you know, nerds and scientists. They were not regarded as true Brits. So this was the excuse. These were not really Brits, so we shouldn’t have trusted them. But when the defection happened of I think it was Burgess and one of the others when they just disappeared.
Sprecher 1
McLean, wasn’t it?
Sprecher 2
Yeah, when they just disappeared. This caused quite a bit of shock in Whitehall and there was, there were some internal investigations, but not, not like what you would have expected after an intelligence disaster such as this.
Sprecher 1
And Philby did come under suspicion and ended up, you know, losing his fast track, that being the head of MI6.
Sprecher 2
Yeah.
Sprecher 1
But but he did so suspicion and it actually he did warn them. Yeah we know now that he warned them but at the time it was only suspected that he warned them although top people in the CIA came to believe one of the more famous CIA guys came to absolutely believe that Philby had warned and the CIA actually knew more about Philby and and really were a little upset with the British that they didn’t arrest Philby.
Sprecher 1
Mm.
Sprecher 2
So then you move up the ranks, you move up the ranks of moles, and then you end up with people like Hollis e MI5, MI5 director, a man who should never even have joined the MI5 in the first place because he was so unqualified. And everybody was was just wondering, why is this guy getting these promotions and why did he become the director?
Sprecher 2
And even when these intelligence failures happened, he just maintained his career so well.
Sprecher 1
We should also mention that that the prime minister of Britain, Harold Wilson, was and this is part of the spy catcher scandal, was basically accused or it was suggested that he was a Soviet mole. And part of it was information that came from Anatoly Gillinson, who defected in December of 1961 from the Soviet KGB residency in in Helsinki, Finland.
Sprecher 1
And one of the things part of some of the information that Glissant came with was that there was going to be an assassination assassination in Great Britain, where a leader of a political party was going to be murdered so that a Soviet agent could take charge of that party. And of course, almost like clockwork, you had the death of the head of the Labor Party and and Wilson, Harold Wilson moved up into that position and Wilson had these East Eastern Europe business connections.
Sprecher 1
And this was so if if Sir Roger Hollis is protecting it or promoted, he’s he’s also got people in the British Labor Party who are probably protecting him.
Sprecher 2
Right. So this is this is the problem we’re dealing with. So moles protecting moles. And so then we come to the next problem, which is in Britain, spies are crown servants. They’re not servants of the Prime Minister, they are crown servants. And in the early days of MI6 and MI5 and this this went on for quite a bit of time, you had some of these relationships between the, the, the royal family, which is quite large, much larger than people realize between these people and these directors of the intelligence agencies and and people of that sort of status.
Sprecher 2
And and so so then we got to learn, for example, in books such as The Secret Royals, we learned that Queen Elizabeth, for example, she had access to everything. She got these reports daily and this red of red box, and she could access anything and everything. And she also had access to American secrets because of these shared programs with the United States.
Sprecher 2
And so it was expected of her that she read these documents and then she either burns them or she returns them. And supposedly she was very nice and neat and tidy with those documents. But theoretically, she was able to share this information with her relatives. And, for example, the the infamous Lord Louis Mountbatten, he was the first sea lord.
Sprecher 2
He was the the Lord of the Admiralty. So he was he was running the Navy. And then he got promoted to the Supreme Allied Commander for South East Asia. So. So you have a family relation? It’s a family relationship, and it’s also an intelligence relationship. So standard rules of espionage apply. You can recruit anybody and you can put pressure on anybody.
Sprecher 2
So what happens is of let’s say, the communists, if if the communists recruit somebody from these very high ranking families. So you wouldn’t, in effect, create a giga mole who has potentially access to everything. And so, for example, in in the book War of the Windsors, you find more of the Windsors, you find quite a bit about Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Sprecher 2
I mean, things you don’t even most of the time you don’t even find on the Internet. So this is these were scandals scattered over decades. And most people have actually forgotten about them. But if Lord if Lord Louis Mountbatten and others were compromised, these people, such as Mountbatten, they would have had the power to install new moles or to protect other moles.
Sprecher 2
So this is kind of a an ongoing problem. It’s entropy. So we’re talking about especially the the beginning of Naito is one of Mountbatten’s, one of the people Mountbatten was close to Baron is May became the first secretary general of NATO. So we’re talking about a problem that most likely persists to this very day. And now it’s more important than ever that that that NATO is able to defend the Western world and potentially more than the Western world.
Sprecher 2
So if NATO’s compromised, we have a serious problem. So this could shift the power balance globally, even though the West has the West has certain advantages in production and technology and and business. But if the West is compromised, this could shift the power balance. And so so there are several categories of compromising material. Mountbatten. Mountbatten was a homosexual, allegedly.
Sprecher 2
He was also a pedophile. He had quite a bit of communist contacts. And he also had another special role which was supposed to be very, very secret, which is a job he inherited from Prince George, the Duke of Kent. And this particular job was to manage the secret communication between the the British nobility, between the British nobility and their close relatives in Germany.
Sprecher 2
And that meant Nazi Germany. So for people who don’t know these, we’re talking about family clusters and they are really, really large, larger than most people actually realize. And and so this so for example, this the person who who managed this communication earlier, Prince George, the Duke of Kent, he was the son of King George, the Fifth and Queen Mary.
Sprecher 2
His brothers were kings. Edward the eighth and George the sixth. And so the family relations extended not only to Germany, but also to Denmark and previously to Czarist Russia. And so this is of course, this is.
Sprecher 1
Also related to the royal family in Greece as well.
Sprecher 2
Exactly. And it’s because the families because these family clusters are so large. This introduces the next problem, because there was there were quite a bit of romanoffs who left Russia and settled in Europe. And so the question is how many of those people got compromised potentially, because if you are an aristocrat, you have all these kind of options, you get all kinds of access, you know, everybody who was important.
Sprecher 2
And this is also something that needs to be looked at further in the future.
Sprecher 1
And the Russian special services are extra interested in you because you could be a locus for opposition to the Russian or Soviet regime.
Sprecher 2
Exactly. I mean, when when the so-called whites, when the so-called whites were fleeing Russia, it’s known that the whites were severely, severely infiltrated. So it’s quite the extended spy war back in the day.
Sprecher 1
Yes. So I make the point that anything that is an enemy of Russia, for example, immediately becomes a magnet for Russian agents to infiltrate.
Sprecher 2
Yeah.
Sprecher 1
So if you or I were to set up a shingle and say we’re we’re going to start a a movement to change Russia, we would be flooded with people knocking at our door who would be Russian agents trying to get in at the ground floor.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. I mean, if you if you were part of this Romanoff family, that meant you were from the Schleswig-Holstein family in Hessen. So you had these connections, you looked like a German and you looked like a Brit and you looked like an American. And some of these some of these Romanoff stayed is spread around quite a bit. And so Prince George died in a plane accident in 1942.
Sprecher 2
After his death, Mountbatten took over the secret channels took over the secret channels to.
Sprecher 1
Was that this is, by the way, considered suspicious by anyone?
Sprecher 2
I have not looked into that. That’s closely. I mean, we know what happened to Mountbatten later, which, you know, very people remember what happened to Mountbatten in the end. So it is this should be looked at now.
Sprecher 1
That was now I’m remembering because I read it in the newspapers. Is it as a kid? I think it was what was it, around 1971. So yeah. Blown up. Correct them. Blown up in a he was in a boat. Correct. Of some kind that got blown up. It’s called Idiot. Am I remembering that right.
Sprecher 2
I think it was, it was quite small and he was, he was repeatedly vacationing there or moving around and he got, he got warnings. He he was warned that he should switch his routine, but he didn’t. And yeah, he got blown up.
Sprecher 1
And it was supposedly the Irish Republican Army that killed him. Is that right?
Sprecher 2
Correct.
Sprecher 1
That’s correct, yes. Okay.
Sprecher 2
So, Prince, that’s a long memory.
Sprecher 1
Yeah.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. So this Prince George dies in this plane accident, and then Mountbatten. Mountbatten took over the secret channels to relatives in Germany during the Second World War, including Philip of Hesse and Castle, who had already joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and took on diplomatic tasks for Hitler. A shocking number of high nobility were in the Nazi Party and had all kinds of all kinds of jobs there.
Sprecher 2
And Philip of Hessen was also the son in law of the Italian king, which is interesting. And he undertook secret diplomacy between the Nazis and Benito Mussolini. And I think in 2009, the London Guardian reported about some new information that came to light about Benito Mussolini. In fact, in his early days, he worked for British intelligence.
Sprecher 1
Mussolini worked for British intelligence. Now, this is when he was a journalist.
Sprecher 2
When he was a journalist. Exactly. He was for.
Sprecher 1
World War One.
Sprecher 2
I don’t exactly remember the year, but it was I think the report was in The London Guardian in 2009. So if you look if you look up the London Guardian and and Mussolini and you find it quite, quite fast. So. Well, the story.
Sprecher 1
Was that he was at one time a marxist, wasn’t he?
Sprecher 2
And he he did some of some physical operations as well. I mean, he had people, I think, beating up other people. And so it was not just information stuff you did, but it was also physical operations. And he took money from the Brits in his early days. And of course, we don’t know how long this relationship actually continued.
Sprecher 1
And so and of course, Victor Emmanuel, the third was the king of Italy. So this aristocrat you’re talking about was the son in law of the king of Italy.
Sprecher 2
Mm hmm.
Sprecher 1
Right. And of course, just to clarify for people, when Benito Mussolini was the prime minister of Italy and Italy did have a king, Victor Emmanuel, the third the time. And of course, the the you had you know, Italy was a monarchy like Great Britain. Only Mussolini was kind of permanently in power there after his march on Rome.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. I mean, I did visit San Marino in Europe where you find this basically there’s old castle, which is now a museum. And this goes back to the conquering of Italy or the, as they call it, the unification of Italy. And they have a, uh, they’re very grateful for American guns at the time, which they received. And there was also British, British help in getting that done so that this is all, ah, this relationship goes back.
Sprecher 1
Um, a lot of fighting in Italy during World War Two. The Americans invaded Italy, the Germans invaded Italy. So you had three armies in Italy fighting and the Italians were kind of on both sides at different times.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. And one of the one of the, one of the two guys, either Giuseppe Mazzini or Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of them was in contact with Karl Marx. They were exchanging letters in the past.
Sprecher 1
And that was the Roman Republic of, of, of those guys was what, what were the remind us the years was that the 1860s or seventies. When was that.
Sprecher 2
I don’t quite remember exactly when it was, It was the, the, the unification as they called it, of Italy. And and so the French had to withdraw their troops and because they were busy, I think they were busy against the Germans at the time. The French were busy with the Germans. And so.
Sprecher 1
During the Franco-Prussian War.
Sprecher 2
I think it was around that time. So the French, I think the French had to withdraw the troops. And so the unification of Italy took place with Mazzini and, and Garibaldi and.
Sprecher 1
Now, now the actual unification of Italy was the Piedmont. Sardinia thing with the the family of Victor Emmanuel. Right. That. Yes. What year was that. I’m trying to that was in the 1870s tour. Was it in the eighties.
Sprecher 2
I don’t remember exactly the year. I mean, I did I wrote about this once, once in the past, and I actually visited San Marino and took some video of some of the exhibits they have there. And and so this was sort of a weird dad, this this weird secret society was called the Carbonara. It was kind of a mix between, I don’t know, a weird type of Freemasonry mixed with socialist elements.
Sprecher 2
And just just everything everything was was in there. And so this excuse is kind of how far back this, this whole thing goes, you know, with the aristocracy. And of.
Sprecher 1
Course, Italy ultimately was not united as a republic. It was united as a monarchy, which makes a kind of difference. And so so Italy and then Italy, World War One, just to make it clear, Italy was allied with Britain and France, the intent in World War One, although in Italy didn’t enter the war, you know, when all the other countries did.
Sprecher 1
Italy had supposedly the Germans and the Austrians thought that Italy was on their side. But Italy had some kind of double set of arrangements. So Italy kind of stayed out of the war and then entered the war against Germany and Austria later on. Yeah. And of course suffered a terrible, defeated Chaparro pass.
Sprecher 2
There’s even a figure of speech in German. That’s a figure of speech in German. It’s called toilers. The tomato that means is loyal tomato. It’s a sort of a derogatory term. It’s a derogatory term for Italians. So because of all this backstory. And so, yeah.
Sprecher 1
And it’s funny, in in both world wars, the Italians were thought by the Germans to be on their side. There was a joke you probably heard it that the Russian was told in that among German military officers and generals, Hitler is told that Italy is about to end of the war. And he says send depends on division and know my fear.
Sprecher 1
They’re on our side. Oh, my God. Sent send ten Panzer divisions. Yeah, because it’s worse if Italy’s on your side because you.
Sprecher 2
Run and there’s there’s some there’s also some back story which was commented on by the German tank. German tank Commander Hormel, the infamous guy because he was he was relying on on supplies from Italy and support from Italy. And there was all sorts of strange stuff going on back then.
Sprecher 1
So something he the Italian navy was for the listeners. And in this point in the war, Italy entered the war when France was capitulating in 1940 because Mussolini thought, oh, gosh, Hitler’s going to win. And Mussolini had previously told Hitler he would he would be on his side in the war, but he stayed out because he thought Hitler was maybe going to lose.
Sprecher 1
But when Hitler looked like he was winning, Mussolini didn’t want to miss out on the goodies. So he declared war on Britain and France in like, what was it, June of 1940, June or July. And so Italy enters the war and of course, Italy has Libya as a colony. And there’s the Italian eighth army is in was it eighth army?
Sprecher 1
Italy had an army in Libya. And of course, Libya is next to Egypt, where Britain had forces. And of course, Italy had a significant navy in World War two. And they immediately was the Italian army was defeated when it tried to invade Egypt in late, late 1940. And they went running all the way back to Tripoli. And the British were chasing them the whole way.
Sprecher 1
In the end, they were crying for help. And Hitler sent Rommel with the Africa Corps to help. And of course, but they had to bring the supplies to Africa Corps by this island called Malta, which the British used to attack the Italian supply convoys supporting the Africa Corps and the Italian army there. And so. So go ahead. So what were you going to say about Rommel?
Sprecher 2
Uh, well, he he did mention these shenanigans with the supply lines and the Italians and all this weird stuff that was going on, and Rommel was from there was never an intelligence guy. I mean, he did have quite. You did have some talent with military intelligence scoping on the battlefield and so on. But he was.
Sprecher 1
He was his own pilot. He would fly up over the battlefield and take a look around. So he would sometimes direct his troops from the air. He was pretty. Yeah.
Sprecher 2
On. Yeah. But you also had his blunders. I mean, there was this one anecdote where where you almost got caught by the British, which would have been disastrous for him. He I mean, he was he was traveling he was traveling in these special vehicles that were originally British vehicles. I think they were like, imagine it as an armored RV.
Sprecher 2
So he had one of these, I think. Yeah, even three of those. And so one at one point during the night, he was using this vehicle for a sort of a unofficial expedition. He was trying to I think it was he was crossing the border to Egypt at time. I think it was Egypt. And so he found a spot where he could cross during the night and he wanted to scope out the area and then return in the darkness, you know, return back home.
Sprecher 2
But on the way back, they couldn’t find the spot to to cross back into safer territory. So at some point they decided to call it a night and try to get some sleep. And so in the morning they looked out out the windows of this thing and they noticed British troops outside. You know, it’s just in, you know, a certain distance.
Sprecher 2
But it was was viewing distance. And so the British thought this was one of their own vehicles because nobody else had those vehicles. Right. So they just thought this was no big deal and they didn’t notice the the sprayed on symbol of the Africa corps. So they just went right past it. And so when it was light, Rommel and his guys, they could just drive back across the border.
Sprecher 2
So this was sort of the craziness that was going on at the time. And so Hitler Hitler had this double system of diplomacy. Now, German German diplomacy has always been aristocratic. I mean, even to this day. I mean, people think this ended at some point. But no, I mean, even even after World War Two, German diplomacy was pretty much in the hands of the aristocracy.
Sprecher 2
But this double system that Hitler tried to use was he also had these very, very high level aristocrats. And so he thought he could use them for an additional secret layer of correspondence with the British and other nations. And so an intelligence professional would not have done it this way because of the loyalty issue, because you never know who was playing really for what side.
Sprecher 2
If you use people from the house of Hessen, for example, but Hitler still still tried trying to do it that way. And yeah, so then so then the war is over, the war’s over, and the British royal couple posed in countless television reports. But there was a tricky problem of this the secret secret communications from the war period.
Sprecher 2
They were they were pretty, pretty serious. And so the American.
Sprecher 1
And what do you mean, serious? So there was there was back and forth information going back and forth between the German relatives and the English relatives that would have compromised both sets of aristocrats.
Sprecher 2
Exactly. So there was there were all kinds of shenanigans going on. And for example, for example, that that plan which or that idea that Hitler had, he wanted he wanted to influence the next king of Britain. Hitler wanted had a specific idea who was going to be the next king of Britain, and he wanted to be a puppet king or something of some sort.
Sprecher 2
And so there were all these kind of ideas going around and secret negotiations and and you have to expect that the aristocracy was heavily spying against the Nazis and they were relaying information to Britain. And so all this correspond and it was lying around on German territory, I mean, boxes full of correspondence, of correspondence. And this was not supposed to fall into the hands of the occupying forces.
Sprecher 2
You know, the British soldiers, the French, the American, the Americans soldiers. So it became essential for them to go to Germany and collect these documents and bring them back to Britain. This was also a meant to to do sort of an analysis on on all these operations. So these documents, they were not supposed to be burned in Germany.
Sprecher 2
There was supposed to be transported back to Britain for further evaluation. And so, yeah, this this this material, this is some correspondence also included details about Rudolf Hess, this strange journey by plane to England and the Duke of Windsor relationship with the Nazis. So yeah.
Sprecher 1
Now just a question. Your I think you’ve said this before and of course, this is a bit of big mystery. Hitler denied that he knew anything about his making this trip to to Great Britain, flying there and parachuting in Scotland. But you think Hitler knew about it, that he set his intention early?
Sprecher 2
It’s it’s highly likely. It’s it’s very likely. There were other connections, too, like the the household fur clan. And so they’ve all believed they had they had friends in high places in Britain. And so they wanted to cultivate not just these relationships and they were also well, the Nazis were planning well, the Nazis were hoping that the aristocracy would take over Britain again, so have full control and just have a puppet parliament of some sorts.
Sprecher 2
So this was kind of the Nazi idea and it.
Sprecher 1
Was a big attempt to influence or control the British government. I should note that.
Sprecher 2
By the way, before, if you will, before I forget it, this is one thing I almost forgot. I should have put this in the story when when when the Cambridge when the Cambridge traders were exposed, people tried to figure out what their motivation was. And one of the motivations was that for four of these these students at the time these students were looking at the way Britain was interacting with Nazi Germany.
Sprecher 2
And so at the time there was this big deception maneuver going on. So the British were the British were faking sympathies for the Nazis and doing this appeasement stuff, But this was all part of a big deception program. But this this university, this young university students like Cambridge at Cambridge, they didn’t know that they thought this is a big right wing conspiracy.
Sprecher 2
They thought, well, the the Britain may become fascist at some point or something of that sort. And of course, the Russians, the Russians, they used that. So the Russians so the Russian intelligence, the Russian intelligence approach was tailored for that. So they were telling these young kids, you don’t want Britain to be fascist in the future, do you?
Sprecher 2
This is a fascist world conspiracy. We have to stop it. We have to do something. Do you want to join a secret.
Sprecher 1
Group that works for Beazley? The British were simply manipulating the Nazis.
Sprecher 2
Exactly.
Sprecher 1
To hopefully to make them do what they wanted. And I should note that both Haynes Ling, a Hitler’s valet and SS bodyguard and and his chief secretary, Christoph Schroeder, both said in their memoirs that they believed Hitler. You know, they they knew he they saw his, you know, strong statements condemning Hesse and so on. But they both believed he’d said yes.
Sprecher 2
Yeah.
Sprecher 1
And And I think we’ve seen quilters book on this. I’ve looked at that, too. And I think there’s I think he said yes.
Sprecher 2
Yeah, yeah, that’s it did.
Sprecher 1
And I think that he he rued the day because I think he realized they had tricked him and Hitler was extremely put out with the Germans if you read I mean with the British because if you read a table talk he talks about having a Roman circus with a Churchill naked in a cage while he’s saying, Oh, Stalin’s a fine fellow.
Sprecher 1
So there was bitterness there on the part of Hitler who had initially been pro-British or at least pretended to be at the end of the war. And I think that Hitler’s tilting at the end of the war when he played the spoiler and let the Soviet army come in. I think there was some kind of I think I’ve said before, I think there was a deal, a secret deal at the end of the war between Hitler and and Stalin, which which fits in to this and to the use of the old right.
Sprecher 1
And anti-Semitism today traces back to that thing. I mean, what what is your impression on this?
Sprecher 2
You mean the the anti-Semitism aspect of it?
Sprecher 1
The anti-Semitism, the. All right. The connections between like the Golden Dawn party of being pro Putin and, you know, the Nazis in in South America, having to Russia and so on. I mean, it’s it’s it seems to me that the Nazi diaspora and this has been a former CIA guy told me this, a guy who um, it was Pete Bagley who had actually had a relationship with her with a KGB general, a top KGB general who said that, you know, basically the Nazi diaspora, the big chunk of it was controlled by the Soviets after the war.
Sprecher 1
And I mean, you heard this before.
Sprecher 2
What? Well, yeah, I mean, I’ve heard that at the end of the war and and after the war of quite a few, quite a few Nazis regretted these strategic decisions. And they thought, well, what would have happened if, if the Nazis had been permanently aligned with the Russians, wouldn’t that have been the better choice? And so then I think these remaining Nazis, they started to to work more with the Russians and and try to make something happen.
Sprecher 2
And of course, if you have if you have aristocrats running around in between, that they could also facilitate some of these some of these contacts, because, as I said, an aristocrat looks like a German, looks like the romanoffs. Basically they look like a bird they look like an American and they have all these contacts. And so I think this is sort of a facilitator role between, let’s say, the Soviets and then the remaining Nazis that were scattered around in various places.
Sprecher 2
So, yeah, lots of secrets.
Sprecher 1
I should also yeah, I should also note that the Sarah so a similar dynamic happening in the United States with when you get to Allen Dulles and you get to James Angleton sort of deathbed confessions, so to speak, when he was dying of cancer, saying that, you know, Allen Dulles made me promise if I was to become chief of counterintelligence, that I would never submit him and his friends to lie detector tests, especially with regard to what they did during the war with with their interactions with the SS.
Sprecher 2
MM.
Sprecher 1
And the suggestion indirectly from that is that they took Nazi gold. They were, they had communications with the SS that were not supposed to happen. They didn’t report that, that the and I think Angleton said something, they were, they were arrogant enough not to think that the Soviets, that the KGB knew about it and that, that Angleton thought that they perhaps had been blackmailed.
Sprecher 1
MM Which when you see that the head of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s deputy, was later came under suspicion of the FBI, of being a longtime Soviet agent, and that Allen Dulles was his handpicked deputy at the CIA and became the head of the CIA when General Smith was sidelined by Eisenhower after falling under suspicion. That then you have Dulles is long tenure as CIA director, and that the idea that Angleton would say late in his life, you know, I think he might have been under Soviet control is an astonishing admission.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. I mean, when the when the war ended, John J. McCloy became responsible for occupied western Germany. And of course, McCloy was tied into high ranking people at the State Department in the CIA. So the people you just mentioned. And and so the expectation was at the time that that John J. McCloy would just just handle the situation correctly in occupied Germany, that that meant you find you find the guilty the really guilty people, you put them in prison or you execute them.
Sprecher 2
In some cases, you find the bad guys, then you find the reasonable guys and you do just work with the reasonable guys. And to a degree is some degree that actually happened. But people were shocked when when John Jay McCloy basically led some of the craziest people go, I mean, letting them off the hook, giving them back the assets.
Sprecher 2
Well, probably, you know, the Americans were pulling the strings on that money, but formally handing back the money and company assets. And so some of these some of these highly high ranking Nazis, they became some of the richest people again in postwar Germany. And they were running these big corporations, corporations that became global at some point. So there was all sorts of crazy ness going on.
Sprecher 2
And, oh, by the way, in quite a few of these corporations that I was referring to, quite a quite a few of these corporations are quite old. So they can be traced back to the times when, you know, aristocratic people had their their hands in this. So there’s all kinds of crazy secrets. And so and so then right after the war, Lord Mountbatten, Lord, Lord Mountbatten appointed selected people to travel to Germany and take documents with them.
Sprecher 2
One of them was Anthony Blunt, the traitor in the service of the Soviets.
Sprecher 1
So blunt was the one that was like the art guy for the queen, right?
Sprecher 2
Correct. Correct. He was surveyor. Surveyor of the kings or Queens pictures.
Sprecher 1
Right. And as I recall from Peter Wright’s memoir, Spy Catcher, I think it was Peter Wright put it together that Blunt was with these other models. He had been. And he went to Blunt and he got blunt to confess. But blunt, they didn’t they didn’t remove him. They didn’t he was he.
Sprecher 2
Was treated with kid gloves. He was treated with kid gloves and gloves. And so blunt. Blunt was supposed to obtain documents from the brother of the prince of Hesse and Castle at Friedersdorf Palace and the tunnels. Another mission went to the Duke of Braunschweig. And so I so, for example, the book War of the Windsors clearly states that the Soviets were able to blackmail the British royal family and the relatives with those documents, with this sort of correspondence that was done.
Sprecher 1
With time frame, did this do they think this blackmail started? Was it right after the queen, you know, took her office up? Well, she’s just practically a girl.
Sprecher 2
When the well, when the book War of the Windsors came out, this was when more incriminating information against Mountbatten was was not yet public. So it’s not exactly clear because it was this correspondence that was a problem. The homosexuality was a problem. The alleged pedophilia was a problem. And also mountbatten’s communist contacts were a problem. And and he was known to be a wild guy.
Sprecher 2
He was known to be quite unstable. And so it’s.
Sprecher 1
Really not the only one I mean, there was a there have been other people associated with the royal family with this kind of background, haven’t there?
Sprecher 2
Exactly.
Sprecher 1
And it’s not the only one.
Sprecher 2
Yeah, of course. Of course. Then Louie, Louie Mountbatten’s nephew, his nephew was then married to Queen Elizabeth, the second who had access to all intelligence, received daily reports in a red leather box and used to be ahead of all of her prime ministers.
Sprecher 1
Do you think his nephew shared that with him?
Sprecher 2
Well, it’s well, if if these family members talk to each other about intelligence matters, which they always did, I mean, nobody nobody has to know who the mole is, right? I mean, it’s just if there’s one mole and if there’s another mole continues on after Mountbatten died, if there’s one big mole, that is enough, because you can get access to literally everything.
Sprecher 2
And while that mole that that aristocratic giga mole is in place, he can install other moles. And for example, when Natal was created, the first secretary general of Natal was Lord Ismail, who was also close at some point, even worked for Mountbatten and so this this becomes kind of a spiraling problem. It’s it’s just pure entropy.
Sprecher 1
So it is the is Britain the same with this regard now, in your opinion, are they in the same position today that they were then? Is there, is there been any correction of this? Have these older networks compromised by the Russians aged out or is it just been handed on?
Sprecher 2
I think it’s continued. I think it just continued to this very day. And and it’s not just it’s not just I mean, everything that was compromised that included, in my opinion and I’ll get to that later, what was compromised, I think also included old, old British networks in the United States, because after the revolution, the British, they didn’t want to sit idle, sit by and just just watch the United States develop.
Sprecher 1
So penetrations into old Yankee families, then?
Sprecher 2
Well, certain old families, yes. And and the universities, the American universities heavily infiltrated. And and, you know, some networks that are regarded as old American networks, but they have clear British roots and very many aristocratic links. So it’s not just that Britain was compromised and its colonies also what Britain did in the United States, you know, the clandestine networks.
Sprecher 1
What’s interesting is that Roosevelt picked William Donovan to be head of the SS when that was formed just before our U.S. involvement in World War Two, and that Donovan, according to some biographies and researchers, had been recruited as a British agent in World War One. Have you heard this?
Sprecher 2
No. You know, that is new to me.
Sprecher 1
Which is interesting that the that the person that FDR chose to be the head of American intelligence in World War Two.
Sprecher 2
Was the British.
Sprecher 1
Was had been already 20 years a British agent.
Sprecher 2
Yeah, that is that is scary. I mean I mean, this is how this is all this is this all works. I mean, if you build up if Britain builds up this clandestine in the United States right after the revolution and you grow these networks and then you have this penetration in Britain, this penetration in Britain at the highest levels, then this penetration would also inherit or control these old networks in the United States.
Sprecher 1
Right. So if the head of heads of my five or in my six becomes Soviet agents, then all the British agents, in effect, become Soviet agents, because now all the intelligence they’re gathering, everything they’re doing is ending up on a desk in Moscow.
Sprecher 2
Exactly. So at some point it’s at some point even even Winston Churchill chided Mountbatten over his his expression of left wing views and the Americans were more open in their criticism and also pointed at the mysterious Peter Murphy, who was always very close to Mountbatten without holding any formal position in the staff. Murphy had been openly Marxist when he had first met Mountbatten at Cambridge, and he was regarded as a very promiscuous homosexual.
Sprecher 2
Despite this security risk, he was allowed to be alongside Mountbatten in Southeast Asia, where ultimately the Communists were able to take over China.
Sprecher 1
Yeah, because it’s. Isn’t it interesting that General Stilwell Vinegar Joe said by FDR to be the chief general there of the reasoning with Chiang Kai shek was basically hated. Chiang Kai shek I think he what did he he had some terrible names for the Chinese generalissimo and was kind of favorable to the communists. And then you have Batman, Batman at the end of the war coming into Burma with the British army, fighting the Japanese, opening the Burma Road.
Sprecher 1
Also, if he’s a Soviet agent, you’ve got Chiang Kai shek is now surrounded by British and American generals who are essentially pro Mao, pro-Soviet.
Sprecher 2
And also when I think when I think when when Whitmire took over from Stilwell, he in Asia he expected a a full on briefing, you know, a proper handover of the command. But he almost he almost received nothing. And staff members told him well he always kept everything important in his hip pocket. So that was that was kind of the handover of the command back then.
Sprecher 2
So this this is crazy.
Sprecher 1
We admire wrote a book called Whitmire Reports. And it’s it’s quite he’s a very sensible, smart American general who kind of understood things. But what we realized was that General Marshall, General Stilwell, all these American military people and politicians and this penetration in the White House, Lachlan Curry, the things that Harry Dexter White and Harry Hopkins had done, they helped Mao and they hurt Chiang.
Sprecher 1
And ultimately it was through these communists within the Roosevelt administration that saw arranged events in China following the Second World War. The China effectively ended up becoming communist, that the Chiang Kai shek did not receive support or Mao did, and they, the nationalists, lost the Chinese Civil War. We have Communist China to this day. We can thank them for it.
Sprecher 2
Exactly.
Sprecher 1
And of course, wasn’t Mountbatten the last viceroy of India?
Sprecher 2
That is correct. And so and that’s the other thing. This is the other thing when when when Mountbatten basically. Well, it was was sort of a British withdrawal from India. And this was handled in a way that benefited Russia. And in the following decades, it was much easier for the Russians to be active in India. And there was kind of a spy war going on, of course, but it was much more complicated than it needed to.
Sprecher 1
Be effectively an ally of the Soviet Union.
Sprecher 2
Exactly. And so and so this.
Sprecher 1
Military equipment from the Soviet Union.
Sprecher 2
Exactly. And then there’s this one book from from a defector, I think it was this the KGB station chief in London. Gordievsky Was it one of the ADF skills? Exactly.
Sprecher 1
I think that’s the one you.
Sprecher 2
So maybe it was him or maybe it was another defector. He wrote about the spy war when they were moving around suitcases full of cash to try to gain back some influence in India. And. And they complained they were not getting the suitcases back, the empty suitcases. So there just throwing old money, throwing on money to try to solve the problem, a problem which Mountbatten effectively caused.
Sprecher 2
So so even more astounding back then, this this Murphy character was close to members of the British Communist Party, such as Harry Pollard, an unwavering support of Stalin. And from 1933 until November of 1939, Pollard was in direct radio contact with Moscow as the cold, hot, cold holder. So he had the codes to communicate with Moscow. And then Olga Gray, an MI5 agent, infiltrate to the party, the Communist Party in Britain, the Communist Party in Britain, and was for a time, Pollard’s personal secretary in Operation Mask.
Sprecher 2
Agents were able to crack the code and decrypt radio messages, and they, of course, revealed the the comintern’s close supervision of the Communist Party. And they figured out stuff about Pollitt, then Lewis Lewis wife, Edwina Mountbatten. Edwina Mountbatten also became more and more left wing. And so the authors, the authors of War of the Windsors conclude, and I quote, virtually everything Mountbatten did after the war perfectly played into the hands of the Soviet Union, working against British and American interests.
Sprecher 2
So they’re not even sugarcoating this. They’re just saying it how it is. And so, yeah, many saw his handling of the British withdrawal of India as a blatant move to steer that vast country towards Russia. Churchill detested his disdain for the special relationship between Britain and the US. Mountbatten supported the Communists in the Spanish Civil War, opposed Britain’s involvement in the Suez crisis and advocated for nuclear disarmament.
Sprecher 2
I mean.
Sprecher 1
Yes. So there was there were there were powerful British political forces in the Labor Party especially, that wanted unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. Yeah, you know, it’s insane. It didn’t happen. But it was interesting that those forces were really there. It’s it’s interesting. I should ask you, because it’s always a quandary to me is that when people are at such a high level, when when know Lord Mountbatten and here his nephew is the queen’s husband, when people like this are helping the communists, helping the Soviet Union, how in the Soviet files do they regard them and do they regard them as 100% reliable, friendly, reliable?
Sprecher 1
I mean, I know they have this designation where they have false flag recruitment and they’re they they consider them on their side. But what one would Colonel Steele Self have told me was that you do defector. He said to me and see if you’ve heard something similar. He said that when when you have people helping you at this level, you never call them agents.
Sprecher 1
You call them friends because when they have a certain degree of power, they have a certain degree of influence, and you absolutely don’t want to threaten to blackmail them because you could alienate them and they have enough power to hurt you.
Sprecher 2
This could be.
Sprecher 1
Really it’s one of the problems with blackmail when you get to that level. I mean, if it’s a low level person, you could throw them to the wolves and they’ll go to prison. But if they’re at that level, you basically can be blackmailed by them because it’s going to find out you control somebody at that level, then you are you cause a huge reaction, a backlash and motions and investigations by parliament and so on.
Sprecher 1
So so it’s a it’s a as loony have explained it to me. It’s a very sensitive thing for the Soviet intelligence services or the Russian today to have somebody at this level because if that gets exposed, it isn’t just bad for Lord Mountbatten or.
Sprecher 2
Exactly. Charles Yeah, we may be talking about yeah, we may be talking about an actual partnership of some sort. So it’s back and forth. So they all have stuff against each other and they all, they can all help each other. And that.
Sprecher 1
Yeah, however much they may agree there is and this is hard, the hard to understand, there is a kind of independence that these people can have from the Soviet espionage service that somebody at a lower level like the Walker spy ring wouldn’t have that. In other words, if the Soviets get sick of them, they just let the FBI take them right?
Sprecher 2
Yeah. And also I mentioned this in an earlier show there. There was sort of this idea being toyed with early on that in in in Tsarist Russia, they would maintain the czarist throne. But underneath society would be reorganized in a socialist in a socialist system. So this is kind of this was an idea back then, and it’s not entirely clear if there actually was a serious attempt at this.
Sprecher 2
And this may have gone terribly wrong. And this is maybe when the infiltration or the the infiltration of Britain occurred or of the aristocracy occurred or maybe this partnership occurred. So maybe things didn’t go didn’t go as planned, or maybe there was a phase of of trying things and this turned into something else. So it’s there’s still quite a bit quite a few secrets out there.
Sprecher 1
This is the there is, you know, and of course, Germany is an in-between case. And I should point out, you know, I’ve I’ve read a couple of biographies of Admiral Canaris. And one of the things and see what you say about this, because you had mentioned this, this the British having it all over German intelligence. But these books show that Canaris had penetrated British intelligence, that he knew what was going on inside British intelligence and that but he did not he wanted to help the British.
Sprecher 1
He was trying to undermine Hitler, but he didn’t. He was a patriotic German, so he didn’t want to destroy Germany. But his main objective was to end the war, to get the to keep the communists out of Europe, to keep the Soviet armies from reaching the heart of Europe and to and to try to fix all the things that were broken.
Sprecher 1
And in a way, some of these and it’s mostly British authors who kind of were fed things by people after the war from British intelligence about how much how important Canaris was to winning the war for the allies that you see, this guy was a hero. And, you know, I just reread it last week, this part where one of these British journalists said, look, that the information that that that I had was that the Soviets, of all the spymasters in Europe they feared was Canaris, because he was working against them and against Hitler.
Sprecher 1
For the Allies. Of course, what the Russians understood was their they they ultimately wanted to defeat the West.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. I mean, it didn’t hurt any of us. Of course, it made sense. Course it made sense to find to find a solution with the British and to to to seize the hostilities and to and to protect Europe from the communists. Of course, that that made absolute sense. But I think it was already too late. Far too late at that point.
Sprecher 1
Knew what both of the accounts I’ve read show is that Philby betrayed Canaris to basically to the Russians and Stalin then betrayed him to Hitler.
Sprecher 2
I mean, especially when.
Sprecher 1
Part of his back channel where Hitler and Stalin, even though they’re fighting each other, they’re exchanging information while they’re fighting each other.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. I mean, it’s I think to think but I think I think that yeah, I mean, I think the the this, this ties in to the Martin Bormann case because it took a while for him to get properly exposed. Bye bye. Lew kills her for example and, and and so the, the information that Martin Bormann provided, I mean all the military secrets of the Germans, you know, the latest up to date military plans of the Nazis, the information that Martin Bormann, then Martin Bormann acquired, that information made its way to Russia with a specific spy ring that was in place to relay the information.
Sprecher 2
And so when I looked.
Sprecher 1
At the Red Orchestra.
Sprecher 2
The what was it, the sonic ring, or was it the.
Sprecher 1
Yeah, the Sonja ring was the road to Capella, right.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. And so when I looked into, when I looked into Martin Bowman’s past, I found quite a few high ranking aristocrats the Rivendell family, the old Mecklenburg Mecklenburg aristocracy, and the highest Mecklenburg aristocracy was virtually the same family, the British one. So really high ranking connections to Britain. And so it seems. Well, I mean, you can tell by the biography that these aristocratic people were recruiting a young Martin Bormann and just helping him along in his career.
Sprecher 2
Then he joined the Nazis and he had this meteoric rise and so that was probably the origin that was his first serious contacts. And it’s interesting to see that somebody who who was somebody who got help from the aristocracy, that guy becomes a spy and the information ends up with the Russians. Right. So again, it’s aristocratic. It’s aristocratic people tied to Britain, but the information goes to Russia and Russia benefits from that information.
Sprecher 1
So. So you have this, Of course, if I am Felix Kozinski, it’s 1923 and I’m doing Operation Trust and I’m infiltrating the White diaspora in Paris, in Berlin and so on, I am also targeting the related aristocratic families. I am also trying to get in with those people. I’m trying to get their maids or their their house servants to be my agents.
Sprecher 1
I’m trying to figure out what their sexual proclivities are, what their financial needs might be. And so, you know, this the Soviet special services, starting in the 1920s, are already going to be focused on these people.
Sprecher 2
Exactly. Exactly. And there’s also this whole thing with the the last I think he was the the last finance minister of the czars, the Russian czars, Mr. Peter Bach. He then went to when when the revolution happened, he then went to Britain and he started to work for the Bank of England. And and then you had this emerging trade between Britain and the new Soviet Union, the new Soviet government, the Anglo was it called the Anglo Soviet Treaty, signed by this aristocrat.
Sprecher 2
So they started so Britain, Britain started to Britain started to to work with the new Soviet Union, which is interesting.
Sprecher 1
And until I think it was in 1927 and was it the zinoviev letter or something, that the scandal that they found out that the Soviets were working with the Communists in Britain to hurt the British and it caused a upset in their relations. And of course here the British Socialists under Ramsay MacDonald took power and failed miserably in that context.
Sprecher 1
So you ended up with, in the thirties, mostly conservative governments in Great Britain. You know and it’s it’s it’s a strange story. But then after World War Two, the socialists who had been part of the coalition wartime government, emerge stronger in Britain. And you ended up with the kind of, you know, Britain became socialized, industries became nationalized.
Sprecher 2
And but also also the British know companies like British Petroleum and and also Royal Royal Dutch Shell, They they kept working with the Soviets. I mean, they had been in the area before, before the Soviets, but they still kept working with the Soviets. And there were some more factories and mining and all that on a business with the British.
Sprecher 1
There were many that crossed this line despite, you know, they were effectively kind of Cold War sanctions. And this was a problem, too, for the United States with what to do with these companies that kept helping the Soviet Union. But now now having surveyed this and we’ve gone up to the modern, you know, time saying, look, this is still the problem, this is still the situation.
Sprecher 1
The Russians are. So now we have a war in Ukraine and we’ve got the Russians fighting the Ukrainians and the British especially and Poland. Until the government changes and America. And this is a very strange in Germany, too. And this is a very strange thing to explain, very thing to explain, because we have known for years that like your Chancellor Schultz, our President Biden, the president, France, these aristocratic families, these intelligence services where people have been compromised, we have seen all this time that the Russians have controlled many of these people.
Sprecher 1
These people have helped Russia at every turn. And then in 2012, they all do this about face the Obama administration. You know, it’s the Russian reset they’re helping build. Skolkovo the Russian Silicon Valley. The what was it, a billion or 2 billion they gave to that? They had their Uranium One. Then all of a sudden, all at once, they just sort of turn and Putin isn’t a bad guy.
Sprecher 1
And this is before Russia invades Crimea. This is before the Euromaidan revolution. This is in when I studied this, you know, I studied the mostly the biographical account of Michael McFaul, the US ambassador to Russia under Obama and McFaul. I count him as an idealistic, honest person who reveals many things, many odd details about this. Meetings between Hillary Clinton, secretary of State, for example, and a meeting between her and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister for hours alone without a translator is unprecedented never has happened before that American secretary of state meets with the Russian foreign minister alone together without any witnesses, without a translator.
Sprecher 1
This is bizarre. And then, you know, McFaul is baffled Again, John Kerry comes in, takes over the position of secretary of State, goes to Moscow, meets with McFaul and Putin in the Kremlin, then then then again John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State, goes out on a walk for 2 hours, again with Sergey Lavrov, no translator, no witness. And this is right at this moment where there’s this change in the relationship between the Democrat ruling Democratic Party at the time in the U.S. and the Putin regime, where they were oh so friendly and oh so helpful.
Sprecher 1
And then all of a sudden these meetings without witnesses and then they’re they’re denouncing Russia and they’re saying that, look, for example, that Donald Trump is a Russian agent, which is something somebody should have been saying. I mean, I was saying it about Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and Obama, you know, right up to that point, because it was obvious they they had these connections to former Soviet intelligence, to both of the both the Clintons and Obama.
Sprecher 1
I mean, Bill Clinton went to Moscow and Prague during the Cold War by himself in the winter of of 1969 70. And there were stories that I had through defector sources that Clinton was did have recruitment sessions as a young Oxford student with Czech. And in January 1970.
Sprecher 2
Exactly. He was I know him, but he was he was a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and Britain was compromised and he was also a Yale. And apparently the whole Yale network is also compromised because Britain is compromised.
Sprecher 1
Yeah. And and in and of course this is fascinating that they bring Clinton into Oxford and and this Rhodes scholarship program and so you have this curious about face and and then of course you have the revolution in Ukraine has been a problem for since 2004, since the time of the Orange Revolution when they tried unsuccessfully to try to murder the presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, by poisoning him.
Sprecher 1
He survived the poisoning. And I in fact, years ago I spoke to the doctor that that that discovered the problem, that it was dioxin poisoning and saved his life. And so you had this beginning of this estrangement between Ukraine and Russia and, of course, Yanukovych being Putin’s puppet in Kiev. And then as these relations got worse and worse and many of Moscow’s agents in Ukraine fled to Moscow, including Yanukovich and the prime minister and governors and F as a U.
Sprecher 1
B officials that, you know, SBU officials fleeing to Moscow, among others, that that Ukraine was miraculously as this integrated Soviet republic, totally penetrated by Soviet structures, was nonetheless through this popular movement breaking away, so much so now that we have this war and yet all these classic instruments of Moscow like, well, the German Social Democratic Party leaders, the Green Party, they are supporting Ukraine, who has always been, you know, clandestinely.
Sprecher 1
Look at the Bukowski files, has always been a helpmate to Russia is is although he’s slow walking all the assistance to Ukraine they’re not able to put the brakes on. And so I want to understand why now that we have established the strength of the the Moscow’s hold on Western Europe and. I know it’s there’s a hold here in Washington, especially in the Democratic Party.
Sprecher 1
How do you view what’s happened? Of course, in Germany, you’re seeing this play out in real time and that’s why I mentioned this independence, that when people reach a certain level, you don’t you they’re there. You’re they still they have independence is president of the United States. He has the button You can’t blackmail him.
Sprecher 2
Mm hmm.
Sprecher 1
Effectively, even if he’s done things for you, he has a degree of independence because of his position. And I just want to mention two fascinating books that that that you have to understand how this works. This is the way I’m trying to understand this. This is love two mafia, this book, Russia’s Secret Rulers, which came out in the nineties, which was wrestling the nature of the changes in Russia.
Sprecher 1
And then this absolutely brilliant study by Vesalius Carrasco, the Polish scholar on Russia, how the Soviet Union disappeared. And and basically what Timofey says, and I think Timofey is correct and and the guy that wrote the afterword, who’s a Russian who lives in Paris, Anton Kozlov, says, is that, look, the iron triangle that ruled the Soviet Union, which is the party, the army and the KGB, it effectively was not destroyed with the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB was still there.
Sprecher 1
The party was still there. That what happened with the Communist Party, Soviet Union became, yes, true the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. But of the leaders in the Communist Party, Soviet Union were the people that formed the other successful political parties in Russia. So that effectively, you have two or three communist parties, or at least they’re led by people who are communists.
Sprecher 1
And and so what what the what Kozlov says absolutely fascinated me because he says, look, you have to understand it’s Lenin, Lenin and Lenin or Lenin founded this whole thing, set up this whole the parallel institutions, the iron triangle. He set this thing up. And Lenin was a guy who who was the ultimate conspiracy theorist. He believed World War One was a conspiracy.
Sprecher 1
You know, he believed the Kronstadt rebellion was it was a conspiracy. He believed the Civil War was a conspiracy. He believed in and he was a conspirator. I mean, he took the sealed train. He took the German the money from the German that the German government had given him to start a revolution. He was he he believed everything in a paranoid way was a conspiracy.
Sprecher 1
Capitalism was a conspiracy. Imperialism was a conspiracy. And so he he lived and breathed conspiracy, and he created the Communist Party, Soviet Union. Ultimately, that that his his Bolsheviks became was a conspiratorial. I mean, he writes this and what is to be done? I am forming a conspiratorial political party. Our method is conspiracy. And what Kozlov says is that if the iron triangle exists, if the parallel institutions exist, where do you see the conspiracy broken up?
Sprecher 1
That was the Leninist system. Because the Lenin and Lenin, the system is not just a political system, it’s a system of conspiracy, and it’s the ultimate system of conspiracy made by the ultimate genius of monomania of conspiracy. Vladimir Lenin. How do you react to this?
Sprecher 2
Well, I think Russia I think Russia and China have a multi plan and they need a master narrative for that multi-stage plan. So if if they came out guns blazing as a unit, as a unity Russia, Russia, China, North Korea and some other allies, if they came out guns blazing, not a good idea. It’s too dangerous. So I think they they move in stages.
Sprecher 2
And so when they go from stage to stage, I think they they have this this this the strategy in place to obfuscate that it is, in fact a multi-stage plan and it is an old plan and it works to their advantage each stage by stage by stage. So, for example, they the first stage, which was the the invasion of Ukraine.
Sprecher 2
And so the narrative then was this was all Putin’s idea. He just is an old fashioned Roman style imperialist. And so he’s he’s acquiring a new wants to acquire a new province and and so it’s all put on him in public. This was all his decision. You know, the Chinese were not happy about it. They claim. And so then, of course, when NATO’s reacted, you had this, you had this, this, this, this campaign in the West this campaign that said do not help Ukraine too much, do not antagonize Russia too much, because then Russia could fall apart.
Sprecher 2
This would be too dangerous or Russia will Russia will align itself with China. So this is strategic deception. It’s already a unity. It’s already basically one big thing. But they’re they’re starting the first stage, the first phase with Ukraine. And then, I mean, even to this day, the German military has not become stronger. The French military is still fairly weak.
Sprecher 2
Poland is in the is is in the middle of trying to become stronger. But it’s all really, really, really weak. And so it’s a mix of nuclear threats. It’s a mix of just just deception. The Russians are saying the Russians are saying we’re weak. We could fall apart, you know, with the precaution coup attempt. So don’t be too hard on us because we might fall apart and we could align ourselves too closely with China.
Sprecher 2
So then you get let’s you get all this appeasement for months and months and months. And then, of course, the the the Russians, they launch the next big thing with Iran, Hamas and Israel. So this is the next stage. And and again, now all these countries are negotiating with each other. Do can we afford a larger war? What what would the result be?
Sprecher 2
Couldn’t we come to an agreement now? So this is something that does going on as a second stage. And so then the next stage could be the this Taiwan thing with China and North Korea and Japan and South Korea. So this is so there’s another stage and every stage is supposed to look like it’s it just happened that way because of the previous stage.
Sprecher 2
So nobody is supposed to understand that this is a multi-stage plan. This has been planned for quite a while. And every stage is is is according to plan. But they want to make it look like that. The next stage just happened. It just happened because of what Naito how Naito responded. And and they’re trying to negotiate, you know, maybe some some solution for Ukraine or whatever.
Sprecher 2
But it’s a multi stage plan and by going stage by stage by stage, I think Russia and China can be more successful because every time they do the same, they tell the Europeans to to stay weak and stay out of this because that would be the better, the better choice. And at some point, I mean, at some point in the near future, the next stage could be that, you know, millions, millions of Chinese Chinese soldiers could flood Europe essentially.
Sprecher 2
It’s not that hard to do. And the military in Europe is the militaries in Europe are very, very weak. And so right now they’re trying to make it look like Russia is reluctantly Russia is sort of reluctantly partnering with the Chinese, but they’re are afraid of the Chinese. And and so maybe if we show to Russia, we can get Russia back into our camp and this sort of nonsense.
Sprecher 2
So every stage, every stage, this game is played and the, you know, the Eastern Bloc, they want to advance every stage along the way.
Sprecher 1
If if if we go back to what Putin was saying in 2018, 2017, if we go back to what the Chinese are saying, we go back to intelligence I was getting from Russian and Chinese dissidents and defectors, there is this military plan that Russia and China have in the future where they they they want to isolate the United States, separated from allies in East Asia and Europe, and they want to bomb and invade or well, they don’t want Obama to bat.
Sprecher 1
They want to invade the United States and want to divide it up. They want Russia will take Alaska and parts of Canada and China will take the lower 48 states. And you’ve got the secret speech of Geo Chen, which is somewhat which says essentially the same thing. This is what Colonel Stennis of Loon have told me about in, you know, in February of 1999, I think is when he first told me about it.
Sprecher 1
And I was kind of stunned, but it made sense with what I knew, with what I had been observing, with Russia and that. But the big problem with Russia was that that Russia had in in its maneuver of trying to reform under Gorbachev, things had fallen apart in ways that they had not expected and see, if you you agree with this, that that it’s great to have agents in the West and to be able to get rescued by the West and to get help.
Sprecher 1
But there’s so much, so much help these agents are going to give you that they might agree with you, but they are still essentially British or American or German. And there’s a limit not only to what they can do, what they’re willing to do, and in a way they have their own agenda. And that in a way, by relying on these spies you perhaps have imagined you can do more than you can do, and that in the breakdown of your own system is is the real problem that you’re having.
Sprecher 1
And this is Anton Kozloff. So this is what Kozloff says, and I get your reaction to this. Kozloff says that the Lenin system is a system of conspiracy, but what Lenin and Stalin discovered, their great discovery was the adjunct to conspiracy must be terror, whom you have to kill and weed your your administrative staff continually by terrorizing them, by murdering your own people to keep them honest.
Sprecher 1
Because they won’t be honest, they will steal from you, they will pilfer from you. Your production system won’t work. Your economic system will not work. You will not be able to prosecute a future war because nothing will work. The only thing will work is purging. And you’re seeing right now in China, the Communist Party is now purging the Chinese military like Stalin did before World War Two.
Sprecher 1
Remember in 1938, the year before the war started, Stalin murdered tens of thousands of his own officers from his officer corps and so and what what basically caused a lot of the saying is that Brezhnev stopped the terror, Khrushchev denounced Stalin, and they stopped the terror. And they only had the conspiracy. And they literally the system then became corrupt.
Sprecher 1
It became ill disciplined and they started to lose control because now different centers and this is what Sarasota and how the Soviet Union, she talked about the disintegration of the vertical and the disintegration of the horizontal. Once you get it. Of course, she doesn’t say it’s due to the to the lack of terror. Exactly. She just describes the process.
Sprecher 1
But I think Kozlov is right. The terror is what worked. Because how do you get people to obey if their tenure is is guaranteed, if they can steal? Look, Putin is the biggest thief of them all is what we hear. Putin steals and his minions say, well, it’s okay for us to steal. And although Putin was kind of going around threatening people and kicking people out of their jobs at first after he’s in power ten years, they’re much too comfortable.
Sprecher 1
He doesn’t want to get after his cronies. Depends on them. They’re loyal. They’re loyal because they could steal. And then I had an oligarch tell me this was, you know, as it right after the war last year when the war started. He said, look, the rumor is that, you know, the defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, and his cronies stole $30 billion of money from the military appropriation system.
Sprecher 2
Oh, that’s quite a bit.
Sprecher 1
So The Russian tanks didn’t get made. The army of tanks that were supposed to basically fill up to take armies where the tanks didn’t get made, the modernization. They have all these fabulous new weapons. They’ve got these military labs. I mean, I think it was 2018, Putin gave a presentation where he showed off all this super weaponry that Russia had developed.
Sprecher 1
They developed the weaponry, but they couldn’t make factories that could turn out these weapons in numbers. That would matter exactly because every was stealing in the system. Is it possible that that basically this system that looks like it’s going to take over Europe that is so successful at controlling prime ministers and gov or peers, does that? Lord Mountbatten.
Sprecher 1
They had, you know, they certainly have something on Chancellor Shoals and on, you know, the president of France and the something on Biden. They can’t consummate. They can’t make this thing work for.
Sprecher 2
Them, but they can settle. They can I think they can all settle. I think when when when different sides have different advantages and just becomes too much. So, for example, the West is the West is the big weakness of the West is that we are infiltrated and compromised. The big weakness, the big weakness of the Russians and and of the Chinese is their economy was dependent on us and they have all this theft and they’re inefficient.
Sprecher 2
And so, so to say so every side has these huge advantages and disadvantages. And at some point when when the prime goals cannot be achieved, you know, the the most hoped for goals, if they cannot be achieved, they could settle. They sort of just just regroup and have some sort of a settlement.
Sprecher 1
Deal, make a kind of negotiation.
Sprecher 2
Negotiate a deal. And and they can obfuscate this process, of course, by, let’s say, staging smaller wars or maybe two or three mid-sized wars somewhere in the world, have it have it in a in a controlled fashion, but make it scary enough so everybody in the world is scared out of their minds and then at the end have this settlement and maybe make it even official, an official settlement or an official deal.
Sprecher 2
So this is.
Sprecher 1
Something that Putin Putin has put MiGs in the air with Kindle missiles, saying that he’s going to take out an aircraft carrier if this thing in the Middle East goes further. Yeah, And but you know what’s really intriguing to me? I got a report from, you know, John Mosher, the military historian. He wrote what I think is the best book on the Russian front, the war between Hitler and Stalin called the Death Ride.
Sprecher 1
And Mosher has been had an email thread throughout the beginning of the war. I contacted him early on because I really wanted his opinion and he he has sources in Ukraine and he’s following the war very closely. And he said something yesterday that absolutely stunned me. And it was confirmed by other sources that I’m listening to out of Naito.
Sprecher 1
And maybe you’ve heard this, is that, you know, the Ukrainian armies are not making a lot of ground, but they are killing enormous numbers of Russians, either attack. And that now Mosher says, look, this is going to sound fantastic, but he thinks the Russians have suffered a half a million casualties in the fighting and that, you know, you normally in combat, an attacking force suffers more casualties in defending forces.
Sprecher 1
And this is and so the Ukrainians are just destroying dismembering the Russian army even even behind the minefields, even with the tank ditches, the Ukrainians are just picking them apart. And to the extent that where the Russians are now putting elite paratroop divisions that aren’t supposed to be lined formations into the line or behind the line because they’re afraid it’s going to break.
Sprecher 1
And the Russians tried this counterattack recently where hundreds of vehicles were lost and the human toll was massive and they were just absolutely devastated. And this is going and of course, there’s only been three rainy days in October. October hasn’t been the usual rainy weather in Ukraine, is what Mosher was saying. And so he said, look, we can see that the West is now going to turn the spigot off to Ukraine is going to not be sending these weapons to the United States.
Sprecher 1
We can see the changes, the Russian moles, the Russian agents, Russia’s friends are helping out. There’s still three or four months worth of supplies in the pipeline. And he says, I don’t this is the shocking thing, Mosher said. I don’t know if the Russian line will hold that long that Russia is nearing. And he said, Here is the amazing thing.
Sprecher 1
Putin doesn’t understand this. And the Russians, everybody is this is a system top down where the people down here are disrespected and they lie to the people they tell the bosses what they feel right there. And so it’s a dysfunctional communication system. So and I think we have that in the West with our political correctness and our for the false mentality.
Sprecher 1
This is what Kozlov says. He says it’s a system of deception and self-deception in which the basic ability to see reality is broken. I see that it’s clear in Russia but it’s happening in the West, too. Your your comment.
Sprecher 2
Well I mean this so maybe the current stage is not going exactly to plan or in the specific time frame. But I think the next stage be launched fairly soon. And I mean, the Chinese, they created this Chinese have created this New Silk Road. They’ve equipped all kinds of and roads and storage facilities. So they’ve they build it as a trade, a trade system.
Sprecher 2
So but observers have noted have noted that everything is built to military standards, to military quality. And so it’s it’s it could be the next stage that certain number of Chinese troops or North Korean troops or whatever, they could be mobilized and they could into move into Eastern Europe. This is, I think, certainly possible. And I think.
Sprecher 1
Putin went to North Korea here, what, the week before?
Sprecher 2
Like, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. It was a summit, also another another summit. And I think I think the communist strategy of breaking up a plan into different sections in different phases. I think this this this can be observed in the Communist takeover of China and I’ve written something about that as well because it happened in stages and in every stage this, this information game was played.
Sprecher 2
Oh, couldn’t we could we not split China into two parts? So the Communists have the north and you know, the the nationalists have the South. So this was used for various purposes. Then, then at times the propaganda was all we have to make the nationalists work with the communists against the Japanese. And there was always an excuse. There was always some sort of a reason given for not squashing the communists, which was possible.
Sprecher 2
And so. So what was it? I’m looking at my notes here. So yeah, I mean, the here the the American American five star general George C Marshall had essentially had essentially ordered Chiang Kai shek to stop hunting and destroying the communists. Of course, the the order came from above at a time when the communists were weak and could have been defeated.
Sprecher 2
So the Americans, the Americans were not allowed to win. Basically Mao, Mao got a break, was able to reorganize his troops, find new recruits and and integrate new Soviet advisors and at the same time, the Americans made they made cuts on the pretext, not a pretext. Supplies were stopped to the Chinese nationalists, and then there was even an embargo.
Sprecher 2
So the United States ostensibly wanting to prevent hundreds of millions of people in China from falling under communist control left, the Chinese nationalists hanging, they left them starving.
Sprecher 1
And so you had, of course, the Chinese nationalist was superior to the Chinese communist forces. But once the United States cut supplies from your army and you’re a country like, China, that’s really during a whole war, was dependent on supplies from the U.S. and Britain. You suddenly have a situation where the communists can win the Civil War.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. And so, yeah. So then you have U.S. you as General Albert Whitmire, considered a staunch anti-communist. He became chief of staff under Louis Mountbatten in 1943, who was commanding the allied forces in Southeast Asia, holding the title of Supreme Allied Commander of South Asia Command. And Whitmire succeeded General Stilwell as chief of staff to Junko shek and and normally there is an orderly handover of command with detailed instructions.
Sprecher 2
But Stilwell had simply left, leaving Whitmire with almost nothing. The staff shrugged his shoulders, and they said that Stilwell always kept everything important in his hip pocket.
Sprecher 1
Is it pockets? Yeah. And Stilwell hated, hated Chiang Kai shek. I think he he called him what did he call him? Old Peanut or something like that, and claimed that he was a coward because he wouldn’t fight the Japanese.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. And that. And there was a distrust. There was a certain level of distrust against the Brits, the Limey, as they call them, because there was something very, very off there was something very off. And then December 7th, 1945, Whitmire met with General Douglas MacArthur and Navy Admiral Raymond Spruance, and a plan was made to threaten the communists with moving many more nationalist troops north and even into Manchuria.
Sprecher 2
And this was intended to encourage or force the Communists to seek a common solution with the Nationalists and then three nationalist divisions equipped by the United States defected to the Communists. And then U.S. President Truman used. This as an excuse to impose an arms embargo and stop supplying the Chinese nationalists. So this happened stage by stage phase after phase after phase.
Sprecher 1
And yeah, it was it was you know, the war ends in 1945 and 1949. The communists win the civil War. Finally. It’s, you know, you you wonder how so. So you think that they’re still going to be able to manage the war in Ukraine and that Russia’s going to be able to take the whole of Ukraine?
Sprecher 2
Well, I think it’s I think process. I think it’s. Yeah, I think it’s it’s still in the cards. I mean, now we have this looming new war in Iran with Iran. Israel, Hamas, a few other countries. So, I mean, observers have noted that this could divert the attention of the United States. And then you had Biden get up on television, I think it was 60 Minutes, and he was saying the United States of Africa.
Sprecher 2
I think he meant the United States of America. And he was fumbling.
Sprecher 1
To that Africa.
Sprecher 2
Yeah, I think he said I mean, it sounded like you’re saying the United States of Africa. He meant the United States of America. And he said that, yeah, we can we can help Ukraine and Israel at the same time. However, when this thing escalates with Iran and some other players local players, it it does become a thing because if if if nuclear weapons are off the table, if biological and chemical weapons are off the table, it becomes a it’s all conventional warfare.
Sprecher 2
So what is the arms production? What is what are the supply lines? You know, it just becomes a whole mess. It becomes a whole mess. And and so when when if if this new war becomes a larger war, then, for example. So then, for example, the the focus has shifted and then maybe in 4 to 5 years, the next war starts in in the south, China, south China Sea.
Sprecher 1
In the Florida for east. Yeah.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. And so then the the attention has to be the, the attention has to be diverted and split even more so.
Sprecher 1
Let me ask you, in Germany, I mean, we heard the German government when this sort of this war started, that they were going to finally meet their 2% of GDP.
Sprecher 2
Oh, gosh, military spending.
Sprecher 1
And of course, but then we hear, no, we didn’t meet it last year. We’re going to meet it next year. And now we’re hearing they’re not going to meet it this year. So. So is Germany getting ready for World War three or is Germany just muddling along, not getting ready?
Sprecher 2
Well, the the German military is a disaster. I mean, every year there’s every I think it’s every year there’s a special report being compiled assessing the needs and the problems. And so the latest report a couple of months ago said we need three 300 billion, €300 billion immediately, not 100, which was proposed. We need 300 billion now.
Sprecher 1
EUR billion to do one.
Sprecher 2
To just not suck, essentially.
Sprecher 1
300 billion to just I mean, what is Germany have like two tank brigade, some U-boats and and a.
Sprecher 2
Few fairly nothing. Fairly nothing. We also don’t have any ammunition. I mean it doesn’t matter which weapon system you’re looking at, we do not have any ammo and some of the equipment is, is too old and some of the new projects have been, I fear, deliberately sabotaged. It was this new tank. There was this new tank project and the politicians kept changing the requirements at some point.
Sprecher 2
And I kid you not, the regular civilian laws now have to apply to a tank. So that means a tank is a workplace and has to be regulated like every other workplace. So the air has to be perfectly clean and everything has to be up to civilian standards, which is a joke really. And so the engineers were going crazy and these new tanks, they become ridiculously expensive and they simply don’t work right.
Sprecher 2
They catch on fire. They they do not work in these in these exercises. And every time we give something to Ukraine, something that we already have, every time we give something away, it takes forever to order replacements. And then it takes more time to actually manufacture those replacements. And you need 5 to 10. You need 5 to 10 bureaucratic institutions to give the green light to a certain project or to a certain purchase.
Sprecher 2
So you always you can always pretend to be waiting for somebody else to give the green light so everybody can blame everybody.
Sprecher 1
And true. Do the U-boats still not work for the for the third year in a row?
Sprecher 2
Well, as the saying goes, nothing’s swims, nothing drives and nothing flies. That is basically the status of the German, German armed forces. And of course, if, if you project into the future, Germany could become sort of the industrial manufacturing entity for several NATO countries. And of course you can convert civilian industry to military. But still Germans on average, they cannot fight.
Sprecher 2
Most people in the German military, they they work in an office or in some or they are in training or they are mechanics. So the actual number.
Sprecher 1
Infantry formations are just worthless.
Sprecher 2
Pretty much. I mean, I think there are only 40,000 fighters available. I mean, actual fighters, warriors available at any time. And then, of course.
Sprecher 1
They’re equipped to equip three divisions.
Sprecher 2
Exactly. So, I mean, the joke was I mean, even in the old days when it wasn’t as bad in the Cold War, the joke went, you know, Germany conducts Germany, Germany conducts war by trying to does this trying to stall the enemy while waiting for the help of a real army. This was so this was the job back then.
Sprecher 2
And now it’s even worse. And so, yeah, I mean, this is this is kind of situation we have we have. So it’s almost it’s almost a demilitarized zone.
Sprecher 1
I Americans who know World War two history a bit that I talked to they they still they imagine that Germany’s this great power and of course in World War two Germany had it a large part of the war over 300 divisions at any one time mobilized and so now they have enough for three divisions. So you’re talking about 1/100 1/100 of the size of the Vermont and in in in latter day Germany.
Sprecher 1
So that that Germany really I mean, Switzerland is more of a military power than Germany because. Well, because it can mobilize thousands of men, you know, and and in Germany can mobilize 40,000 men. I mean, Switzerland could invade Germany.
Sprecher 2
So to say. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, at this point, the we have some of the worst gun rights in the developed world. So, I mean, this may sound absolutely insane to an American, but to to legally own firearm in Germany, you have to state a requirement. Now, in many countries or most countries, you can just say, well, my requirement is personal protection, self-defense, or even the overall militia concept.
Sprecher 2
So you you could mobilize if if, if the need. But in Germany, that doesn’t fly. So you need to be a sports shooter or you need to be a hunter. You have a complex, you get a complicated hunting license and you’re constantly monitored and you have to be a member of two different types of organizations that will also monitor you.
Sprecher 2
And the slightest thing, if I mean the slightest thing you do wrong, you lose your your right to own firearms. So it’s not like in the U.S. where it has to be like a felony felony crime or felony conviction or something like that. No. Any, any sort of.
Sprecher 1
Got it. Yeah. I moved to Michigan. I got a concealed carry permit in in the first two weeks I was here, you know.
Sprecher 2
To get a concealed to get a concealed carry permit in Germany. You would have to be the prime star witness in a high level mafia case or something of that magnitude. It’s that bad. So So essentially they make it so complicated for you to to own a firearm that many young people, they do not bother. And so yeah, most people, they’ve they’ve never they’ve they’ve never held a firearm, operate a firearm.
Sprecher 2
They know nothing about firearms.
Sprecher 1
And what’s interesting is there’s only about five countries in the world that actually produce armored fighting vehicles. Germany is one of them. And so what you’re telling me is that Germany is basically not able to even do that anymore.
Sprecher 2
Not really. Not with the sabotage going on. I mean, it’s I mean, it’s been I mean, it’s sabotage techniques are are fairly basic. So, I mean, you see everything in the German in German politics, anything you would classify as a sabotage if you make projects too expensive, if you keep changing them, if you apply ridiculous laws to them, if you if it takes you ten months to submit an order to produce things and and then it takes 18 more months to defend itself, Germany absolutely.
Sprecher 1
Defend itself.
Sprecher 2
Absolutely not.
Sprecher 1
So this is okay. So what’s interesting is that? You know, this is the thing I’m wrestling with in my mind. We have your dysfunction in Germany. You’re describing something that we in the United States were starting to get into this ourselves. This sort of thing is starting to appear in the American the shrinking.
Sprecher 2
Yeah, the the shrinking, the shrinking of, the forces. I mean, the the numbers I think the numbers in America was it had 1.4 million, 1.5 million active duty something.
Sprecher 1
Yeah, we’re we’re we’re getting down there and in and of course the Navy is not able to build the ships. They’re making things complicated. They’re making the aircraft too expensive. Too complicated. Yeah.
Sprecher 2
And these they stopped some of these companies went out of business making or they shrunk the production of making these these or they call them the rocket propulsion systems like these small these small systems for various rockets. I think they’re they’re not being made in sufficient numbers. And also the I mean the the regular Naito naito ammunition, I mean, a lot of these ammo dumps have been depleted.
Sprecher 2
I mean, we have we have substantial American American ammunition in storage facilities here in Germany. But I think they have been emptied out because of Ukraine. And all in all. Yeah. And also some of these ammo storages in Israel have been emptied out, these 155 millimeter shells. I think they have all.
Sprecher 1
These real sort of howitzer shells.
Sprecher 2
Ukraine. Yeah, they’ve they’ve been moved to move to Ukraine too. And it’s everything. Everything has become a problem. The I think the the F-35 stealth plane I think has been sabotaged quite a bit. I mean, they have quite a bit of trouble with that. So not lots of trouble with it. And it’s too expensive and all this sort of stuff and an astounding number of problems for the leading engineering nation in the world.
Sprecher 2
So I think there’s something going on.
Sprecher 1
Similar to we’re going to follow the German track or yeah, follow the track.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. And also and also the and also the the, the military has problems. I mean, the American military has problems recruiting new people because of excessive cannabis, smoking, obesity, mental illness. You know, everybody’s on pills. So yeah, that’s also a big problem.
Sprecher 1
Know there’s this, you know, it seems to me that there’s a race between the East and the West on these various dysfunctions that the West is unable to. What’s interesting is that Russia now can only produce was it t 64 tanks, other facilities have broken down that they that their ability to sustain their war is breaking down for their own reasons.
Sprecher 1
Corruption, for example, the lack of terror. But the West discipline is breaking down. Common sense is breaking down. I saw katherine Clark, the Democratic House whip yesterday, speak against Jim Jordan, who was nominated, was running for speaker of the House. They were doing votes and the speech was so violent, she called him a threat to America or a danger I thought I had never heard this kind of rhetoric in on the House floor of the United States Congress in my life that a House whip would call a prospective speaker of the House a danger to the country, right?
Sprecher 1
Yeah. You might have heard that just before the American Civil War, out of out of a Southerner talking about the the people who were opposed to slavery being dangerous to the country. But but you really it’s the divide in the United States is becoming worse. And the dysfunction though it’s not at the level that it is in Russia.
Sprecher 1
And I suspect China has dysfunction, too. I wonder if all these countries go to war and they kick their war machine and everything just goes kerplunk.
Sprecher 2
Mm hmm.
Sprecher 1
Because I think and you could tell me if I’m wrong. And this is what interests me about philosophy and the relationship of philosophy to strategy and statecraft is that philosophically, we are so demented we are I think we’re losing our minds. We believe in things. We believe in things that things are real, that aren’t. The things that are important aren’t that upside, that everything is upside down and backwards in our in our thinking and perceiving.
Sprecher 1
And so what is ultimate Lee working? You know?
Sprecher 2
Well, I hope I hope they they all they all mess up so bad. Nothing, nothing really works as intended. And they ultimately will settle to to some to some degree, you know, with conditions that are not completely horrible everyone but I’m constantly I’m constantly running these these different scenarios. You know how how could this how would this play out And I think that with the old conventional warfare, I mean, to this point, I think with conventional, conventional they have I mean, many players have somewhat exhausted themselves.
Sprecher 2
But I think that in several countries they can still mobilize people and use them in some somewhat of a of a capacity. So, for example, I heard various numbers from Germany that there is there are storage facilities where they keep the old assault rifles from the cold. And the numbers the estimates run up to, let’s say, 1.1. 5 million rifles or more and they also store the specific ammunition, which is not the current NAITO five, five, six standard, but the older German standard.
Sprecher 2
And so in theory.
Sprecher 1
The Germans did. What was the German standard?
Sprecher 2
I think it was the what was it? It’s a longer bullet. It’s like the 51. I think the the it’s the longer bullet that were used in the, the HK G3 rifle, you know, the, the the older they had this heckler heckler and cock HK G3 rifles quite a few of them and they use the longer the longer bullets so that it’s a bigger caliber it’s bigger than what what the current NATO’s standard is the new the current 556.
Sprecher 2
And so they have rifles, they have ammo and of course, factories, they can produce things. You know, you have some quite innovative companies in Germany. So it’s theoretically possible to mobilize, let’s say, a million people or 1.5 million people and give them a rifle and give them ammo and some sort of a uniform or whatever or a patch and just send them through basic training and then send them off into combat or something like that.
Sprecher 2
So this can be done in Germany even though, you know, people have have no experience with weapons, no previous experience. And I think this goes this is the same for other countries as well. So whether it’s Europe or it’s Asia, they can mobilize quite a few soldiers. And I think when ultimately when the smoke settles, then, you know, the big players, they can just decide if they settle or on what terms they will settle.
Sprecher 1
You know, there’s this I don’t know if you saw this, but there there was apparently an agreement in Moscow about arranging some kind of a making arrangement for Putin’s successor. And of course, there’s talk that Putin’s health is worsening. But so there’s that dimension of it. But but I really have the sense that that there is a a a stupidity problem and a disconnect from reality problem in Berlin, in Moscow, probably in Beijing, in Washington.
Sprecher 1
It it is universal to to modernity and and when when it comes to these spy networks and all these people who are compromised, you know, what Viktor Suvorov wrote in business is that if Russia goes to war, this is how are you going to know They are going to literally dump all the blackmail they’ve been holding on all these leaders who have worked with them so that nobody in the West will will trust their leaders anymore.
Sprecher 1
Have you heard this novel?
Sprecher 2
It kind of makes sense because I’ve been telling people, you know, because so many people out there, they’ve become pro-Russia or neutral on Russia or whatever and and there’s always this hope, this irrational hope that they will that they will be supplied by Russia with useful information, you know, against politicians over here. But so far, that has not happened.
Sprecher 2
And for decades and decades that has not happened the way people hope for it. And so so I’m telling them the only so the only, as you said, the only conceivable scenario where there is an information dump that would be tied to something else like a war, and it must be something, something really outrageously something, something some special event, because otherwise this just doesn’t happen.
Sprecher 2
They, the Russians, do not help you. They will not give you the juice, the juicy stuff that will make your dreams come true. But they rather collect compromising information about you and the people that you’re working with. And I think that back in the old days, I think the cutoff point maybe was the year, let’s say, 19, 1900 or something, or maybe it was an earlier cutoff point before or that if you were in the Empire game, let’s say, for example, high ranking Brits, if you were if you grew up in these families and you to understand the different elements of of the empire, I think back in those days you could still grasp all
Sprecher 2
the major of it. You don’t have to be a master in all of these different areas, but you still have to understand all these areas. And I think what happened, especially in the 20th century, imperialism became just too complex, too specialized. And I think the people in charge, they lost touch with some of the new technologies and some of the complexities that that arose.
Sprecher 2
And so in the old days, you could be, you know, a professional, professional person running an empire and you could. So oftentimes these people had a personal military experience going back to the 1800s or 1700s, you would have an arrest, an aristocrat who was himself guiding or steering battles, deciding battles, working with the generals, sometimes even being more hands on like Napoleon was kind of hands on with sculpting on the battlefields and inspecting everything.
Sprecher 2
So this was kind of the old way you had to make these large decisions, but you also had to be good in military and in espionage. You had to understand all that. But it just became incredibly complicated to just to run to run a big structure. And and maybe this complexity will lead to some sort of a settlement, some some sort of a deal, because it just it’s you can simulate it in a computer anymore.
Sprecher 2
I mean, you could simulate, let’s say, for example, a regime change operation during the Cold War. You could run, run the simulations in a computer and then try to replicate that in the real world. But when you’re talking about, you know, a larger part of the world and all these different intelligence networks and compromising each other, I think it’s it’s it’s insane.
Sprecher 2
It’s impossible to simulate on a computer. And why would they do something which they cannot really understand, which they cannot really simulate.
Sprecher 1
But if you have basically debauched, everyone’s thinking by exposing them to phony conspiracy theories, phony narratives, phony ideas of reality. Look, I look at the American far right and the left. The left is completely deluded and disconnected from reality in this country. And All of the policies the left in the United States advocate our policies of national suicide, you know, open borders, really trade with China, really don’t rebuild the nuclear forces, let them rot.
Sprecher 1
Really?
Sprecher 2
Everyone is a woman. No. Yeah, everyone is a woman.
Sprecher 1
That’s gendered thing. We’re going to have sexual, what do you call it.
Sprecher 2
Reassignment or a formation of reassignment surgery? No, no, they called it Ephron. They call it affirmation. No, it’s not reassignment. It’s affirmation.
Sprecher 1
Oh, I see affirmation. So you have these things and then you had you had them actually twisting people’s arms to take an experimental drug. Where were you? Don’t just have 10,000 people as guinea pigs. You have you have hundreds of millions of people as guinea pigs. I find the common sense of the leaders of the Western countries is gone.
Sprecher 1
They are disoriented. I think back to Richard Weaver’s book, Ideas have consequences. And he basically said that nominalism and materialism lead to a kind of progressive insanity and mental paralysis where you are no longer living in reality anymore, that that something has happened inside of people that’s broken now.
Sprecher 2
So insanity, so insanity works better than terror or insanity and terror work better than just terror.
Sprecher 1
Yeah, you have to. I mean, and of course, Stalin was completely we know that Lenin was psychologically abnormal, but yet even then, because they had something that worked. Right. I mean, they were killing people. They destroying the country progressively by stages. But the country was expanding. It was winning wars. They were spreading communism. You know, it it seems be that that all of the new, you know, ideological thinking, education, all the concepts, there is something that every concept has to be against human nature, against the way we’ve always done things before.
Sprecher 1
There are always reinventing the wheel and it’s not around anymore, you know what I’m saying? Yeah. So it is it it is the breakdown of civilization in the most and I have seen things in my life that I thought I would never see. I mean, I mean, you, you, you, you literally have in the United States an education that destroys children’s thinking, their ability to actually reason.
Sprecher 1
You had the you had phonics removed starting in the 1930s by these leftist educators in the United States and like people who don’t learn by phonics never are fully literate. Right?
Sprecher 2
Oh, by the way, when you mentioned when you mentioned this, this sabotage of society, especially sabotage in the schools, I mean, this also goes back to the Skull and Bones group, right? Because the Skull and Bones people, the skull and Bones people, they had this connection to Germany where some experimentation was done in social sciences. So they were trying to out what works and what doesn’t.
Sprecher 2
And it seems that the bones people, they took this information from Germany and then they applied what doesn’t work for kids and they withheld stuff that would have worked. And so when when for example when the Nazis were the Nazis were cracking down not just against every Jewish scientist, but also different kinds of scientists, quite a few scientists actually fled Germany and they went the United States and some of these institutes were then restarted, reestablished in America.
Sprecher 2
So the Frankfurt School, the Institute for what it called social studies or whatever. And so they they moved they moved these people to America. And so then you had like these guys such as how about how about Marcuse who developed critical theory. So what did the left the left is using to just it’s just agitate against anything. And this, of.
Sprecher 1
Course, now critical race theory is taught in the U.S. military.
Sprecher 2
Yeah.
Sprecher 1
And so you are you are black and white U.S. military personnel being told, hey, you Whitey, you’re a racist, you’re evil, you’ve hurt this guy over here and why the heck are you serving in the U.S. military? It’s a racist. Yeah, the flag there is racist. Why are you I mean, it it is demoralizing the personnel. And yet General Mark Milley militantly.
Sprecher 1
That’s important. We have to give we have to teach people this. And it’s like it comes out of well, it’s it’s derivative of Herbert Marcuse, as you know critical theory. It’s critical race theory.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. And he was a mike Husserl was attached to the to the American intelligence American intelligence community. And and so they.
Sprecher 1
Which is in synonym.
Sprecher 2
Yeah. And so and so so these these these weirdo these these weirdo Germans were then cultivated in in the United States for various purposes. And it’s you can always find the skull and bones the Skull and bones network involved for especially with the school the school system in America. And when I looked at the origins, when I looked at the origins of Skull and Bones, I basically found I found old style British intelligence, aristocratic intelligence.
Sprecher 2
So even before the revolution and of course, even after the American Revolution, you had these British networks operating, British networks operating in America.
Sprecher 1
We know Skull and Bones as a fraternity at Yale that George H.W. Bush and presumably George W Bush were members of. So and of course, they’re known to have some kind of strange initiation rituals. So what what the skull and bones, what’s its origins? Where did it come from? I’ve got Anthony Sutton’s book here on it. I read it.
Sprecher 1
But explain to the listeners what Skull and Bones is.
Sprecher 2
Well, Skull and Bones is some it’s an it’s a very elite organization that is very picky with its members. So you need to come from an old family and especially if your parents were members, you can also be a member. So these kind of organizations, there are many of them, but only some them are really old and and really powerful.
Sprecher 2
Now, on every college in the United States, you can find different kinds of societies, same in Britain and some of organizations can be dangerous. For example, the Cambridge Apostles, you know, this was the the left wing. They called it a debate club. Right. And some of these groups are more of a debate club. But some of these groups, they have their own buildings, they have their own rituals, they have their own history, and they may have their own, too.
Sprecher 2
And so it’s easy to think of Skull and Bones as American, but the roots are clearly British and by British that that oftentimes means these weirdo German origin, aristocratic families. And so people have quoted some references inside the bones building and inside the organization in general. They’ve quoted some things that they have. They have sort of a thing for Germany or German history.
Sprecher 2
So they they view themselves as having German, German links or whatever. But I think that it’s the high level German aristocracy, sort of the origin, because that German or partial German, a German aristocracy then took over the British throne in 14 and this was a large operation of infiltration. So you have these, these family clusters. So for example, if you take if you look at Elihu Yale, Elihu, Yale was a British American colonial administrator, and his ancestors include the royal family of Plantagenet Now Plantagenet.
Sprecher 2
They’ve they once ruled Britain and part of France a very powerful family. And some experts say that multiple American presidents can be traced back to. So the family of Plantagenet.
Sprecher 1
William of Normandy’s family.
Sprecher 2
Yeah, exactly. And and the the House of Plantagenet was aligned with the velvet and cluster of families. And, for example, Hanover Hanover, they are a wealth and they took over the British throne in 1714. So very often in Plantagenet, they were kind of partners against other aristocratic families. For example, the French, the the the French lines that became the French kings.
Sprecher 2
And so this is this is one of these just this one one bit of the background. So then Eli, who Eli who? Yale’s father was a wealthy Boston merchant and lawyer to Robert Rich, the second Earl of Waldwick, who was a member of the British Privy Council. Uh, and then Samuel Eton. Eli, who Yale’s uncle, helped found Harvard.
Sprecher 2
So again, British aristocratic ties everywhere. And Eli, who only lived in America as a child, spent the rest of his life in England, Wales and India. He became an employee of the infamous British East India Company. In 1699, he returned to Britain with a fortune, which he made with diamonds and notable diamonds from these mines included Orlov of Diamond, which belonged to Prince Grigori Orlov and Catherine the great of Russia.
Sprecher 2
Uh, and other very famous diamonds, such as the Hope Diamond. Then Elihu Elihu, Yale’s neighbors, included the Duke of Powys, Lord Chancellor Bathurst, Queen Anne and her son, Prince William, Duke of Baluchistan. Then Eli, whose son in law was Lord James Cavendish. James was a grandson of Countess Elizabeth Cecil, influential Cecil family. And this goes on and on and on and then the of the original founder of Yale University was James Pierpont.
Sprecher 2
Uh, James Pierpont married the daughter of John Davenport, who was the co-founder of the American Colony of New Haven, which was a British colony. And David poured was educated at Oxford, and James Pierpont daughter Sarah married the well-known colonial secretary, Jonathan Edwards, and a descendant of James Pierpont was John Pierpont Morgan, the infamous J.P. Morgan. And Morgan had first joined the firm of Peabody and Co and the houses creditors included the Baring Brothers of England, and then they approached the Bank of England for a loan.
Sprecher 2
It is interesting. Then in 1871, uh, Anthony Joseph of Drexel became JP’s mentor. They founded Drexel Morgan and Cole, and this is where it gets interesting. Drexel’s brother, Joseph William had a daughter named Elizabeth, and she married John Berry’s 45th Baron de ses from the British Privy Council. So now, Elizabeth, by marriage had become a Baroness, Baroness Disease, and she was the one who claimed that Lord Louis Mountbatten was not just a homosexual, but also a pedophile.
Sprecher 2
It’s her quote, it’s her quote about Mountbatten being a pedophile. Her quote that ended up in the FBI, the FBI files on Mountbatten. She even wrote a book. It’s called Turn of the World about the, uh, the history of the American High Society from the so-called gay nineties up to the First World War. Uh, yeah. And this then this goes on was Alfonzo Taft and William Huntington, Russell and many others.
Sprecher 2
And for example, uh Alfonso Alfonso Taft, the American lawyer, diplomat, politician, attorney general and secretary of war. He was a descendant, several ancient New England or very old New England families, including those of Huntington, Pierpont Hooker, Willard Bingham and Russell. And so you this this network, this clutter of of high powered families. And this goes back to the era before the American Revolution.
Sprecher 2
So of course, you had British intelligence networks, British intelligence networks in their American colonies. And how many of those networks survived the American Revolution and how many new networks were built? And so no matter how no matter how you look at Skull and Bones, it always goes back to that that origin. And do you.
Sprecher 1
Think Skull and Bones is one of these British espionage network connected, get the young men into this thing and then figure out which ones you could recruit.
Sprecher 2
It’s thoroughly British. And by British, it also goes into the these very, very old German families. I mean, we’re talking families go back 1200 years. So, for example, the the wealth and I was mentioning such as the D.A. for a king of Britain, George George the first, he was originally from Hanover in Germany. So he just moved to Britain and so these these veils and they actually go back to at least the year 800 and they were able to.
Sprecher 2
Charlemagne Yeah. So they were able to grow each generation and just spread and spread and spread and spread. And then they they had this alliance with two other clusters. The Vintner and Reinado. And so they’ve, they, they’ve grown to be very, very, very large. And this was sort of the advantage which they had. And so you get these weird German vibes and you then get the, you know, the, the modernized British version and then this sort of became the skull and bones, the skull and bones fraternity.
Sprecher 2
So that’s not really, well, an American tradition they’re doing.
Sprecher 1
André Nev Rosoff, who was the he ended up buying in the 1980s. It was late seventies, was a Yale graduate. He was from Russia. His dad, Lev Now Resolve, who I knew before his death, was Stalin’s favorite translator from Russian into English and English into Russian. By the way, I never knew off the Navajos reserves had defected from the Soviet Union in the seventies, and Andre went to Yale.
Sprecher 1
He ended up buying the Yale Literary magazine, which had become defunct and, you know, literary. Andre is into literature. He’s a literary guy. And what was interesting was that he was publishing things that the Yale folks didn’t like, so they waged a legal battle to take the Leo Yale magazine away from Andre. And Andre wrote a book about this called The Gingerbread Race, which got killed.
Sprecher 1
It was published in Britain in the middle of the printing. It was killed. The book is I have a copy of it’s probably worth 500 bucks. And of course, I knew Andre sent me a signed copy from the because he had left the United States to live in the UK at that point. And the gingerbread race kind of shows a gingerbread man on a cross right that and his a lot of the book is about this Yale thing and about the frat boy mentality.
Sprecher 1
And it’s written from a you know, he’s got this Russian perspective in this American you know Andre’s kind of not you know, he’s sort of an international person. He’s raised in Moscow, in the Soviet Union, but he grew up partly in America. He lives in Italy now. But what’s interesting that he the gingerbread man, is his analogy of the West.
Sprecher 1
The West is the gingerbread man. You know, if know the story. I don’t know if they have it in German as it I think it’s a German nursery story to the gingerbread man. Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me the gingerbread man. And finally the gingerbread man has to cross a river. And of course, you know what water does to gingerbread?
Sprecher 1
It’s just melt.
Sprecher 2
Yeah.
Sprecher 1
So The fox came along and said, Oh, I’ll carry you across on my nose. And the gingerbread man says, Great. So he gets on the foxes nose and halfway the river, the fox gobbles them up, no more gingerbread man. Right. And so basically Andre says, Look, these people in the West, these fraternities, they really never these boys never grew up.
Sprecher 1
They remain frat boys whole life. That mentality is burned into them. Whatever fraternity they’re in, however, it’s childishness, it’s it’s not fully mature. And and he said he remembered this one American young young man. He he bragged to knowing was from the Soviet Union bragged to Andre in America, we have the pursuit of happiness. And Andre’s answer to the bullies in the Soviet Union, we have the hydrogen bomb.
Sprecher 2
Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, and.
Sprecher 1
This was this is sort of runs through the whole book. And there’s a lot of profundity in the book. But the thing that’s disturbing is that this these Western elites, they lack a kind of seriousness and when you’re talking about these aristocratic families, these people were once upon a time warriors on horseback who rode armor as their family business.
Sprecher 1
They were serious men in charge of these families. And at some point they all went soft. And this is this is a point a Russian might make. Andre Now Resort makes it also Viktor Suvorov, a.k.a Vladimir Risen has this statement in one of his books that that one of his colleagues in the GRU says well the Americans they’re not serious people.
Sprecher 1
And and I and I heard this kind of thing from Stan Luna that there was this concern that there was a there was a lack of gravitas, there was a lack of intellectual seriousness from the Americans and probably from the Germans. And you see what’s happening in your country.
Sprecher 2
I think what’s happened is that some some very, very old some, very old families, some very serious people, they they’ve created sort of an American class of privileged frat. I think it’s a very serious group that has created this sort of this frat boy level thing. I think that that was popularized in the United States. I mean, even in the in the older British student societies, I mean, some of them are very, very elite, like the bowling club, for example.
Sprecher 2
In the bowling club, you can if you become a member, you will meet the royals, prime ministers, that sort of thing. And they’ve been known to do some stupid stuff. But the families who run the system I think they are very, very serious because they’ve been around for so long. I mean, if you are around for 1200 years, I mean, you’ve dealt with temptation.
Sprecher 2
I mean, you’ve dealt with the the, you know, the luxurious temptations and the, you know, temptation to go soft. And they have actually managed to expand their power over 1200 years. And they were going with the times they were just adopting to new things and sometimes they were even the trendsetters. So I think you have both. You have like the super serious people that somehow managed to beat, to stay consistent over a long time.
Sprecher 2
But then also you have sort of this this American this this American thing they’ve created, and this is in practically every American college where they encourage people to get into serious alcoholism and stay with alcoholism. And I I’ve got something here in my notes. It’s from the it’s from the Yale Daily News from February 29th of 1972. So and this report was was titled it was titled Yale Group Spurs Mao’s Emergence.
Sprecher 2
So they’re talking about China. And it’s and it says and I have I have the link in my in my story here. It says Without Yale’s support, Mao Tse tung may never have risen from anonymity become the ruler of China.
Sprecher 1
Jonathan I read that when it came out.
Sprecher 2
Jonathan Jonathan Spence, a professor of Chinese history, was the first to discover Mao Tong’s connection to Yale. At this important juncture, the Yale and China Student Union had invited Mao to lead the editorial board of its journal. So then you look further, because initially Mao was a nobody, but his lucky angel was the Yale in China charitable medical institution also used for espionage purposes, I would think.
Sprecher 2
And and so when Mao when Mao founded a local cell of the Communist Party, Yale stepped in again and rented him three rooms, which he called a cultural bookstore. And then he was selling, supposedly selling many, many copies of his books. And these book sales made him very popular with the party. They thought he was quite talent. And the Yale China, a Yale China Association, viewed Horace Pitkin, the Yale graduate and descendant, the university’s founder, as something of a martyr because he was killed during the so-called Boxer Rebellion in China in 18 1892.
Sprecher 2
Horace went to New York’s Union Theological Seminary, a center for American infiltration of Asia. Union Theological was dominated for 20 years by Henry Sloan Coffin. Leading U.S. intelligence official Andy Sloan and Coffin Families was a member of Skull and Bones, as were a dozen of his relatives.
Sprecher 1
And so probably make him really a British agent then.
Sprecher 2
Yeah, pretty much him and pretty much. And so. So Yale expanded and China and and so yeah. And then he just started his career. So there were many organizations.
Sprecher 1
What’s interesting is the British have Magnificent Empire, which is the largest empire in the history of the world, covering like a quarter of the land surface area of the world. And then all of a sudden it falls apart. They become socialist. They Britain becomes a big nothing. Its Navy is, relatively speaking, joke compared to what it was. And and then you have and basically they’re just all going down the drain.
Sprecher 1
So whatever thing they had, it’s gone. It’s a shadow of its former self. And in that I look at the the president of the European Commission who was until 2019, your country’s defense minister Ursula von der Leyen, and the that I first read the reports about the U-boats not working in the take regiments not being functional when she was defense minister.
Sprecher 1
And in if you say she’s from an aristocratic family. I have to say that there is when you have a leader and she’s got to be one of the most foremost of the leaders to emerge out of Germany from her generation. She is not a serious person because everywhere she goes, it’s a catastrophe, right? I mean, am I missing something here that she is just a walking wrecking yard?
Sprecher 1
Yeah, of course it’s a wrecking ball.
Sprecher 2
Of course. But a lot of things have been wrecked with an intention it and she I mean, she was originally from a privileged family in a privileged family from Hanover. And then she married into some other aristocratic family or her ancestor married into this aristocratic family.
Sprecher 1
She and she looks great, has this tremendous aristocratic persona. She sounds so good, so elegant, but it’s so disastrous.
Sprecher 2
Yeah, but doesn’t it look like doesn’t it look like doesn’t it look like the assets? I mean, hard assets of the old British colonial empire? These assets sort of, you know, when, when, when the empire seemingly when, when under the rise of the Soviet Union was happening and in communist China. So it’s like the law of energy. Energy doesn’t really disappear.
Sprecher 2
It just changes form or it’s its location.
Sprecher 1
It’s just more and more like maggots in a dead dog, you know? I mean, there’s.
Sprecher 2
Well, it depends. It depends on it depends on if you if if the Russians inherited all these intelligence networks from the British, these deeply embedded, multi-generational intelligence networks, that is of tremendous this value and is more of a value than Navy ships or one of the other colonies, you know.
Sprecher 1
Well, yes. And see, that’s the interesting thing when everything they do is against their own sides, against their own country, when everything they do is sabotage, do they even know what they’re doing.
Sprecher 2
Well, somebody you mean people notice about the British Commonwealth that it is quite large, so the visible empire is gone. But there’s, there’s still this, are quite significant structures and it’s kind of obfuscated. Who is exactly owning what, who is running what. I mean, the British have been going in, I mean, the British population, they’ve been running in circles trying to figure out how much the Queen possessed, you know, because because people started to dig around, you know, all the land she owns or this she owns and that she owns and this is even and this goes even back further into the past because the queen’s relatives and ancestors, they founded quite bit of these
Sprecher 2
corporations that are global corporations today. So sometimes several corporations were started. Then they were fuzed into one, and then they were bought by another corporation. But many, many times with these big, big enterprises, you have these aristocratic backgrounds. And so it’s really a it’s really a secret who owns these corporations most of the time, because you can always put somebody sit somebody in the front and make everybody believe he is the owner or he owns the most shares of the company or whatever.
Sprecher 2
But who is the true owner. Because what does an intelligence agency, what does an intelligence agency do? They recruit sources and they create foreign companies, create front organizations. So this is what every intelligence agency does every single day. So you run a corporation, but Nobody’s supposed to know that. And I think there’s there’s something there’s there’s a lot that still needs to be needs to be uncovered to to figure out who is who and who’s working for whom.
Sprecher 2
Because I think because you mentioned this this insanity. I think this insanity that that we all feel with leaders or people in general, I think this goes back to this confusion because people just don’t know anymore who is who and who’s playing for what side. I mean, Israel. Israel is going nuts now because somewhere is a leak. Hamas knew all the secrets of Israel’s defenses.
Sprecher 2
And so where’s the league? Where are the moles and and what does Netanyahu want? Is he moving closer to the Russians? And what was Israel’s position so far with regarding Ukraine? So it’s just people are so confused about who is who, who has what agenda. And most people, they just try to get through their day. And this goes goes even for politicians, they just want to get through their day.
Sprecher 1
Yeah. And again, I you know, as a student of history, we are in the downslide we are in. This is the decay of the West. And I think the the right context for understanding this and I referred to maggots in a dead dog is there is an extent to which all of this is the epi phenomenon of western degeneration of decay that that when you look at the 18th century or the 16th century, the religious wars, there is a healthier, more discernible and rational explanation for people’s behavior.
Sprecher 1
And seem to know what they’re doing. Whereas today it’s clear that most of these actors don’t have a concept of cause and effect, don’t really understand what they’re doing, and what they’re doing often produces the opposite effect of that which they’re claiming to intend, in which they almost certainly intend. And then you have, again, as you pointed out, the Russian infiltration, penetration, manipulation and the ideological kind of agreement that so many that Vladimir Bykovsky talked about, that, hey, you got a lot of communists in the West, in the United States, people who helped communism, people who don’t want to be expose as having really helped Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Sprecher 1
Same thing in Germany. You have all these things layered into it and. And and, you know, you’ve got the story of Alexander the Great and what the Gordian Knot, if I’m remembering correctly, and if you can untie this not you know, you can rule us or whatever. So what he did is he just took a sword and he just cut it.
Sprecher 1
He didn’t try to untie it. And I think to some extent, a lot of this is like, it’s a puzzle, it’s a Gordian knot, but there’s going to be people who are going to come along and. They’re going to say, I’m not untying this. I’m just going to start using a sword. Yeah. And this is something I’ve seen for 30 years I thought would happen 30 years, because remember, you had two world wars in the first half of the 20th century.
Sprecher 1
Nothing. Now in in the the subsequent almost 80 years. And something is going to give here at some point.
Sprecher 2
I mean in the past, people were not as confused through ideology. I mean, you look at you look at somebody like you look at somebody like Washington, right. For example. So so George Washington, they had a you know, back then they had a a learning by doing mentality. So they didn’t promise to have all the answers. Let’s figure this thing out.
Sprecher 2
And then you had Napoleon. Who was Napoleon initially reading enlightenment authors. So so he was so he was he was interested in changing changing things. But then, of course, the necessities, the necessities were, you know, dictated another course. But Napoleon had to learn so many different things. And he was he was a fanatical reader. So he had to juggle all these tasks at some point.
Sprecher 2
And it’s it seems more like he he would have preferred to be a president, but unfortunately, he had to be a king. And he always he always made fun of he always made fun of the crown. He always described it as a pure necessity. It was just another task. And he was first and foremost a military man. So he was very, very hands on.
Sprecher 2
And then he had to juggle all these other tasks that he was not exactly equipped for. He not exactly trained for it. So the diplomacy that he was he was not good in diplomacy and he had severe weaknesses when it came to intelligence. But was he was very, very hands on. And some of his qualities made him stronger than his his British some of his British enemies at the time, especially King George.
Sprecher 2
The what number was it.
Sprecher 1
Third.
Sprecher 2
The third. Yeah. So there was yeah, I mean, King King George, the King George the third. He refused to address Napoleon as a proper. And then I think Napoleon replied that, well, how many years has Britain been ruled by these Georges? I mean, this is only goes back to 1714. So who is you to tell me? I’m not I’m not a king as well.
Sprecher 2
Right. So so I think people back then, they weren’t as as confused and clouded by ideology. It was more like a practical sense of let’s figure this thing out, Let’s understand these tasks and just just find a solution.
Sprecher 1
Well, the word ideology was only then being coined and Napoleon picked it up and use it as a term of actually and referring to ideologies. And it is I think that that is the problem, is that and of course, in this discussion, a lot of the focus is on intelligence and on strategy. And the thing is, is that ideology is kind of part of strategy because it’s nonsense.
Sprecher 1
It’s used to manipulate people for the most part. And I know some of my readers were confused. What do you mean? Don’t you have an ideology? No, I things I think are true and I’m trying to understand. But ideology is not is not truth.
Sprecher 2
It’s a package sort of I see it as a package of ideas. And you you are required. You supposed to you’re expected to buy the whole package instead of just looking at individual ideas and and fanatics, fanatics, they want to force you to buy the whole package and you cannot deviate.
Sprecher 1
From the package. It’s a shortcut to thinking and it’s a it’s a way of forming a kind of club where everybody thinks the same thought at once and therefore everybody’s kind of goose stepping to borrow an expression in the same direction. And so it becomes a way of herding people, of manipulating and moving people in large numbers. It a phenomenon of modern mass society.
Sprecher 1
And it is it is extremely negative because it means in some sense that when you start manipulating people and they start abbreviating, they they start they start thinking and they start abbreviating their understanding of reality to the reductionism of ideological tropes and, and notions that they then become kind of not human anymore. And in fact, the argument was made by this brilliant Russian lady analyst that there is no Russian public, there is no Russian public opinion.
Sprecher 1
There’s not even a society there because the people have all been there function as individuals and as members of society, as.
Sprecher 2
Is by.
Sprecher 1
The government, you know. Right. So in there, it’s none of it is real. And this is what we’re in danger of. This is what happened in the Third Reich. This is what is is actually happening in the Western countries now.
Sprecher 2
I mean, there’s this old saying, everybody has a plan until they get hit in the face. I mean, the moment you actually try to make these plans work, then you see reality is different than than what your ideology told you. And it’s I think it’s became so clear. Was Napoleon on because he was not really an aristocratic person and he was kind of local.
Sprecher 2
It was coming from a local family, but.
Sprecher 1
His father was a petty aristocrat, I think his.
Sprecher 2
And his father than his father then pulled some strings on French mainland to get recognition. I mean, they kind of faked things to make it look like family was was truly aristocratic. But so in in all these military schools, Napoleon, he always made a big effort and he always tried to outperform everyone else. And he was he noted that in the course of his career, he was rising up the ranks.
Sprecher 2
He noted that quite a bit of aristocrats were lazy and they were not making a large effort. So he was outperforming them. He did have ideas of changing the system and having a broader, you know, pool of of people with with some sort of control. But at some point, he was essentially forced to create a new aristocracy and to create new cadres for the future, hope for the best.
Sprecher 2
So this is always you. You do confronted with reality. And and it’s not it’s not exactly what you expected. And when when he had to when he had to create a system which he didn’t like and when he had to put on a crown when he never really liked idea in the first place of anybody having a crown for that matter.
Sprecher 1
And well, and then you get to the St Helena manuscript in it and then you’re very disappointed to read what he says in there. But anyway, Alex, this has been fantastic. I think we’ve touched on a lot of subjects and, and if people can hang with us too to follow this, it’s been really great. And I know we’re going to do this next week and, and we’ll cover more things.
Sprecher 1
So folks, thanks for being with us. Thanks to Alex Parrish. And I’m Jeff Nyquist. Thank you for joining us.
Sprecher 2
And a word of warning.
Sprecher 1
So you got that?
Sprecher 2
Yep. You know what I think?
Sprecher 1
I mean, what do we do? We did.
