Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
They had their assets stuffing ballot boxes, using mafia muscle to shut down opposition meetings. We bought the media in the region. We worked with all the religious groups and the charities and The people involved in that operation, you know, publicly wrote in the memoirs that we would have lost that election if not for the CIA.
James Woolsey even defended that regime change operation on Fox News in 2017 when he was asked, you know, Russia's meddling in our elections. We don't meddle in foreign elections. And he, you know, said, well, you know, we used to do that sort of thing, you know, in Italy and in Greece. And He's referring to this event that I'm talking about.
And then she says, well, we don't do that anymore, though, right? And he goes, well, chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, only in the interest of democracy, you know, basically. But at that point, there was no authorized CIA covert action to do it. They were a spy agency. They were on the ground. They took the reins and run.
And ex post facto, George Kennan, 12 days later, says, hey, this thing was gangbusters, right? We just swung the entire course of the Italian election doing this. We need to do this everywhere. And in fact, we need to create the capacity to do this everywhere, even if we don't intend to use it. Because this was a real last-minute effort last time. We need this capacity in place.
Our assets in the organized labor, our assets in the judiciary, our assets in the media, our assets in the movies and culture – even if we don't intend to, just in case we ever need to. And he called this the inauguration of organized political warfare.
And something like 15 to 20 times in this memo, he presupposes that it's going to be parked at what he wanted to set up inside the State Department called the Bureau of Political Warfare.
and that it would be a formal – that what we now call CIA covert activity would simply be another office at the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, D.C., in Foggy Bottom, not in Langley, Virginia, and it would be called the Bureau of Political Warfare. But he goes over the reason why we might not want to structure it that way.
We might want to put it at another agency, which would come to be the CIA. And he talks about how the funding – The funding for it may not be able to be disguised on the State Department's books. It may raise too many questions. There may be too much of a – for this sort of covert activity, it may be best because it's political warfare and it's really dirty and it's huge diplomatic blowback.
And State Department has to report its finances very publicly and there's –
we created the state department the very first meeting of of congress of the united states of america in 1789 it was the first agency we created it's ancient everything runs through it so he said it might be best actually to have this done but it should still work constantly with the state department it's fundamentally a state farming function but perhaps it should be parked somewhere else and then two months later boom cia nsc 10-2
was tasked to do the thing that was originally anticipated for the State Department Office of Political Warfare. The same thing is happening right now with USAID. That's all this is. They're just going to create, and in fact, everyone can read Max Boot, the, uh, you know, Arch Council on Foreign Relations, you know, Never Trump, Neocon, um, you know, uh,
you know, constant voice on the think tank space against all things Trump world, he penned a article, I believe it was during the Trump administration, where he called for this exact same structure to be set up to create, that we should not shy away from this sort of work or hide the fact that that we do them. We should create a formal track at USAID called the Career Track for Political Warfare.
And it should be called a Bureau of Political Warfare inside of USAID. And people should be trained specifically for this function of USAID early in their careers. And it should not be something that's a big scandal. And so we have a limited personnel pool because nobody wants to say that's what they do. They should be celebrated.
We need to turn the culture around so that when USAID can do this, they've got a much bigger and better network to do this. And we're now running into that. So I don't actually see USAID going away when you move it at state. Okay. You are inheriting – and this is an uncouth phrase, but I think the visceral imagery is intended to make this stick – closing the Ronald Reagan building –
And moving all of those funds, if it's a billion in overhead, moving just, if you keep all the grants and move that 43 billion into the State Department, the State Department just inherits a USAID herpes infection. It's the same problems.
It's this tumor, this growth, this permanent flare-up that now it's just, there's no difference between, other than the structural that allows you to get away from oversight, which is what I'm saying. But frankly, there'd be no difference if you shut down Langley headquarters and you created an office of political warfare at state to do that.
If you shut down USAID headquarters and created an office for international development at state... Now, you're making Marco Rubio at that point the most powerful secretary of state in American history when you do that. But fundamentally, the problem was there was not oversight or repercussions for wrongdoing and rogue activity at USAID.
And so it's coming back to the place it was intended to be spawned out of.
What is that? The Atlantic Council bills itself as NATO's think tank, effectively. The easiest way to think of them is the sort of civil military, semi-clandestine, even though it's public-facing, coordinating arm for NATO priorities. So when you have... NATO is obviously the Western world's military alliance.
And so they're concerned with the military activity of U.S., France, all the NATO countries. And it's their sort of consensus military activity. And people are finding this out, who are mostly concerned with domestic policy, they're finding this out more and more with this USAID story, which is that
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