The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 19 ｜ Fred Burton ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

00:00:00.000 Most people, I mean, look at millennials, they don't even remember 9-11.

00:00:20.620 For most people, that's where we started.

00:00:24.720 People a little older, maybe they'll say World Trade Center.

00:00:28.200 But it was in Beirut that this really put us on this path, right?

00:00:35.220 Without a doubt.

00:00:36.200 Beirut was the center of gravity when I was a young special agent working the embassy bombings and the kidnappings and the hijackings.

00:00:44.740 All roads of terror just flowed through Beirut, originated out of Beirut. 0.98

00:00:50.220 And the principal enemy at that time was the Iranian-backed Hezbollah organization, which is still very relevant today, Glenn.

00:00:59.800 And the guy who—explain who—what was his name?

00:01:05.460 What was his name?

00:01:06.940 Imad Mughniya?

00:01:08.300 Yeah, I think he was the—no, Imad.

00:01:11.000 Yeah.

00:01:12.060 Imad.

00:01:12.560 Imad Mughniya was pretty much the center of gravity for the Hezbollah security apparatus.

00:01:20.700 He was liaison with the Iranian intelligence service. 0.69

00:01:24.440 He was the master terrorist.

00:01:26.420 Most people from our generation can recall Carlos the Jackal.

00:01:30.660 But after Carlos the Jackal, there was no bigger terrorist than Imad Mughniya, who had more U.S. and Israeli blood on his hands than any other terrorist before Osama bin Laden came around. 0.80

00:01:43.940 So how do we know Carlos the Jackal?

00:01:47.360 We know Osama bin Laden, but we don't know this guy.

00:01:50.200 Well, it took us a long time to map out who Mughniya was, Glenn. 0.99

00:01:54.460 And I can tell you, when I was a young agent working the hostage cases and the terrorist attacks, that we had a grainy photograph of this guy that we really did not know who he was.

00:02:05.640 And we started an intelligence collection effort to try to figure out exactly who Imad Mughniya was.

00:02:10.800 And we actually got some intelligence as to his identity.

00:02:14.380 And then we started to kind of walk back the cat to try to figure out exactly where he was inside the Hezbollah organization.

00:02:21.240 Remember, when all these attacks were taking place in Beirut during this time period, we had this group called the Islamic Jihad Organization.

00:02:30.560 And I can remember studying their communiques, and we sent it off for psycholinguistic analysis.

00:02:36.360 We had the FBI and the CIA look at it to try to figure out who was this person crafting these communiques.

00:02:42.920 And it all led back to this character by the name of Mughniya, who was responsible for all these terrorist attacks. 0.97

00:02:50.100 So were we prepared at all?

00:02:56.160 I know when all hell broke loose in Beirut, we didn't have anybody who was really prepared in the CIA to deal with this kind of organization, right?

00:03:13.320 You're absolutely correct.

00:03:14.980 Remember, the CIA was stood up to combat the KGB, to go behind the Iron Curtain.

00:03:21.700 So can I ask you if this is too much of a movie understanding?

00:03:26.480 But it seems to me that while they were ruthless and everything else, there was rules where in the Middle East there doesn't seem to be any rules. 0.87

00:03:36.000 Is that true or is that movie?

00:03:37.580 No, that's real true.

00:03:39.500 There used to be rules in the intelligence service, even doing battle with the KGB.

00:03:45.600 You know, the gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail.

00:03:48.200 You don't kidnap other intelligence officers.

00:03:50.820 You don't assassinate other intelligence officers.

00:03:53.300 There was just understanding.

00:03:55.560 Then Hezbollah comes along. 0.96

00:03:57.520 Imad Mughniya comes along with Beirut Rules, which was the title of the book, in that all the gloves were off in that time period.

00:04:06.360 They went after the CIA.

00:04:08.540 They went after the United States Embassy in 1983 in the first bombing, which took out the eyes and ears of intelligence for the United States government when the CIA had a meeting there and it was car bombed by Hezbollah.

00:04:23.100 And that was really the first volley of attack that decimated U.S. intelligence in that time period.

00:04:30.380 So Reagan was so focused on the Soviet Union.

00:04:35.200 When this started to happen, did he understand it?

00:04:41.820 Was this a secondary?

00:04:43.900 Because this will lead to the main character in your book who's a real American hero.

00:04:48.460 And it seems odd the way that was treated when he was kidnapped and taken.

00:04:55.000 So I'm trying to get an understanding.

00:04:57.980 Did they see the Middle East then and these new kinds of terrorists as something big and important in the future? 0.99

00:05:09.120 Or was this just some gnats that we have to deal with here?

00:05:13.760 We're dealing with the real problem of the Soviet Union. 0.95

00:05:16.380 I think they dealt with Beirut and the Middle East in this time period during the Reagan administration as almost a tactical problem, meaning it wasn't a strategic kind of issue like the Soviet Union was during that time period with Star Wars and the fall of the wall, meaning our arch enemy was the Soviet Union.

00:05:36.280 And along came this asymmetrical kind of group that was able to bring the United States to his needs in many ways and take the fight to us.

00:05:46.540 And we were not prepared for that during that time period.

00:05:49.560 And our intelligence, Glenn, during that window was very poor.

00:05:54.160 We didn't see the truck bombs coming.

00:05:56.580 We didn't see the kidnapping of the Americans coming.

00:05:59.040 And yet they kept continuing.

00:06:01.360 And then the CIA had to do a huge course correction to try to deal with the problem.

00:06:07.380 And again, all roads led to Beirut.

00:06:11.800 When we had the bombing of the Marine barracks, I've read several times that if Reagan would have responded with overwhelming force, the future might have been greatly different.

00:06:27.120 Do you believe that?

00:06:27.760 I do.

00:06:28.820 I think with the benefit of hindsight and living through this, I mean, we were so caught up in the fray during that time period.

00:06:35.160 It's hard to look out over the horizon to try to see what's coming.

00:06:39.640 But I do think we were not prepared.

00:06:41.920 I think that basically we folded our tent and went home after that.

00:06:46.440 We tried to leave Beirut.

00:06:48.940 And Hezbollah won and literally drove us out of Lebanon in many ways. 0.98

00:06:53.620 So I think with the benefit of hindsight that if we had tried a little different strategy that perhaps we would have been more successful.

00:07:00.580 Okay.

00:07:01.100 So now let's get into the book because it's just some kind of basic frame framework.

00:07:06.460 But your book is a spy novel, except it's true.

00:07:12.080 It's Ian Fleming, except it's true.

00:07:14.380 And you introduce us to a hero that I remember hearing about, but not really hearing about, William Buckley.

00:07:25.760 Put us in the time, what was happening, and let's begin with who he was.

00:07:33.400 Who was William Buckley?

00:07:34.700 Bill Buckley was an American patriot.

00:07:38.180 At age 13, he's listening to the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor on his radio at home outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

00:07:47.560 His sister tells me that he always wanted to be a soldier.

00:07:50.840 He played with little toy soldiers when he was a kid.

00:07:53.560 And shortly after his graduation from high school in 1947, he goes off to the Korean War, where he's awarded the Silver Star for rushing a Chinese machine gun nest at age 18 with the 1st Cavalry Division.

00:08:09.500 Jeez.

00:08:10.420 He was different.

00:08:11.920 He was a man that, as you will see in the story, is always running towards danger.

00:08:16.660 So after the Korean War, he goes back to the Boston area and literally becomes a librarian, which is so different.

00:08:24.020 He was just that kind of person.

00:08:25.760 He was a very well-read man.

00:08:28.100 And he attends school at Boston University, and he takes multiple languages.

00:08:33.500 And after university, at Boston University, he joins the CIA, which at that time is just starting up in the mid-1950s.

00:08:43.060 And he goes off and starts doing a little bit of work for the CIA, and then Vietnam is heating up, and he goes off to Vietnam as one of Kennedy's first Green Berets.

00:08:56.580 And he's in special forces assigned to the Phoenix program in Vietnam.

00:09:00.600 Which is what?

00:09:01.260 The Phoenix program is what?

00:09:02.820 The Phoenix program was winning the hearts and minds.

00:09:05.180 A lot of misinformation has been written about it, and it's pretty much, from a historical perspective, viewed by many as an assassination targeting program.

00:09:16.140 I was just going to say, it's an assassination club.

00:09:19.060 It was part of that, yes.

00:09:21.440 But it was also an effort to try to win the hearts and minds and to try to join the enemy forces together and try to combat, again, the Soviet empire in that realm of the world. 0.82

00:09:33.860 And I've got these fabulous little pictures, the old-fashioned Instagram pictures of Bill Buckley in the story where he's sending messages home, and he's riding down the Mekong Delta with a .50 caliber submachine gun, and he's talking about what's happening in the field.

00:09:51.600 And what was fascinating to me, Glenn, and I know you've done a lot of stories too, every picture of Bill in the field in Vietnam, he's with an Australian special forces guy, usually a radio man.

00:10:03.040 And that started me thinking, well, I had no idea that the Australians were so active with the Green Berets and with the CIA in Vietnam.

00:10:11.060 So that in itself is worth another whole story.

00:10:14.560 But after Vietnam, Bill goes back to the CIA and literally bounces all around the world at all the hot spots.

00:10:23.340 What does he do as a CIA operative?

00:10:26.960 He's what is called as a paramilitary kind of person.

00:10:30.560 Inside the CIA, there's a different class structure, to put it bluntly.

00:10:35.920 You have the Yalies, which Bill wasn't. 0.97

00:10:38.680 Although he was from New England, you know, this was a hardscrabble guy.

00:10:42.340 This was a guy that cut his teeth on the front lines in Korea.

00:10:46.600 And yet he was extraordinarily intelligent.

00:10:50.060 Absolutely.

00:10:51.220 Well-read man, a student of languages, a student of history, a student of war.

00:10:56.960 And he becomes a paramilitary expert where he travels around the world teaching foreign intelligence and security services how to conduct hostage rescues, how to put together intelligence-related activities.

00:11:11.020 So that was Bill's expertise.

00:11:13.440 So in 1983, after the embassy is leveled, literally in a car bomb, at a meeting where all the CIA personnel are gathering, Bill raises his hand and volunteers to go to Beirut when nobody else wanted to go.

00:11:32.400 But that doesn't surprise me because that's the kind of man he was.

00:11:35.920 Was he the logical choice or was he the choice, let me put it this way, it seems as though he was sent in on kind of a really dangerous, crazy mission and you're like, who do you want to do this?

00:11:57.520 And it's definitely not a suit.

00:11:59.540 You need somebody who is really intelligent, but you don't want a suit.

00:12:03.800 Right.

00:12:04.280 You need a hardscrabble guy.

00:12:06.040 You need somebody that's been on the front lines.

00:12:08.480 You need somebody that understands the enemy.

00:12:10.820 I think the CIA got it after the 83 bombing in that, look, we're not prepared for what's coming at us.

00:12:18.520 We have enough suits walking the halls at Langley.

00:12:21.740 We need a man that's a former Green Beret, somebody that's been on the tip of the spear, that understands guerrilla warfare.

00:12:29.760 And let's send that person to Beirut. 0.72

00:12:31.700 But more importantly, Glenn, he's the only one that volunteers to go, as you can imagine, during that time period.

00:12:39.340 And to me, again, that doesn't surprise me because that's the kind of guy Bill Buckley was.

00:12:44.460 So just to put us back in that time, 1979, we have the hostage crisis.

00:12:50.380 In Iran, in Tehran.

00:12:51.400 Right.

00:12:51.660 And they take our embassy.

00:12:53.720 Indeed.

00:12:54.200 And we really, we were pretty shocked by that, weren't we?

00:12:57.020 We were.

00:12:57.800 One of our agents was held captive for a better part of a year.

00:13:00.940 Right.

00:13:01.540 So we just got through that.

00:13:03.260 Then there was the Marine barracks bombing.

00:13:06.900 Correct.

00:13:07.940 And then the CIA.

00:13:10.800 We have the 83 bombing. 0.89

00:13:12.560 Then we have the Marine barracks bombing.

00:13:14.740 Then we have the second embassy bombing that takes place.

00:13:18.420 OK.

00:13:18.880 During the sequencing.

00:13:19.800 And where is he coming in?

00:13:21.640 He's coming in after the first embassy bombing.

00:13:25.400 OK.

00:13:25.860 To restand, to stand up the CIA eyes and ears in Beirut.

00:13:30.660 But before the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut.

00:13:35.500 Who was responsible for the embassy bombing?

00:13:37.880 Imad Mugnya.

00:13:38.720 OK.

00:13:39.380 Same suspect.

00:13:40.280 Right.

00:13:41.020 So does he know him at this point?

00:13:43.900 No.

00:13:44.100 Is he starting to?

00:13:44.800 OK.

00:13:44.960 Now, Buckley doesn't know who Mugnya is, but he knows that we have this group called Islamic Jihad that is suspected of being Iranian-backed that might have this murky link to Hezbollah.

00:13:55.720 But they really don't know the actors and the principal tactical operators inside the organization.

00:14:00.920 OK.

00:14:00.940 So he comes over, and what does he do when he gets there?

00:14:05.660 His primary mission during that time period, remember, we don't really have an embassy.

00:14:09.780 The Brits give us some space.

00:14:12.360 Bill has to rebuild the intelligence network that was lost after the 83 bombing when all the CIA personnel are wiped out.

00:14:21.200 So he has to reinstitute basic intelligence collection, basic surveillance operation.

00:14:27.300 He has to try to map the enemies that are against us.

00:14:30.200 He tries to put the pieces of the puzzle together about what happened in the 83 blast.

00:14:35.780 So part of his mission was figure out what happened, try to forecast what's coming next, and lo and behold, we're hit again at the Marine barracks bombing while on Bill's watch.

00:14:46.840 So it's just nothing but terrorism and chaos and mayhem, and Bill's at the center of gravity trying to figure this all out.

00:14:53.940 And then I'm afraid he's abducted one morning on his ride to work.

00:15:07.320 First of all, what do you do when you have no assets?

00:15:13.020 How did he even begin?

00:15:14.800 What did he do?

00:15:15.720 You fly by the seat of your pants.

00:15:17.760 It's kind of like any other operation where you have to go back in.

00:15:22.280 You have to have meetings with your French counterparts, your British counterparts, your Lebanese liaison services.

00:15:28.120 But remember, this is like a Humphrey Bogart Casablanca kind of atmosphere where everybody's on the payroll of different people.

00:15:35.280 You have spies everywhere.

00:15:37.020 You have the Israeli Mossad operating there.

00:15:39.100 You've got the French, the Germans, the Brits. 0.97

00:15:41.160 And so Bill's job is to establish, again, a CIA presence, rebuild a CIA liaison network.

00:15:48.680 So there's a lot of meetings.

00:15:50.660 There's a lot of how are we going to figure out what happened?

00:15:54.300 What's the next threat coming towards us?

00:15:56.640 And this is all before the days of computers and cell phones.

00:15:59.900 Right.

00:16:00.000 So a week before he's kidnapped, he tells a friend, I'm in trouble.

00:16:09.120 And he explains that he's going to be kidnapped and what his biggest fear is.

00:16:15.540 It really was.

00:16:17.100 While he was in Vietnam as a Green Beret, one of his best friends was kidnapped and thrown into prison.

00:16:26.020 And his greatest fear of being an intelligence officer was that he himself was going to be kidnapped and held hostage.

00:16:34.260 And that's the worst fear that he had.

00:16:36.520 And it's so ironic and tragedy that's exactly what happened to the poor guy.

00:16:41.440 He told his friend, I'm going to be kidnapped.

00:16:43.920 I don't please, even if you take out my body, please come get me.

00:16:49.440 Even if you kill me while you're doing it, I don't want to die. 0.79

00:16:53.040 Forgotten and a horrible death. 0.99

00:16:56.380 Yes.

00:16:57.380 And he did.

00:16:58.540 He did.

00:16:59.980 This was a time period.

00:17:01.780 And remember, I was assigned as part of a small group at the CIA that's working to try to find all the hostages.

00:17:10.620 But our primary focal point was locate Bill Buckley.

00:17:15.460 And so every day we went to work trying to find the hostages.

00:17:18.600 But, Glenn, we just did not have the intelligence to know exactly where they were on any given day, I'm sad to say.

00:17:24.600 We had very minimal signals intelligence, very minimal kind of intercept kind of capabilities.

00:17:30.680 We had no sources on the ground to be able to tell us where the hostages were.

00:17:36.240 And then when we did get information, it was usually late.

00:17:39.540 And in the course of debriefing all the hostages, they told us about Bill.

00:17:44.680 And we learned for the first time that Bill was actually being held with all the other American hostages.

00:17:50.520 But he was special.

00:17:51.600 Bill, there was this guy that was always behind another door, and we know his name was Bill.

00:17:56.980 So we knew that Bill was still a hostage, but nobody had really seen him until one night when he died in captivity, which I'll never forget.

00:18:06.900 Father Martin Jinko, who was a Catholic priest that had been kidnapped by the same organization,

00:18:11.660 was the first hostage to come out to actually tell us that Bill had died and that he was delusional.

00:18:18.120 And the other hostages were saying, please get this man some medical care.

00:18:23.820 And they wouldn't listen.

00:18:25.340 And we didn't want to believe Father Jinko.

00:18:28.500 And then David Jacobson came out, the hospital administrator from Beirut, and he said, Bill's dead.

00:18:36.040 And you could have sucked the air out of the room in Wiesbaden, Germany during our debriefing, Glenn,

00:18:40.980 because we didn't want to hear it.

00:18:43.180 We didn't want to believe it.

00:18:44.040 And David Jacobson said, I'll tell you exactly how he died.

00:18:49.000 He said, that's Bill's head hitting the steps, being dragged down from this southern suburbs apartment.

00:19:02.520 And he goes, guys, Bill's dead.

00:19:05.060 And it was just horrible for us to hear at that time period.

00:19:08.940 So we made a full bore effort at that time period to find the man who did this,

00:19:15.160 to find Bill's body at whatever cost it might be, and to bring him home.

00:19:21.340 But that's not the impression I get.

00:19:24.420 When reading your book, that's not exactly what happened.

00:19:29.180 A low-level staffer was put in charge of the investigation, wasn't he?

00:19:35.980 I would like to think that that's probably an accurate depiction of the attention paid to the problem at a Washington level.

00:19:47.180 But behind the scenes, Glenn, we went to work every day looking for the hostages.

00:19:51.780 Sure, sure.

00:19:52.260 There were agents – there was primarily one FBI agent, one CIA analyst, and me, supported by the intelligence community.

00:20:03.180 It was a priority to the counterterrorism group.

00:20:06.400 But there wasn't like this huge operations behind the scene to try to find the Americans being held captive.

00:20:12.800 And that's one of the big shifts that we see today in our counterterrorism effort.

00:20:18.420 Something like this would never happen again.

00:20:20.520 And if it did happen, you would have thousands of people devoted to this problem

00:20:25.440 and still – instead of just a handful of us working on the issue.

00:20:31.800 So they found him.

00:20:38.720 Tell me about the guys who did it to him.

00:20:41.040 Well, when he was abducted, he was coming out of his apartment.

00:20:46.820 He lived by himself off embassy property because he needed that flexibility in order to do his job.

00:20:54.820 He needed the ability to go out and meet sources and to have meetings like with the Israeli Mossad and so forth.

00:21:01.700 So in Beirut during that time period, there were no secrets.

00:21:05.760 Unfortunately, the eyes and ears of everybody were watching the Americans.

00:21:09.040 And, of course, Hezbollah, the organization that ultimately grabbed him, had all the sources that we did not have.

00:21:17.740 And so they knew where all the Americans were lived.

00:21:20.140 So Bill was pulling out of his driveway one morning and his Peugeot, which he didn't like.

00:21:24.940 It wasn't fast enough for him.

00:21:26.260 Nobody likes Peugeots.

00:21:27.260 Well, he had ordered a Jaguar that was coming in that had not made it there.

00:21:32.600 But he was overwhelmed on the ride to work in the morning, dragged out of the car and put into another vehicle

00:21:42.960 where he was taken off to the slums of the southern suburbs of Beirut where he would vanish into an area that we had absolutely no eyes or ears in.

00:21:51.280 And, unfortunately, that's how Bill died.

00:21:56.040 Bill ends up dying in captivity after being tortured, brutally interviewed by Hezbollah. 0.58

00:22:05.480 We suspect Imad Mughniya himself, who at that time was in charge of special operations for Hezbollah.

00:22:12.240 We think the Iranians interviewed him, and it would not be surprising to learn that the KGB did as well.

00:22:21.840 So now—

00:22:23.980 What did he have to tell?

00:22:26.040 Somebody told me who's gone through torture.

00:22:28.580 He said, everybody breaks eventually.

00:22:31.380 He said, you know, the people who say, oh, I'm never going to break.

00:22:34.180 He said they're the first to break because they don't take it seriously.

00:22:37.120 He said, but eventually everybody breaks.

00:22:39.100 What did he—what did they get out of him?

00:22:44.640 Remember, this man knows every intelligence source in Beirut at the time of his abduction.

00:22:51.160 He knows who the Israeli Mossad officers are.

00:22:55.720 He knows who the French Secret Service personnel are.

00:22:58.700 He knows who the MI6 folks are.

00:23:00.820 So he is a walking catalog of all intelligence-related activity in Beirut to include all the double agents we might have working, like if we have flipped a source within the Lebanese security services.

00:23:15.040 Have we flipped a Soviet KGB agent during that time period?

00:23:18.480 So after Bill is abducted, Glenn, everything is shut down, literally.

00:23:24.260 So if you think about it from an intelligence perspective, you had the 83 bombing, right?

00:23:29.040 The eyes and ears of America are blown up, literally, shut down.

00:23:33.700 You have the 84 bombing of the Marine barracks.

00:23:37.220 You have Bill Buckley kidnapped, who knows all the intelligence operations that he had started up since he sent into Beirut.

00:23:45.420 So in essence, our entire operation is shut down.

00:23:51.860 So then the next bombing is where?

00:23:54.600 The next bombing is again the United States Embassy in Beirut, where the U.S. Embassy is hit hard again by Imad Magni and Hezbollah. 0.86

00:24:03.780 We also have a bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait during this time period by Hezbollah.

00:24:09.140 And we also have the hijacking of TWA flight 847 by Hezbollah and the death of the young U.S. Navy diver Robert Stedham, where Hezbollah puts a bullet in the back of his head and dumps him on the tarmac in Beirut.

00:24:23.220 How come my memory doesn't connect all of this to Iran?

00:24:33.580 I mean, I grew up.

00:24:35.860 I wasn't glued to the television for the news at that time.

00:24:39.000 I wasn't you.

00:24:40.940 But my memory does not tie all of this directly to Iran.

00:24:45.880 There's not been a lot written, Glenn, on the Hezbollah-Iranian nexus, meaning you have Iran that's using this proxy Hezbollah as a tool of foreign policy to be able to carry out this asymmetrical warfare against the United States.

00:25:02.180 Now, bear in mind, too, Bill Buckley, when he's a hostage, he's held with many French hostages, German, even Russian, a Korean, an Irish hostage.

00:25:13.840 At one point in time, we had over 20 hostages being held by Hezbollah.

00:25:18.260 They brought Western Europe and the United States to his knees with their hostage kind of policy, all choreographed by Iran and Hezbollah. 1.00

00:25:27.400 So when we first set out to find him, how long has he gone before we find out for sure he's dead?

00:25:41.480 He's gone for about a year before we figure out that he's dead.

00:25:45.260 How long do you think he was alive?

00:25:46.720 I think he was alive for a good six to seven months before he died.

00:25:50.740 Why do you say Moscow interviewed him?

00:25:53.840 We had enough intelligence in putting together the story from some of our – you'll see many redactions in our story that the CIA cut out.

00:26:05.340 Right.

00:26:05.780 And we wanted that in there for transparency's sake so folks would know what was removed from the government.

00:26:10.800 We had enough intelligence to indicate piecing together the redactions and so forth that this was a very valuable asset to Iran that you could barter and you could trade.

00:26:24.160 And that's what the intelligence communities are.

00:26:26.500 It's like an Arab bazaar of trading intelligence and trading information around. 0.83

00:26:30.600 And lo and behold, what we found in the FBI redacted files was that the FBI for a long period of time suspected that Bill may have even been flown to Tehran and may have even been held inside the Iranian embassy in Beirut for a period of time.

00:26:47.380 Where does Osama bin Laden come into the story?

00:26:49.600 Well, bin Laden, remember, he's learning and he's learning the tools of groups that come before him. 0.73

00:26:57.360 And he's looking at the effectiveness of a group like Hezbollah who manages to blow up the U.S. embassy twice in Beirut, the U.S. embassy in Kuwait, the Israeli embassy in BA Argentina, the Israeli daycare center in BA Argentina, the hijacking of TWA 847. 0.52

00:27:22.640 The list goes on and on and on.

00:27:24.100 So, Mugnia and Hezbollah in Iran gave bin Laden a blueprint that you could look for. 0.99

00:27:33.460 And then all of a sudden you could see how can you attack the United States by using this asymmetrical kind of warfare, which is exactly what we're still dealing with today.

00:27:42.660 And did Obama ever get together and they meet – not Obama, Osama bin Laden.

00:27:51.540 Sorry for that.

00:27:52.320 Did they get together and did they meet?

00:27:55.920 We have no evidence of that.

00:27:58.600 Do you believe that there was?

00:28:00.940 I don't suspect that there was.

00:28:03.060 All right.

00:28:03.260 When he was taken hostage, this was the – was he part of the Iran-Contra exchange?

00:28:14.860 Was he one of the guys that Reagan was trying to get out?

00:28:17.600 Yes.

00:28:18.160 Buckley?

00:28:18.460 First and foremost, you have to look behind the scenes here.

00:28:21.880 You have a small group of working people like myself trying to debrief the hostages and trying to find them.

00:28:29.400 Then you have Iran-Contra.

00:28:31.040 You have this compartmented operation off to the side with Admiral Poindexter and Colonel Oliver North that's doing the trading of tow missiles to Iran to get these hostages released.

00:28:42.480 And I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer at times, Glenn.

00:28:45.420 And I remember going over on the North Atlantic after about my third trip across.

00:28:50.320 And I'm thinking to myself on a cold Air Force flight, how come we're deploying before a hostage is released?

00:28:58.300 How come I don't know about what's going on?

00:29:00.520 And we finally get to Wiesbaden and the small group of us start talking amongst ourselves.

00:29:05.500 And we're saying, there's got to be something else going on here because we're always deployed before the hostage comes out.

00:29:11.100 And then when the first hostage comes out, which is Father Jinko, we were expecting Bill Buckley.

00:29:17.360 We were expecting the hostage chief.

00:29:19.900 So you have Father Jinko.

00:29:21.820 Don't get me wrong.

00:29:22.540 We were glad to get him out.

00:29:24.180 But that wasn't part of the deal.

00:29:25.720 We later understood the deal was that they were supposed to get Buckley out.

00:29:29.940 And unbeknownst to us, Buckley had died.

00:29:33.260 You see, the Iranians had pulled the wool over our eyes and Buckley had died in captivity. 0.81

00:29:38.060 But we were expecting him to be released and we were going to debrief him first.

00:29:44.260 And then Father Jinko comes out and then the second hostage comes out.

00:29:48.180 And we knew at that point in time it was a lost cause and that we had to move into a body recovery mode.

00:29:56.860 I can't imagine what you've seen.

00:29:59.700 And I can't imagine in body recovery mode and what that's like for a friend, somebody you admire in a place where it's completely foreign and looking for the body is dangerous for you, right? 0.99

00:30:22.160 It really was.

00:30:23.140 It became a mission of the United States government to try to find him at that point in time to bring him home for a proper burial.

00:30:29.480 Now remember, as callous as this sounds, Glenn, Hezbollah knew that his body was still worth something to the United States government, that that was a leverage point. 0.69

00:30:41.540 And so we became very aggressive in that time period with reward offers.

00:30:48.500 We actually even created little matchbooks with pictures and we we had wanted posters.

00:30:53.280 And we said, look, we'll pay up to two million dollars if somebody can tell us where the bodies are, where the people are that took him.

00:31:01.980 So we could try to gear up some counterterrorism teams to try to go in.

00:31:07.100 And did you get any any takers on that?

00:31:10.240 Well, we eventually recovered the body utilizing the intelligence community that had some sources that identified where the bodies were located.

00:31:17.920 And we were able to send a very brave State Department Diplomatic Security Service team out from the U.S. Embassy that went out to help us recover the bodies and and and bring Bill Buckley home.

00:31:33.320 So.

00:31:34.780 After Bill dies, we have the Gulf War. 0.52

00:31:38.840 Correct.

00:31:39.520 Right.

00:31:39.680 We have Hezbollah in Iran crossing over into Iraq.

00:31:50.640 Tell me the significance here.

00:31:53.520 Well, remember, there are no friendly intelligence services.

00:31:57.260 That's the first thing you learn in my business, that nation states always act in the best interests of their own.

00:32:03.460 Correct.

00:32:04.260 And so when you're looking at the Iranian intelligence service, this is an organization that is very capable, very well funded with a lot of sources that we don't have access to.

00:32:16.480 Same as the Iraqis during that time period. 1.00

00:32:19.140 Ahmad still he marches into Iraq, does he not? 0.98

00:32:21.920 He does.

00:32:22.920 Magniya maintains a very elevated presence inside of of Hezbollah.

00:32:29.580 He's traveling on multiple passports.

00:32:31.280 He's the modern day Carlos the Jackal. 0.84

00:32:34.340 He's a he's part spy, part master terrorist.

00:32:37.780 He's an intelligence officer that becomes critical for Iran to be used as a tool against us. 0.88

00:32:44.500 And he he goes he's he goes all over the world.

00:32:48.340 He has a meeting in Sudan.

00:32:50.000 He has a meeting in Sudan.

00:32:51.840 He has meetings in Syria and he actually was mapped to Damascus, Syria in 2008, where a counterterrorism effort at that point was put into place, predominantly with the United States and Israel to take him out.

00:33:10.980 So there is a degree of vengeance.

00:33:14.020 Yeah, there is a degree of justice.

00:33:15.860 That's 2008.

00:33:17.120 But it took to 2008.

00:33:18.740 Now, remember, this is a very slippery individual that has various diplomatic passports, mostly Iranian in different names. 1.00

00:33:28.120 When you manufacture identity documents like any nation state, you can be anybody you want.

00:33:33.200 So it took a long while to be able to find him.

00:33:36.440 But once he was found, I do applaud the United States government for going after him.

00:33:43.260 So there would be a little bit of justice, a little bit of vengeance for all the U.S. and Israeli blood on his hands. 0.85

00:33:49.380 So while he's there, bin Laden is in Paris.

00:33:54.720 While he's in Sudan, bin Laden is in Paris, right? 0.93

00:33:59.200 Not to my understanding.

00:34:00.860 OK, then I'm missing.

00:34:02.760 Bin Laden's in Khartoum. 0.59

00:34:04.200 Khartoum.

00:34:04.940 Khartoum, Sudan.

00:34:06.460 And Magniya can travel in and out of areas like Paris.

00:34:10.340 OK, all right.

00:34:11.380 So was it the Sudan bombing?

00:34:14.000 I'm trying to remember which bombing it was that the first one that kind of shook my understanding, the first one that kind of shook the terrorist world, if you will, was the embassy bombing in Beirut and then the barracks.

00:34:27.580 And they were like, whoa, we can make these guys move.

00:34:30.120 Right.

00:34:30.480 Then wasn't there another hotel or embassy bombing, maybe in the Sudan?

00:34:35.580 You're thinking of the East African embassy bombings in Nairobi.

00:34:40.440 Yes.

00:34:40.860 And that was an al-Qaeda operation.

00:34:43.680 Right.

00:34:44.020 That was bin Laden's. 0.94

00:34:45.620 Which he kind of learned, did he not?

00:34:47.860 Correct.

00:34:48.540 Correct.

00:34:48.840 He learned from the master terrorist, Imad Mugniya, during that time period. 0.72

00:34:52.040 That's correct.

00:34:52.680 OK.

00:34:55.540 And so we don't ever hear about his teacher.

00:35:01.340 We never hear.

00:35:02.120 I've never heard his name before.

00:35:03.620 Never heard his name.

00:35:05.460 Then we hear about Osama bin Laden.

00:35:08.180 And I remember I was in 1999, I was on the air.

00:35:12.500 And I just, I like to take people at their word.

00:35:15.660 You know, it's amazing when you take people at their word, especially when they're telling you, you know, they're telling you something nice.

00:35:23.120 You can brush that off. 0.91

00:35:24.140 They tell you they're going to kill you.

00:35:26.140 You should take them at their word. 0.84

00:35:28.120 You should believe them.

00:35:28.860 You should believe them.

00:35:30.060 And I was on the air on a conservative radio station, WABC in New York.

00:35:33.940 And I said, I think it was the aspirin factory bombing.

00:35:39.140 And I said, look, this, they're trying to get after this guy.

00:35:43.180 And I said, I don't know anything about him, but I started doing my homework on this guy.

00:35:49.260 He's coming.

00:35:50.740 He is coming.

00:35:52.220 And there will be blood bodies and buildings in the streets of New York City in the next 10 years.

00:35:56.720 And it'll have this man's name on it.

00:35:58.940 And I remember just getting such tremendous pushback from people that didn't want to hear it.

00:36:04.520 What's life like been like for you to know all of this stuff, to be there and to see?

00:36:14.380 I don't I don't know.

00:36:16.120 I imagine it's you don't feel it maybe in the CIA, but maybe up above and in the in society that nobody wants to hear about it.

00:36:25.340 Nobody wants to see it.

00:36:26.500 Nobody wants to believe it.

00:36:28.260 Is that frustrating?

00:36:29.880 It's extraordinarily frustrating.

00:36:31.200 Remember, in the 1993 First World Trade Center attack, which was a huge wake up call for us that was on my watch.

00:36:41.000 I've gotten much more credit than I deserve for the capture of Ramzi Yosef, the mastermind of the First World Trade Center bombing. 0.98

00:36:47.580 He was bin Laden's number one bomb maker. 0.98

00:36:53.140 He had tried to kill the pope in the Philippines.

00:36:55.640 When we grabbed him in Pakistan, he was planning to kill the United States ambassador to Pakistan.

00:37:00.400 He had the Bojinka plot. 1.00

00:37:02.160 We had the landmark plot in New York City during that time period when you were there, where the group had looked at blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge, trying to assassinate President Mubarak at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

00:37:13.900 The list goes on and on and on.

00:37:16.740 And then if you wind it back just one step earlier, Glenn, you may remember this from your New York days.

00:37:22.740 You had one of bin Laden's field operatives, a shooter by the name of El Saeed Noser, assassinate Rabbi Markahani of the JDL.

00:37:33.440 So that was really the first jihad on the streets of America during that time period.

00:37:38.660 Then you have the 93 World Trade Center attack.

00:37:41.640 And then you had al-Qaeda trying to kill President Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

00:37:47.940 So then you have that kind of lead up.

00:37:50.400 I mean, we saw it coming.

00:37:51.300 And those of us that were in the field.

00:37:53.120 But were people listening?

00:37:54.520 No.

00:37:55.240 No, nobody listens.

00:37:56.760 And remember during that time period, you had a very dysfunctional counterterrorism system in place where you had the FBI and the CIA and the State Department.

00:38:05.840 Nobody was cooperating.

00:38:07.460 You didn't have the degree of cooperation that you do now in our post-9-11 world where you have so many joint terrorism task forces.

00:38:16.180 The world is different today.

00:38:17.640 But, look, governments are reactive.

00:38:21.860 They're not proactive.

00:38:23.000 It's not like private business or any other entity.

00:38:25.720 And it takes tragedy, I'm sad to say, to force change.

00:38:29.420 Meaning it took Bill Buckley's abduction in Beirut in order for the CIA to protect other station chiefs so that the same thing doesn't happen to them again.

00:38:40.620 And that's what happens in government bureaucracies.

00:38:44.220 Nobody wants to hear about what's on the horizon.

00:38:47.940 We'll just react to the problem once it happens.

00:38:50.540 Now, we've gotten a lot better since 9-11.

00:38:53.520 You know, my hat's off to the FBI, you know, since 9-11.

00:38:57.220 They've done a great job here domestically.

00:38:58.840 I don't think people have any idea how, and this is just my guess, I don't have any idea either, but I don't think that we have any idea how much we have been saved from for good, you know, detective work and intelligence work.

00:39:15.100 I mean, I think the country has been, these guys, Thomas Jefferson talked about, you know, Islamicists, that they're not going away.

00:39:26.400 They're not going away.

00:39:27.780 We may have pushed them back now, but they're coming back, and they're going to come back over and over and over again because they believe all of this stuff.

00:39:36.920 And we just keep seemingly pushing them back now.

00:39:40.880 ISIS, it's over.

00:39:42.420 Nobody's paying attention to what's happening.

00:39:43.960 They're still, it's still happening, still going on.

00:39:47.160 They're not going to give up.

00:39:48.360 No, they're not.

00:39:49.340 This is generational, Glenn.

00:39:51.100 I'm sad to say that our kids will be dealing with this problem.

00:39:54.800 I've been in this business since 1981, and you can just see the carnage and the destruction, and you can look around the world.

00:40:02.160 And that's not to mention the hundreds of other attacks that we could talk about that have happened elsewhere, from the hijackings to the assassinations to the killings of Americans.

00:40:11.100 This is something that's going to go on forever.

00:40:15.280 This is not a problem that you can eradicate.

00:40:19.720 There's only so many of these terrorists you can hunt down and kill, and let's face it, our special operations teams are doing a great job at that.

00:40:26.620 But in essence, how do you defeat an ideology?

00:40:31.940 You can't.

00:40:32.820 Where were you on September 11th?

00:40:52.940 I was in Austin, Texas.

00:40:55.520 I had left the service by then, and I vividly recall the plane sitting in the trade towers, and I hearkened back to the 93 First World Trade Center bombing, and I said, this isn't surprising in the least.

00:41:08.820 And to me, the shocking part is the folks that say, I never saw this coming.

00:41:13.840 You could see it coming, you could see it coming, you had enough intelligence to indicate that it was right around the corner.

00:41:21.520 I'm a self-educated, pretty much boob most of the time, especially back in 1999.

00:41:31.900 I didn't know what I was talking about.

00:41:33.160 I could, with very little internet access, could figure out Osama bin Laden and see this was coming. 0.95

00:41:44.280 Not to be shocked, shocked that maybe they flew him into a building, but not shocked that they were trying to blow those buildings up or kill mass Americans. 0.66

00:41:54.680 That's what they say they want to do, and they still want to do that.

00:41:59.380 And they will keep trying.

00:42:00.980 They're laser-fixated on aviation.

00:42:03.160 They always have been because it's the perfect terrorist kind of vehicle to try to take, to drive into buildings, to try to blow up.

00:42:11.660 They have historically always done that.

00:42:13.760 That goes back to the Black September days, the radical Palestinian organization that were so good at hijackings. 1.00

00:42:20.640 You know, Al-Qaeda has learned from the likes of Hezbollah and Imad Mughniya and Black September before them. 0.93

00:42:27.020 And this is a persistent problem that's just not going to go away.

00:42:30.580 How do we win or make significant progress without becoming what we despise?

00:42:46.420 I think that you have to do what boils down to a fairly common sense kind of actions, Glenn,

00:42:55.120 on the part of everybody that watches your programs or listens to your podcasts, meaning you have to learn to take care of yourself,

00:43:02.340 to look out for your neighbor, to know basics of how to stop the bleed,

00:43:07.540 which is a wonderful program that's got a lot of legs here in the United States now.

00:43:12.580 Learn how to put on a tourniquet so you can help yourself or your family member or your co-worker in a mass casualty-style attack.

00:43:19.540 I don't mean it that way.

00:43:20.520 I mean as a nation, as a culture, when you have ruthless people that will have no problem shooting children,

00:43:33.480 you know, taking nine years old as slaves because God tells them, 0.97

00:43:37.540 and we'll just torture and destroy. 0.78

00:43:44.680 When Mubarak left Egypt, I was so torn because it's not hard to see what the Arab Spring leads to a caliphate. 0.99

00:43:54.440 That's what they want.

00:43:55.840 That's what they say.

00:43:57.120 So it destabilizes that.

00:44:00.320 And I was not cheering for Mubarak to leave by any stretch,

00:44:06.720 but I was also really uncomfortable with a group of people, us, saying,

00:44:14.140 oh, we don't torture, but we'll pick you up in a ghost plane, and we'll take you to the man who will.

00:44:19.000 Well, I feel like if we want to do that, if we feel that's important, we should man up and say,

00:44:26.160 this is a different world, and this is how we have to deal with this, and we do it under these conditions.

00:44:34.280 But I'm torn because don't we then become them?

00:44:39.980 Well, the one thing I've learned in this, over my course of lifetime in this business, Glenn,

00:44:46.020 is this is a very dirty business, and most people don't want to realize that.

00:44:49.980 You get it.

00:44:51.180 A lot of your viewers and listeners get it.

00:44:54.220 But the reality is there's so many folks that don't get it,

00:44:58.920 and that at the end of the day, we're a nation of laws,

00:45:01.680 and that we operate under the United States Code,

00:45:05.000 and that we've had some great strides on the battlefield.

00:45:09.980 at trying to stop a strategic strike on the United States.

00:45:14.320 I'm optimistic that the FBI will keep that watchman kind of status on full bore

00:45:19.760 as long as they're funded properly, and we have a lot of resources devoted to the problem.

00:45:25.020 But I'm not overly optimistic that this is a problem from a nation

00:45:30.340 that we're going to be able to combat in our lifetime,

00:45:33.840 and I'm not optimistic that this is a problem that's going to go away in our kids' lifetime.

00:45:38.280 George Bush said, I spoke to him in the Oval,

00:45:43.700 and I said, no offense, but you're hated by so many people.

00:45:51.680 And he said, I know.

00:45:53.220 He said, I knew it was going to happen before I did what I felt was right.

00:45:57.660 He said, but I think, I think in 40 or 50 years,

00:46:05.580 when our children, our grandchildren are possibly seeing the end of this,

00:46:13.840 they will look back and say, they understood it,

00:46:17.660 and they stood and did what they had to do at this time.

00:46:21.180 So, speaking to him, thinking, before you went to Afghanistan,

00:46:28.260 you were thinking, this is 50 years of trying to change this.

00:46:36.820 How? How can you possibly change this?

00:46:40.660 I speak as somebody who, I'm a hawk,

00:46:46.160 but I'm also becoming more and more Washington, not our business,

00:46:54.720 because no matter how hard we try in the Middle East, they don't care. 0.79

00:47:00.360 They hate us.

00:47:01.440 They will hate us. 0.99

00:47:02.360 And it's not because they're jealous of us or any of that crap. 0.99

00:47:05.640 They're being spoon-fed an ideology that I believe is evil 1.00

00:47:10.120 and says, conquer the world and behead any infidel. 0.99

00:47:15.100 You're not going to change that. 0.73

00:47:17.160 And there are a lot of good people on the ground in the Middle East

00:47:20.520 that are completely alone that, you know, I'm not speaking out against that

00:47:26.260 because, you know, I'll just keep my mouth shut.

00:47:28.360 I want to live.

00:47:30.540 We come in.

00:47:32.380 They spin us.

00:47:33.640 We do bad stuff, you know, much better than everybody else,

00:47:39.660 but still, we're a country.

00:47:41.640 We screw up.

00:47:42.540 We make deals with people.

00:47:44.000 It happens.

00:47:47.640 I don't want to pull out because that just creates this giant vacuum,

00:47:54.840 but I don't see anything but another 50 years, going back to FDR, 0.78

00:48:00.860 another 50 years of making the same kind of mistakes

00:48:04.500 in a war that you really can't win.

00:48:07.640 Does any of that make sense to you?

00:48:09.080 It certainly does.

00:48:10.060 I understand.

00:48:10.920 I think that what we're fighting is an unwinnable war,

00:48:14.880 that we're back to just tactical considerations

00:48:19.180 to try to take out the next Imad Mugniyah or Osama bin Laden 0.99

00:48:23.640 to prevent a weapon of mass destruction from being detonated on U.S. soil.

00:48:28.800 That's what we're down to as a nation state.

00:48:32.620 So you think that we are never-ending war?

00:48:37.540 Never-ending war, Glenn.

00:48:40.900 Yeah, the future is not bright when you look at this problem.

00:48:43.140 If you try to forecast out the last 30, 35 years of the problem,

00:48:50.140 do you see it getting better in a place like Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq?

00:48:55.780 No, and in fact, I see a couple of things.

00:48:58.260 I remember a time where I remember my parents and my grandparents seeing something,

00:49:03.740 and it changed in Iran.

00:49:06.920 They used to say they have American passports.

00:49:11.280 Nobody's going to hurt an American, okay,

00:49:14.320 because we carried the big stick, and nobody would screw with us.

00:49:20.220 Now an American passport makes you an absolute target. 0.99

00:49:24.000 So that's changed dramatically,

00:49:27.920 and we're still dealing with foes like China.

00:49:33.940 And I don't know where you stand on China and Russia,

00:49:38.220 but with what Russia is at least kicking up,

00:49:44.880 I don't know if they're seriously prepared now,

00:49:48.680 but what they're kicking up with the chaos that they're planting all over the world,

00:49:54.040 and China with what they're building with their,

00:49:58.480 what is it called, their Sharp Eyes program,

00:50:02.980 that, you know, is imprisoning everybody.

00:50:07.180 Right, especially the Uyghurs. 1.00

00:50:08.580 Right.

00:50:10.480 And then the Middle East.

00:50:11.880 How does a free nation remain free here?

00:50:16.320 Well, I think we can't lose sight of the eye on the ball,

00:50:20.640 that we have to recognize that from a strategic perspective,

00:50:24.040 that Russia and China are at the great game,

00:50:28.880 that this is a great powers kind of exercise,

00:50:32.800 very similar to what we combated back in the 40s and the 50s.

00:50:36.780 But we are in, in many ways, a very interesting time period

00:50:39.960 where you see perhaps some cooperation between the Russians and the Chinese

00:50:44.760 and even the Cubans.

00:50:46.120 Like, for example, these sonic attacks on our diplomats

00:50:49.120 in places like Beijing and Havana.

00:50:51.600 I didn't know it was happening in Beijing, too.

00:50:53.540 Yes.

00:50:53.860 Explain what those are for people who don't know.

00:50:55.580 Yes, those are, for the past three years or so,

00:50:58.960 we've had a good number of American diplomats,

00:51:01.980 United States and Canadian, by the way.

00:51:03.960 I've not seen any reports on Brits.

00:51:05.760 It may have happened, but it's just not reporting,

00:51:08.160 where they've been injured with a high-frequency kind of sonic wave attack

00:51:13.740 of their families,

00:51:15.800 which appear to be directed towards their primary residences off compound,

00:51:20.940 which are not at the same kind of security level.

00:51:22.800 It's frightening, as you can imagine, for anybody in the diplomatic corps.

00:51:27.200 And these have been occurring in Beijing, Havana, and in Moscow.

00:51:32.720 And so you have this kind of great power, potential alliance.

00:51:36.480 But this kind of great power, as you say, playing Beirut rules. 0.94

00:51:42.320 Yes.

00:51:43.100 It's not the game of gentlemen anymore.

00:51:47.140 You're targeting families.

00:51:49.240 Yes, you're targeting families and loved ones and significant others

00:51:53.920 and spouses that are on assignment on diplomatic missions

00:51:59.000 and within the Foreign Service.

00:52:00.620 You have a new rule that's being cut out there.

00:52:03.500 I mean, look what the Saudis just did with the assassination of Khashoggi

00:52:08.580 inside their foreign diplomatic mission in Istanbul.

00:52:12.620 I have never, in the course of diplomatic history,

00:52:15.920 and I've studied a lot of attacks on diplomats around the world of all ilk,

00:52:20.820 I've never heard of something like that occurring,

00:52:23.040 where you've had an individual go into a foreign mission

00:52:26.080 and pretty much be murdered and dismembered on that property,

00:52:31.080 which is just frightening from that aspect.

00:52:34.520 Like, for instance, there has to be cases where somebody walked into an embassy

00:52:40.160 and they were disappeared, and later they showed up someplace.

00:52:43.800 Right, like the Russians. 0.92

00:52:44.980 Right, but this is bold.

00:52:47.180 This is so bold.

00:52:48.140 This is over the top.

00:52:49.160 I've never heard of that.

00:52:50.940 I've never investigated that kind of attack.

00:52:53.520 And I've looked at a lot of attacks on diplomats going back to the 60s.

00:52:58.520 This is something we've never seen before.

00:53:00.000 This is an extraterritorial killing of an individual on foreign soil on diplomatic property.

00:53:07.700 So let me bring you there. 0.94

00:53:10.480 This new Saudi prince, I think the guy's a monster in some ways. 1.00

00:53:15.480 But if you want to look at his reality, he's in a mob family. 0.93

00:53:20.580 The whole thing is mob.

00:53:24.460 You know, Mohammed was a warrior.

00:53:27.900 Jesus was a peacemaker.

00:53:31.420 I don't see any statues of great men in the Islamic world that aren't on a horse with a sword. 0.93

00:53:38.780 That's how you keep the peace over there, at least traditionally speaking.

00:53:44.140 Am I right or wrong on that?

00:53:45.200 No, you're right.

00:53:45.720 Okay. 0.99

00:53:46.280 So here he is, a mobster in a mob family in a place kill or be killed. 0.98

00:53:53.020 With a lot of money. 0.84

00:53:53.660 With a lot of money and a lot of enemies.

00:53:57.480 And he's just pissed off half of his family by taking their stuff.

00:54:03.600 He's then trying to modernize and bring...

00:54:08.660 My understanding is that he has arrested anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 what he would deem radical clerics.

00:54:18.340 He's making enemies everywhere.

00:54:24.620 I don't want to do deep business with him.

00:54:26.760 I don't like that.

00:54:27.980 I think this is shocking and horrifying.

00:54:31.220 However, this is kind of where I go back to George Washington.

00:54:35.240 I don't want any part of any of that.

00:54:37.560 But what else is going to happen there?

00:54:42.720 You know what I mean?

00:54:43.400 You're not going to put a sweetheart of a guy in a country.

00:54:46.580 It can't last.

00:54:47.380 It won't last. 0.82

00:54:48.100 He'll be dead within a week, if that long.

00:54:50.920 So how do we judge our relationships anymore?

00:54:54.900 Like, what should we do in Saudi Arabia?

00:54:57.840 This is an extraordinarily difficult challenge because we do, I can tell you from behind the scenes,

00:55:04.740 we depend upon the Saudis for intelligence.

00:55:06.920 There are no friendly intelligence services, so you have to go to bed with some of these ruthless kind of people at times

00:55:14.920 to get intelligence and information to safeguard Americans around the world, I'm sad to say.

00:55:20.240 So you have to step back on one of these kinds of incidents and try to let the diplomats negotiate some sort of appeasement

00:55:28.460 so everybody's happy from what just took place.

00:55:31.740 But the reality of what just took place is something right out of, like, the Gambino family where they're, you know, 0.94

00:55:38.260 they're picking up people and disappearing them.

00:55:39.980 Correct.

00:55:40.560 And we don't have any visibility or transparency into how many others have happened.

00:55:44.960 We just know about this one.

00:55:46.720 But we're talking about Saudi Arabia and everybody's making a big deal out of Saudi Arabia.

00:55:50.640 And it is a big deal.

00:55:51.920 He did it in an embassy.

00:55:53.820 Okay.

00:55:54.460 On foreign soil.

00:55:55.600 Yeah, on foreign soil.

00:55:56.440 However, the Uyghurs, 2 million are in these concentration camps.

00:56:03.040 Right.

00:56:03.300 Where they're being tortured, brainwashed.

00:56:07.340 Some of them tortured to death, just disappeared in the middle of that 2 million.

00:56:13.600 Nobody's talking about that.

00:56:14.860 No.

00:56:16.080 No.

00:56:16.600 No.

00:56:16.660 I think you look at it from the standpoint of nation-state to nation-state to great power, Glenn,

00:56:27.060 that if you look at some of these great power arrangements from a historical perspective,

00:56:32.840 there is always going to be tragedy at a very personal level, at a localized kind of level,

00:56:39.840 that in many ways as a nation, although we try not to turn a blind eye towards it,

00:56:47.860 we still allow it to occur because our options are very limited.

00:56:52.320 Yes.

00:56:52.620 What can we do about the Chinese holding 2 million Uyghurs? 0.98

00:56:57.680 What can we do?

00:56:58.860 Our options are very limited.

00:57:01.700 Couldn't we as a nation?

00:57:03.460 I think one of the things that helped collapse the Soviet Union, one of the things, and there 1.00

00:57:07.480 were many things, but one of them was Reagan willing to call it out by name.

00:57:14.220 It's an evil empire, and it's against what we stand for.

00:57:19.760 And you know what?

00:57:20.480 If you want to rise up in your own country, there is freedom on the other side of that

00:57:25.140 curtain.

00:57:25.760 You know what I mean?

00:57:26.680 We've tried to do that in Iran.

00:57:28.860 Right.

00:57:29.400 We've tried.

00:57:29.920 However, I think if we would have supported them when they rose up a few years ago.

00:57:36.020 During the Obama administration.

00:57:36.720 During the Obama administration, things may have been different.

00:57:39.680 Much different.

00:57:40.220 Yes.

00:57:40.680 I think that could have actually taken off, but we did nothing.

00:57:45.060 Right.

00:57:45.580 We did nothing.

00:57:46.240 We didn't even support them.

00:57:47.600 We didn't even come out as a president or as a country and say, good for you.

00:57:53.020 Right.

00:57:53.940 Instead, we end up flying how many?

00:57:57.280 Millions of dollars?

00:57:58.240 Which ends up in the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that helped finance groups like

00:58:04.640 Hezbollah, which take our American CIA's station chief hostage. 0.94

00:58:10.080 Right.

00:58:10.460 And beyond that, if I'm not mistaken, this is in the last part of your book, which is phenomenal.

00:58:17.160 We're paying them all this money.

00:58:18.840 We're treating them like, oh, no, you're going to be fine.

00:58:23.980 And then they launch a missile named after the terrorist.

00:58:34.200 Right?

00:58:35.200 Yeah.

00:58:36.060 The Mugnea. 0.97

00:58:36.800 Right.

00:58:38.140 They launch a missile named after the guy that took our station chief.

00:58:42.520 And we don't notice that?

00:58:44.860 Of course we do.

00:58:46.500 Right?

00:58:47.240 We do.

00:58:47.660 Right.

00:58:48.840 But, again, when you're dealing with Iran, our options are very limited because they have the ability, Glenn, to unleash an asymmetrical, very well-funded and organized group that have historically done nothing but level our embassies, kill our hostages, target Israelis, kill Jews, kill American diplomats all around the globe. 0.93

00:59:18.140 But does it help us or hurt us to be absolutely crystal clear on what we stand for?

00:59:27.380 And I don't mean just talk.

00:59:28.780 I mean doing it.

00:59:30.540 This is what we stand for.

00:59:32.540 This is what we support.

00:59:34.560 And our friends in the Middle East, the one we know we can count on right now, the only one that shares any kind of our values is Israel. 0.95

00:59:43.940 Correct.

00:59:44.580 And to act the way Donald Trump acted by moving the embassy and saying, this is our friend.

00:59:52.580 Is it hurt us or help us to be clear on who our friends are?

00:59:58.280 I don't even know if Great Britain is our friend anymore.

01:00:00.860 I mean, I don't even know.

01:00:02.140 I don't know where we stand.

01:00:03.440 I don't know where they stand anymore.

01:00:04.960 From an intelligence perspective, the Five Eyes nations are still doing their job.

01:00:12.420 And regardless of the political rhetoric coming out of Washington or London or Canberra on any given day, you still have the agents and the analysts working together.

01:00:25.520 Thank goodness.

01:00:26.380 Thank goodness.

01:00:26.940 Is Great Britain, I can't even believe I'm going to ask you this question because it seems so insane.

01:00:36.100 Is England over?

01:00:38.360 And here's why I ask.

01:00:39.360 When Asia Bibi, a Catholic who won't renounce her faith, spent nine years in prison in Pakistan, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has the courage to stand up and say, this was an abomination.

01:00:56.840 This was absolutely wrong to put her in prison.

01:01:00.000 And then she says to England, I need to get out.

01:01:09.420 I need asylum in your nation, me and my family, or they're going to kill us. 0.98

01:01:14.980 And there's uprisings in the street.

01:01:17.400 And England says no in a roundabout way because we're afraid of our own population here.

01:01:26.400 How do you survive?

01:01:27.660 Well, I think that the Metropolitan Police and Special Branch and MI5 and MI6 have got a very difficult job because on any given day in the U.K., they could have jihadis running people over on bridges, that they are overwhelmed with domestic terrorism problems in the United Kingdom.

01:01:49.300 And I think that it's a problem that has just grown out of control.

01:01:53.500 They've allowed so many jihadis into their country. 0.97

01:01:58.160 You have the borderless flow of other jihadis in and out of the United Kingdom, that the reach, the cross-nation, the third-country kind of operations that can be launched, that it's a daunting task.

01:02:13.120 And I think that on any given day in the U.K., we could see exactly what we have been seeing now at a very slow tempo of attacks.

01:02:21.280 So you have that.

01:02:23.600 Then you have things like Brexit.

01:02:26.380 And it's not my country.

01:02:28.720 I don't want to get involved in it.

01:02:30.160 I can just look at what I think I'm hearing from many Europeans.

01:02:35.700 And they don't have an American system of small government.

01:02:39.700 OK.

01:02:40.020 They don't understand that.

01:02:41.380 They have communism and fascism and everything in between.

01:02:44.700 But they don't have limited small government freedom of the individual kind of mentality like America does. 0.75

01:02:52.620 So you get into the EU.

01:02:55.500 It's not working out well.

01:02:56.880 It's not doing what it's promised.

01:02:59.380 The people are being told not to be Belgian, not to be Swedish, not to be German, not to be Italian, not to be English.

01:03:08.640 And then the governments are also mandating that you take this gigantic influx of people that the average person says, wait, this is not good.

01:03:19.280 We don't know who these people are.

01:03:21.100 Now look at our crime rate. 0.92

01:03:22.340 Look at our daughters being raped at an unbelievable rate. 0.99

01:03:28.520 Stabbings. 1.00

01:03:29.420 Stabbings.

01:03:30.320 All of these things that are going on.

01:03:32.260 And the average person sitting at their table here, well, these people are fine.

01:03:37.840 There's nothing wrong. 0.97

01:03:38.900 Oh, and by the way, if you hang your Swedish flag, you're a racist.

01:03:43.800 And common sense tells them this is wrong. 0.94

01:03:48.280 This is just wrong.

01:03:49.960 They're not racist.

01:03:51.440 I mean, I'm sure there are some, but they're not racist.

01:03:54.280 They're not xenophobes.

01:03:56.220 They're not anti-Islamic.

01:03:58.380 I know there are those groups out there that are part of it, but there's a big group that just wants to be English.

01:04:06.220 They just want to be French. 1.00

01:04:07.680 And they'd love people to come to their country.

01:04:09.760 They just want you to be French, like us.

01:04:11.980 We just want you to be an American.

01:04:14.540 And because the government and the EU denies that there's any problem, and because the press says, you didn't see that.

01:04:25.560 Nothing to see here.

01:04:26.660 There was no stabbing problem.

01:04:27.680 What, rape problem? 0.53

01:04:28.660 There's no rape problem.

01:04:29.580 I don't know what you're talking about.

01:04:31.900 The only one that says the truth, it's like 1930. 0.85

01:04:36.040 The only ones who come up and say anything that's true are these monsters. 0.95

01:04:41.540 These nationalist, extremist Nazis who say, you know what? 0.97

01:04:47.580 I'm proud of my country, too.

01:04:49.020 And they're not doing anything until some government, and I don't even see us, I think we're playing with it.

01:04:57.320 We're getting closer than we were. 0.96

01:04:58.840 But until some government actually has the balls to stand up and say, look, this is the problem. 0.98

01:05:07.200 This ideology is a problem. 0.98

01:05:09.640 Borderless countries don't work. 1.00

01:05:12.960 We want people to come in, but we want to know who you are and where you're staying, why you're coming here.

01:05:19.480 We want what built.

01:05:21.300 It's a reasonable request.

01:05:22.740 It's reasonable, reasonable.

01:05:25.400 Until somebody starts talking reason in the press and in power, you're adding to all of the other problems chaos.

01:05:34.740 You're feeding, the governments are feeding this disconnect from their own government.

01:05:44.920 They don't trust them anymore.

01:05:48.980 How do you, I think the military called it the Bubba effect.

01:05:52.180 You know it?

01:05:53.320 No, I'm not familiar with the Bubba effect.

01:05:55.400 So I was with some special forces guys out east.

01:05:59.200 This is years ago with, Bush was in office.

01:06:05.680 41 or 43?

01:06:07.000 43.

01:06:07.920 And I said, I said, so what are you guys most worried about?

01:06:12.400 And they said, well, on the horizon, the big thing we're worried about is the Bubba effect.

01:06:17.580 I said, what's the Bubba effect?

01:06:19.480 They said that because so many people are, and countries are living in denial, 0.98

01:06:26.960 the people aren't stupid. 0.99

01:06:30.600 And at some point, you know, Mohammed will go and blow up something. 0.99

01:06:38.040 And Bubba, who's at the cash register at the local 7-Eleven, will see a Sikh come in 1.00

01:06:45.660 and see the turban and just not know and just think, oh, he's part of the problem. 0.98

01:06:49.740 It's you people. 1.00

01:06:50.860 And he'll shoot him. 0.99

01:06:53.380 Everyone will know Bubba was wrong. 1.00

01:06:56.020 Bubba should go to jail.

01:06:57.820 But when the feds roll into town, the town will then turn and say, we'll take care of Bubba.

01:07:05.300 It's you that have caused Bubba to do these kinds of things.

01:07:10.600 I see.

01:07:11.140 You know what I mean?

01:07:11.720 I do.

01:07:12.200 Very much so.

01:07:12.840 That seems more and more realistic every day.

01:07:15.940 Does it not?

01:07:16.720 Well, I think when you look at that kind of scenario, you could certainly see how that

01:07:21.300 could unfold, especially in our nation today with it.

01:07:26.500 You have such a polarized nation.

01:07:28.680 And I'm surprised on basics from a counterterrorism perspective that we still can keep an eye on

01:07:35.560 the ball based on all the problems that are going on inside of Washington.

01:07:40.060 But I do know, Glenn, that and I talk to these agents every day in different capacities, that

01:07:47.240 at the end of the day, you still have very hardworking men and women.

01:07:51.360 No doubt.

01:07:52.060 Doing their job.

01:07:53.080 No doubt.

01:07:53.380 These are the cops assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

01:07:56.860 You have law enforcement and public safety doing their job.

01:07:59.960 No doubt.

01:08:00.300 And that's what gives me hope.

01:08:03.500 That really is what gives me hope for the future on this kind of tactical kind of problem.

01:08:10.480 Do you follow Russia at all in what Russia is doing now?

01:08:14.440 Sure.

01:08:15.620 Have you ever heard of Alexander Dugin?

01:08:18.560 No.

01:08:19.080 OK.

01:08:20.040 He was the guy who kind of created the Crimean policy for Putin.

01:08:27.340 And he's a guy who's developed what's called the fourth political theory.

01:08:32.400 And he has major backing.

01:08:36.140 And he's a chaos guy.

01:08:38.540 And with a blind eye from Putin, although he's not blind on anything, he's established and is

01:08:49.920 supporting all of these extremist groups on both sides.

01:08:55.060 His philosophy basically is what we had happen with our own digital media here, where they

01:09:00.600 would take the side of the police and they'd take the side of Black Lives Matter. 0.68

01:09:03.740 They're just stirring it up.

01:09:05.460 It's an old KGB tactic that goes back to the 60s and 70s.

01:09:09.300 They did the same thing to us here in the United States.

01:09:11.960 If you look at, there's a friend of mine who's written a wonderful book called Days of Rage.

01:09:18.020 I don't know if you've read it by Brian Burroughs.

01:09:19.740 And if you look at the tempo and the sheer scope of attacks in the continental United

01:09:24.000 States in the 60s and 70s, they far surpassed anything that we're seeing today.

01:09:28.540 And that was all Soviet KGB funded.

01:09:31.240 And the Soviet grand strategy along those lines is that if they can create so much chaos inside 0.96

01:09:36.900 the United States, that we would be so dysfunctional from a government perspective that they can

01:09:42.940 continue around the world.

01:09:44.220 I think their plan now is to collapse us.

01:09:52.180 I think that that's their strategy.

01:09:54.720 But I also think that there's some very smart people inside the CIA and DOD that understand

01:10:00.480 that, that how are we going to try to get in front of this, at least also from a cyber

01:10:05.440 perspective and so forth?

01:10:06.780 How can we stop them from meddling in elections?

01:10:09.620 How, how can we go after some of their, how can we turn the tables on them from a covert

01:10:14.860 operations perspective?

01:10:16.580 I've talked to several people about Russia and China and they're split.

01:10:23.520 China has no teeth.

01:10:25.580 They're, you know, they're so close to economic collapse and, and revolution in their own, uh,

01:10:31.760 nation.

01:10:32.260 Um, you know, they, their military is a paper tiger.

01:10:37.260 And I hear the same thing about Russia.

01:10:39.760 They're not a threat.

01:10:42.640 Then I hear the exact, I don't find a lot of people who are in the middle.

01:10:47.460 Um, what's your take on those two?

01:10:50.240 Well, I think you're dealing with, uh, if you look at the people's liberation army of

01:10:54.800 China, uh, their ministry of state security from an intelligence perspective, they are

01:11:00.280 as good as the CIA or the Israeli Mossad.

01:11:04.880 If you look at the Russian SVR, their external service, uh, and the FSB, their domestic service,

01:11:12.200 they are as good as the CIA, uh, and our domestic FBI.

01:11:16.940 So if you break it apart from an adversarial perspective, these are very capable nation

01:11:23.120 states.

01:11:24.240 Now on the battlefield, uh, what China has can far surpass us from a sheer manpower perspective.

01:11:31.720 They can drop people out of planes, not bombs.

01:11:34.020 Exactly.

01:11:34.520 Forever.

01:11:35.220 Forever.

01:11:35.660 Keep dropping people.

01:11:37.600 But from an intelligence perspective, these are noble adversaries.

01:11:41.800 Same with Iran. 0.79

01:11:43.100 I mean, what most people don't realize, Glenn, is that Iran has just as capable of an intelligence

01:11:50.120 service as any first world nation state.

01:11:53.920 Wow.

01:11:54.480 That's how good they are.

01:12:13.100 How did you feel the day we made that a nuclear deal?

01:12:20.500 Oh, it made me, uh, I did not like it.

01:12:23.920 I did not agree with it.

01:12:24.880 I knew that the money that we would hand over, uh, that was allegedly frozen, which reportedly

01:12:30.680 was part of their proceeds that was frozen during the 79 embassy takeover.

01:12:34.360 I knew exactly where that money was going to end up.

01:12:37.080 It was going to end up in their intelligence services buckets.

01:12:39.600 Why would we deliver cash?

01:12:42.740 I mean, everything bad is usually a cash business.

01:12:46.820 Right.

01:12:47.100 You know what I mean?

01:12:47.760 The cartels learn that every day.

01:12:49.240 Yes.

01:12:49.800 I will just deliver that to me in cash.

01:12:52.520 Right.

01:12:53.040 Why would we do that?

01:12:54.800 Well, that was the foreign, that was a foreign policy decision that the Obama administration

01:12:58.480 made.

01:12:58.980 Uh, I do believe that they thought that perhaps it could buy them some time or help with the

01:13:04.360 nuclear proliferation program.

01:13:06.280 Uh, I knew from a practical level that that money would just show up in the, you know,

01:13:11.260 the coffers of the Iranian revolutionary guard and that Soleimani, the general now in charge

01:13:16.480 that reports directly to the Ayatollah, uh, bypassing the president, that he's got a windfall

01:13:22.440 of money to carry out, uh, covert activities all around the globe.

01:13:26.660 You have Russia, Iran, Turkey, um, destabilizing all of it and really taking, uh, Hezbollah, 0.99

01:13:36.080 uh, and Hamas and surrounding now, uh, Israel.

01:13:41.140 What do you think is coming?

01:13:42.740 If I could ask you for a crystal ball, what do you think, what, what, what, what's, what's

01:13:49.240 coming our way?

01:13:49.840 I think Glenn that let's not forget that the Israeli Mossad are laser fixated on Iran.

01:13:58.180 The launch time from Iran to Israel is very short.

01:14:02.580 Yep.

01:14:02.700 And that I'm highly confident that the Israelis, uh, are monitoring the Iranian nuclear development

01:14:10.440 program on a weekly basis at best.

01:14:13.840 And that the moment that they lose that window of intelligence coverage and whatever they

01:14:17.660 might have, human, Sagan, ELINT, whatever, uh, that they're going to take some sort of

01:14:22.600 action is my personal opinion on that.

01:14:24.580 But I'm confident in the services of, uh, the state of Israel to know that they're not

01:14:31.780 going to lose sight of that eye on the ball.

01:14:34.480 I've seen reports from one of the big guys that was, uh, uh, pretty nasty in Saudi Arabia

01:14:44.760 has come out openly in support of Israel.

01:14:47.980 You're starting to see almost a coalition.

01:14:50.860 And I know it's all about Iran. 0.79

01:14:53.640 But if Iran attacks, do you see Arab going after Arab because it is about Iran?

01:15:01.720 I do.

01:15:02.680 I'm pretty confident about that, that, uh, the Saudis are scared to death of, uh, Iran. 0.94

01:15:07.460 They should be.

01:15:08.260 And should be.

01:15:08.860 And rightfully so.

01:15:10.420 Uh, we've, we've gotten a taste of, of Saudi covert action as, uh, distasteful as that might

01:15:16.800 be, uh, with their actions in Istanbul.

01:15:19.480 I think what a lot of people don't understand is that, remember, these services aren't just

01:15:26.880 dedicated to internal nation state activity.

01:15:30.220 They operate globally.

01:15:32.380 That, uh, you have, uh, the long reach of all these intelligence services, which is kind

01:15:37.580 of scary when you think about it.

01:15:39.440 It wasn't that long ago that Iran and Hezbollah planned an assassination of the Saudi ambassador

01:15:48.740 to the United States out of Mexico city of all places.

01:15:53.500 So that is the kind of a reach that, that as the world has shrunk from an intelligence

01:15:58.740 service capability, that you have all these nation states, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan,

01:16:03.960 uh, the Iranians, they operate in a global kind of context.

01:16:08.240 Now, let me take you to our Southern border.

01:16:14.440 Again, I'm a guy with no, you know, I've, I've got a few people on my staff that we just

01:16:19.380 read.

01:16:19.840 We were going online.

01:16:21.040 Um, and we're, we have long memories and we watch what people say and, uh, and remember

01:16:30.140 that and then match the actions, even if they're a few years later.

01:16:34.240 Um, and what's happening on our border twofold, I think we're being set into a, a Gaza, Israel 1.00

01:16:46.120 kind of situation to where God forbid, there ends up being some compound on the other side

01:16:53.740 of our border of these refugees. 0.97

01:16:55.920 That's a constant battle that we'll have.

01:16:58.060 And the big bad Americans, you know, firing off tear gas, Obama did it 1600 times on the

01:17:06.220 same border.

01:17:08.080 Trump does it once and it's, you know, horrible.

01:17:10.880 Um, a, do you think that is possible that we are looking at a group of people and I'm

01:17:19.460 not talking about the actual people that are there, but foreign forces and actors that would

01:17:25.360 like to see us in a Gaza situation on our border?

01:17:28.060 Absolutely.

01:17:28.860 And, and who stands to win in that kind of scenario?

01:17:33.140 Moscow, follow the money into what could be taking place in a lot of these kinds of actions.

01:17:39.280 Well, that brings me to the other part of this is Cuba and Venezuela, uh, you know, had a,

01:17:47.780 had a, had a good friend in Honduras.

01:17:50.040 Right.

01:17:50.700 And he was kicked out.

01:17:54.180 Um, and we have pretty compelling evidence that they are, it's, it's this, you know, alienated

01:18:04.220 party that really kind of put some of this together.

01:18:07.920 And now it is being funded, uh, by, by open borders, people that generally are Marxist and

01:18:16.160 without a media telling you the truth, in fact, telling you to deny what you see, um, how

01:18:27.600 does the American, how do American people figure out who the good guys and bad guys are?

01:18:35.600 I think it's very difficult to do today.

01:18:38.460 Uh, it's always been somewhat of a daunting task for the average, uh, viewer or the average

01:18:43.760 Joe that's going to work every day that, that can only turn on their TV at night or, or watch

01:18:48.400 a podcast or only has time to do that.

01:18:50.720 It's very challenging from a public perception perspective.

01:18:53.960 But remember the Soviets, the Russians have always been very good, uh, at information

01:18:59.840 management and disinformation into creating chaos.

01:19:03.960 So, uh, chaos at the border for the United States, uh, is a good thing for Moscow. 1.00

01:19:10.520 Good thing for anybody who doesn't like us.

01:19:12.600 Exactly.

01:19:13.260 And for that to continue, uh, is something that I think is going to continue for the foreseeable

01:19:18.880 future as well, we're still going to have these flare ups at the border with these border

01:19:23.580 rushes and so forth.

01:19:24.780 So, uh, I think as you look and pull the veil behind some of these money that's being used

01:19:29.700 to, to finance some of these organizations, you've got something that's out right out of

01:19:34.060 an old KGB playbook.

01:19:37.520 You, are you optimistic for the Western culture?

01:19:40.980 I have faith in, um, the kids that I go and talk to at the universities I speak to, that

01:19:50.900 there's a lot of interest in the topics that we're just discussing, Glenn.

01:19:54.780 That gives me faith.

01:19:56.480 I'm not very optimistic of Washington.

01:19:58.500 I left Washington for a, for a reason.

01:20:01.140 Uh, I think that it's very difficult to fix some of these problems from inside that kind 1.00

01:20:06.280 of bureaucracy, that it takes voices on the outside, uh, to shine a spotlight on certain

01:20:12.280 issues, which you have done so well.

01:20:14.420 And so I think that this, you could have almost more of an impact outside of government.

01:20:19.460 And I'm sad to say.

01:20:21.440 Aren't we in a, we're in an interesting time.

01:20:26.120 I've been saying this for a while, for almost 20 years.

01:20:29.160 And I used to say there's going to come a time, but I think we're in it now.

01:20:33.040 Now, where all of the progress of the industrial revolution that took 120 years is all going

01:20:42.740 to happen in about a 10 year period because the pace of technology that we are just changing

01:20:50.080 everything and, and that some of the angst that people feel, and they're not putting their

01:20:56.960 finger on it, they can't put their finger on it is the corporations know this doesn't really

01:21:02.680 kind of work in the new world.

01:21:04.800 The banks, it's not quite right.

01:21:06.860 I mean, we got this, but it's not quite right.

01:21:09.480 The power of the government, the way it works, technology has moved past the old structure.

01:21:16.700 And in the next 10 years, it's going to blow by it.

01:21:19.680 You just, you won't be able to regulate fast enough for technology.

01:21:23.760 And I don't think anybody knows what to do.

01:21:28.520 And most people don't even, you know, they're not, they're not looking at technology and they're

01:21:34.460 not looking at the future and they're not seeing that the people in Silicon Valley are trying

01:21:40.860 to create a world that has 100% unemployment.

01:21:45.060 And the people in Washington are trying to have zero unemployment and the people here in 0.91

01:21:51.320 the middle don't know that this gigantic battle is on the horizon, you know?

01:21:56.720 In your experience of looking at wars, civil wars, conflicts, what is the thing that

01:22:11.020 allows a nation to do what really we've done the whole time, even in our civil war?

01:22:20.360 And that is come back together.

01:22:22.560 After times of great strife, we still hold on to each other and we still come back together.

01:22:30.060 What, where is there an example outside of the United States?

01:22:35.280 Is there anything you, that you've learned, that you've seen that we need to remember?

01:22:41.880 I think tragedy forces that kind of assembly of all different faiths and cultures and common

01:22:48.820 mission.

01:22:49.820 You're a student of history.

01:22:51.500 I am too.

01:22:53.220 I think that if you look at some of the catastrophic events that's happened to our nation, whether

01:22:58.020 it be the strike on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the attempts on Garfield

01:23:05.120 and McKinley, the shooting of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, the events of 9-11, hearken

01:23:12.600 back to President Bush 43 standing on the rubble.

01:23:17.080 The bullhorn.

01:23:18.020 With the bullhorn.

01:23:18.680 And that brought our nation together.

01:23:22.540 But I'm not smart enough to know, Glenn, what causes those kinds of things.

01:23:27.680 All I know is that that kind of a tragic event.

01:23:30.740 Do we come back together like we did on 9-11 next time?

01:23:33.480 I think so.

01:23:34.420 I hope so.

01:23:35.140 Yeah.

01:23:35.380 I really do.

01:23:36.060 I'm very optimistic that.

01:23:37.620 But, but the sad part to your, to your point, Glenn, is that it would take something

01:23:41.340 like that.

01:23:42.020 I know.

01:23:42.640 To bring our nation back together again.

01:23:44.080 One last question.

01:23:48.900 What is the one thing that keeps you up at night that you think, oh man, if I could just

01:23:54.120 get people to understand this one thing, we'd make great progress.

01:23:59.880 I think that I've seen so much human tragedy and picked up so many body bags from a terrorism 1.00

01:24:06.700 perspective where I was down in the weeds.

01:24:09.340 But I think as a nation, the farther we get away from 9-11, the less and less people recall

01:24:14.820 how much human casualty that caused and how much strife that, and it brought our nation

01:24:22.640 to its knees.

01:24:23.400 I don't want to see us lose sight of the Bill Buckleys of the world that have dedicated their

01:24:29.740 life and died in a, in a very tragic way that I'm grateful for people like that, that

01:24:36.880 have devoted their entire life and have sacrificed for our great nation.

01:24:41.200 But I don't want to see us lose the eye on the ball based on all the different political

01:24:47.220 rhetoric and all the different problems and social unrest that we have here in our nation.

01:24:51.480 I think it'd be very easy to do.

01:24:54.000 I know I said last question, but one more.

01:24:56.780 Biggest problem we face, we have to fix, what would it be?

01:25:01.880 You can only fix one or concentrate really on one, but everything else, you know, still

01:25:06.960 the stove is still burning, but this one is a priority.

01:25:10.200 What is it?

01:25:11.100 I think that as a nation, we need to get together from and start almost a new Manhattan kind of

01:25:17.140 project with the greatest minds that we can assemble to look at issues such as effective

01:25:24.140 border security, that you just can't arrest your way out of this problem, that it's just

01:25:29.680 not a law enforcement entity because there's public health problems.

01:25:32.520 I think the southern border is an issue that as we fast forward into the next election,

01:25:38.940 which will become a huge hot button.

01:25:40.780 So I think we need to have the greatest minds our country can assemble to figure out that

01:25:45.820 kind of solution for massive immigration flows that are pending and are going to continue

01:25:52.660 to try to come in every day from our southern border.

01:25:54.800 Thank you so much.

01:25:56.900 Thank you for your service.

01:25:58.440 Oh, thank you, Glenn.

01:25:59.560 Sincerely.

01:26:00.240 Thank you.

01:26:00.760 Thank you.

01:26:01.160 Thank you.

01:26:24.800 Thank you.

The Glenn Beck Program - January 12, 2019

Ep 19 ｜ Fred Burton ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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