Ep 19 | Fred Burton | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Most people,

I mean, look at millennials, they don't even remember 9-11.

For most people, that's where we started.

People a little older, maybe they'll say World Trade Center, but it was in Beirut

that this really put us on this path, right?

Without a doubt.

Beirut was the center of gravity.

When I was a young special agent

working the embassy bombings and the kidnappings and the hijackings, all roads of terror just flowed through Beirut, originated out of Beirut.

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

And the guy who

explain who

was his name,

what was his name?

Imad Mughnia?

Yeah, I think he was the, no, Imad, yeah.

Ahmad.

Who is he?

Mughnia was pretty much the center of gravity for the Hezbollah security apparatus.

He was liaison with the Iranian intelligence service.

He was the master terrorist.

Most people from our generation can recall Carlos the Jackal.

But after Carlos the Jackal, there was no bigger terrorist than Emad Mugnia, who had more U.S.

and Israeli blood on his hands than any other terrorist before Osama bin Laden came.

So,

how do we know Carlos the Jackal?

We know Osama bin Laden, but we don't know this guy.

Well, it took us a long time to map out who Magnia was, Glenn.

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

And we started an intelligence collection effort to try to figure out exactly who Emad Magnia was.

And we actually got some intelligence as to his identity.

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

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

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

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

And it all led back to this character by the name of Magnia, who was responsible for all these terrorist attacks.

So

we were, were we

prepared at all?

I know when you know, when

all hell broke loose loose in Beirut,

we didn't have anybody who was really

prepared in the CIA to deal with this kind of organization, right?

You're absolutely correct.

Remember, the CIA was stood up to combat the KGB

to go behind the iron curtain.

So can I ask you if this is too much of a movie understanding?

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.

Is that true or is that movie?

No, that's real true.

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

You know, the gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail.

You don't kidnap other intelligence officers.

You don't assassinate other intelligence officers.

There was just understanding.

Then Hezbollah comes along, Emad Magnia comes along with Beirut Rules, which was the title of the book, in that all the gloves were off in that time period.

They went after the CIA.

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.

And that was really the first volley of attack that decimated U.S.

intelligence in that time period.

So Reagan was so focused on the Soviet Union.

When this started to happen,

did he understand it?

Was this a secondary?

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

And it seems odd the way that was treated when he was kidnapped and taken.

So I'm trying to get an understanding.

Did they see the Middle East then and these new kinds of terrorists as

something big and important in the future?

Or was this just some gnats that we have to deal with here?

We're dealing with the real problem of the Soviet Union.

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.

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.

And we were not prepared for that during that time period.

And our intelligence, Glenn, during that window was very poor.

We didn't see the truck bombs coming.

We didn't see the kidnapping of the Americans coming.

And yet they kept continuing.

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

And again, all roads led to Beirut.

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.

Do you believe that?

I do.

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, it's hard to look out over the horizon to try to see what's coming.

But I do think we were not prepared.

I think that basically we folded our tent and went home after that.

We tried to leave Beirut and Hezbollah won and literally drove us out of Lebanon in many ways.

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.

Okay, so now let's get into the book, because that's just some kind of basic framework.

But

your book is a spy novel, except it's true.

It's Ian Fleming, except it's true.

And

you introduce us to a hero that I remember hearing about, but not really hearing about,

William Buckley.

Put us in the time, what was happening,

and let's begin with who he was.

Who was William Buckley?

Bill Buckley was an American patriot.

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

His sister tells me that he always wanted to be a soldier.

He played with little toy soldiers when he was a kid.

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.

He was different.

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

So after the Korean War, he goes back to the Boston area.

and literally he becomes a librarian, which is so different.

He was just that kind of person.

He was a very well-read man.

And he attends school at Boston University and he takes multiple languages and after

university at Boston University he joins the CIA which at that time is just starting up in the mid-1950s

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.

And he's in a special forces assigned to the Phoenix program in Vietnam.

Which is what?

The Phoenix program is what?

The Phoenix program was winning the hearts and minds.

A lot of misinformation has been written about it, and it's pretty much,

from a historical perspective, viewed by many as an assassination target.

It's just going to say it's an assassination club.

It was part of that, yes, 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.

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.

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.

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.

So that in itself is worth another whole story.

But

after Vietnam, Bill goes back to the CIA and literally bounces all around the world at all the hot spots because

what does he do as a CIA operative?

He's what is called as a paramilitary kind of person.

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

You have the Yaleys, which Bill wasn't, although he was from New England, you know, this was a hard-scrabble guy.

This was a guy that cut his teeth on the front lines in Korea.

And yet he was

extraordinarily intelligent.

Absolutely.

Well-read man,

a student of languages, a student of history, a student of war.

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.

So that was Bill's expertise.

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.

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

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?

And it's definitely not a suit.

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

Right.

You need a hard scrabble guy.

You need somebody that's been on the front lines.

You need somebody that understands the enemy.

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

We have enough suits walking the halls at Langley.

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

And let's send that person to Beirut.

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

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

So just

to put us back in that time,

1979, we have the hostage crisis.

In Iran, in Tehran.

Right.

And they take our embassy.

Indeed.

And we really, we were pretty shocked by that, weren't we?

We were.

One of our agents was held captive for a better part of a year.

Right.

So we just got through that.

Then there was the Marine barracks bombing.

Correct.

Correct.

And then the CIA bombing.

We have the 83 bombing.

Then we have the Marine barracks bombing.

Then we have the second embassy bombing that takes place

during the sequencing.

And where is he coming in?

He's coming in after the first embassy bombing

to restand, to stand up the CIA eyes and ears in Beirut, but before the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut.

Who was responsible for the embassy bombing?

Emad Magnia.

Okay.

Same suspect.

Right.

So does he know him at this point?

Is he starting to

know who Magnia 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, but they really don't know the actors and the principal tactical operators inside the organization.

Okay, so he comes over.

And

what does he do when he gets this?

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

The Brits give us some space.

Bills has to rebuild the intelligence network that was lost after the 83 bombing when all the CIA personnel are wiped out.

So he has to reinstitute basic intelligence collection, basic surveillance operation.

He has to try to map the enemies that are against us.

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

So part of his mission was to 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.

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.

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

First of all, what do you do

when you have no assets?

How did he even begin?

What did he do?

You fly by the seat of your pants.

It's kind of like any other operation where you have to go back in, you have to have meetings with your French counterparts, your British counterparts, your Lebanese liaison services.

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

You have spies everywhere.

You have the Israeli Mossad operating there.

You got the French, the Germans, the Brits.

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

So there's a lot of meetings.

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

What's the next threat coming towards us?

And this is all before the days of computers and cell phones.

Right.

So

a week before he's kidnapped, he tells a friend, I'm in trouble.

And

he explains that he's going to be kidnapped and what his biggest fear is.

It really was.

While he was in Vietnam as a Green Beret, one of his best friends was kidnapped and thrown into

prison.

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

And that's the worst fear that he had.

And it's so ironic and tragedy.

That's exactly what happened to the poor guy.

He told his friend, I'm going to be kidnapped.

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

Even if you kill me while you're doing it, I don't want to die forgotten and a horrible death.

Yes.

And he did.

He did.

This was a time period and remember

I was assigned as part of a small group at the CIA that's working to try to find all the hostages but our primary focal point was locate Bill Buckley and so every day we went to work trying to find the hostages but Glenn we just did not have the intelligence to know exactly where they were on any given day I'm sad to say We had very minimal signals intelligence, very minimal kind of intercept kind of capabilities.

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

And then when we did get information, it was usually late.

And in the course of debriefing all the hostages, they told us about Bill.

And we learned for the first time that Bill was actually being held with all the other American hostages, but he was special.

There was this guy that was always behind another door, and we know his name was Bill.

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.

Father Martin Jinko, who was a Catholic priest that had been kidnapped by the same organization, was the first hostage to come out to actually tell us that Bill had died and that he was delusional.

And the other hostages were saying, please get this man some medical care.

And they wouldn't listen.

And we didn't want to believe Father Jinko.

And then

David Jacobson came out, the hospital administrator from Beirut, and he said, Bill's dead.

And you could have sucked the air out of the room in Wiesbaden, Germany, during our debriefing, Glenn, because we didn't want to hear it.

We didn't want to believe it.

And David Jacobson said, I'll tell you exactly how he died.

He said.

He said, that's Bill's head hitting the steps, being dragged down from this southern suburb's apartment.

And he goes, guys, Bill's dead.

And it was just horrible for us to hear at that time period.

So we made a full bore effort at that time period to find the man who did this, to find Bill's body at whatever cost it might be, and to bring him home.

But that's not the impression I get.

From reading your book, that's not exactly what happened.

A low-level

staffer was put in charge of the investigation, wasn't he?

I would like to think that

that's probably an accurate depiction of the attention paid to the problem at a Washington level.

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

There were agents,

there was primarily one FBI agent, one CIA analyst, and me,

supported by the intelligence community.

It was a priority to the counterterrorism group, but there wasn't like this huge operations behind the scene to try to find the Americans being held captive.

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

You know, something like this would never happen again.

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

instead of just a handful of us working on the issue.

So

they found him.

Tell me about the guys who did it to him.

Well,

when he was abducted, he was coming out of his apartment.

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

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

So

in Beirut during that time period, there were no secrets.

Unfortunately, the eyes and ears of everybody were watching the Americans.

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

And so they knew where all the Americans were lived.

So Bill was pulling out of his driveway one morning in his Peugeot, which he didn't like.

It wasn't fast enough for him.

Nobody likes Peugeots.

Well,

he had ordered a jaguar that was coming in that had not made it there.

But

he was overwhelmed on the ride to work in the morning, dragged out of the car and put into

another vehicle 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.

And

unfortunately,

that's how Bill died.

Bill ends up dying in captivity after being tortured,

brutally interviewed by Hezbollah.

We suspect Emed Mughnia himself, who at that time was in charge of special operations for Hezbollah.

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

So

now.

What did he have to tell?

Somebody told me who's gone through torture.

He said, everybody breaks eventually.

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

He said, they're the first to break because they don't take it seriously.

He said, but eventually everybody breaks.

What did he,

what did they get out of him?

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

He knows who the Israeli Mossad officers are.

He knows who the French Secret Service personnel are.

He knows who the MI6 folks are.

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, have we flipped a Soviet KGB agent during that time period?

So after Bill is abducted, Glenn, everything is shut down.

Literally.

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

The eyes and ears of America are blown up, literally shut down.

You have the 84 bombing of the Marine barracks.

You have Bill Buckley kidnapped, who knows all the intelligence operations that he had started up since he's sent into Beirut.

So in essence, our entire operation is shut down.

So then the next bombing is where?

The next bombing is again the United States Embassy in Beirut, where the U.S.

Embassy is hit hard again by Emed Mughni and Hezbollah.

We also have a bombing of the U.S.

Embassy in Kuwait during this time period by Hezbollah.

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.

How come my memory doesn't

connect all of this to Iran?

I don't.

I mean, I grew up.

I wasn't glued to the television for the news at that time.

I wasn't you.

But my memory does not tie all of this to directly to Iran.

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.

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.

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

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

So, when we first set out to

find him,

how long is he gone before we find out for sure he's dead?

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

How long do you think he was alive?

I think he was alive for a good six to seven months before he died.

Why do you say Moscow interviewed him?

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.

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

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.

And that's what the intelligence communities are.

It's like an Arab bazaar of trading intelligence and trading information around.

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.

Where does Osama bin Laden come into the story?

Well, bin Laden, remember, he's learning and he's learning the tools of groups that come before him.

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.

The list goes on and on and on.

So Mughnia and Hezbollah in Iran gave Bin Laden a blueprint that you could look for.

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

And did Obama ever get together and they meet?

Not Obama, Osama bin Laden.

Sorry for that.

Did they get together and did they meet?

We have no evidence of that.

Do you believe that there was i don't suspect that there was all right um

when he was taken hostage um

this was the was he part of the iran-contra exchange was he one of the guys that reagan was trying to get out yes

first and foremost uh you have to look behind the scenes here you have a small group of working people like myself uh trying to debrief the hostages and trying to find them then you have Iran-Contra, 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.

And I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer at times, Glenn.

And I remember going over on the North Atlantic after about my third trip across, and I'm thinking to myself on a cold Air Force flight, How come we're deploying before a hostage is released?

How come I don't know about what's going on?

And we finally get to Wiesbaden and the small group of us start talking amongst ourselves and we're saying, there's got to be something else going on here because we're always deployed before the hostage comes out.

And then when the first hostage comes out, which is Father Jenko, we were expecting Bill Buckley.

We were expecting the hostage chief.

So you have Father Jinko, don't get me wrong, we were glad to get him out, but that wasn't part of the deal, we later understood.

The deal was that they were supposed to get Buckley out, and unbeknownst to us, Buckley had died.

You see, the Iranians had pulled the wool over our eyes, and Buckley had died in captivity, but we were expecting him to be released, and we were going to debrief him first.

And then Father Jinko comes out, and then the second hostage comes out, and we knew at that point in time it was a lost cause and that we had to move into a body recovery mode.

I can't imagine what you've seen, 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?

It really was.

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.

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.

And so

we became very aggressive in that time period with reward offers.

We actually even created little matchbooks with pictures and we had wanted posters.

And we said, look, we'll pay up to $2 million if somebody can tell us where the bodies are, where the people are that took him, so we could try to gear up some counterterrorism teams to try to go in.

And did you get any takers on that?

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

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 bring Bill Buckley home.

So

after Bill dies,

we have the Gulf War.

Correct.

Right?

We have

Hezbollah, Iran,

crossing over into Iraq.

Tell me the significance here.

Well, remember, there are no friendly intelligence services.

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

Correct.

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.

Same as the Iraqis during that time period.

Ahmad still he marches into Iraq, does he not?

He does.

Magnia

maintains a very elevated presence inside of Hezbollah.

He's traveling on multiple passports.

He's the modern day Carlos the Jackal.

He's part spy, part master terrorist.

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

And

he goes all over the world.

He has a meeting in Sudan.

He has a meeting in Sudan.

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.

So there is a degree of vengeance.

There is a degree of justice.

It's 2008.

But it took to 2008.

Now, remember, this is a very slippery individual.

that has various diplomatic passports, mostly Iranian, in different names.

When you manufacture identity documents like any nation state, you can be anybody you want.

So it took a long while to be able to find him.

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

So there would be a little bit of justice and a little bit of vengeance for all the U.S.

and Israeli blood on his hands.

So while he's there, bin Laden is in Paris.

While he's in Sudan, Bin Laden is in Paris, right?

Not to my understanding.

Okay, then I've missed.

Bin Laden's in Khartoum.

Khartoum.

Khartoum, Sudan.

And Magniya can travel in and out of areas like Paris.

Okay, all right.

So

was it the Sudan bombing?

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.

And they were like, whoa, we can make these guys move.

Right.

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

You're thinking of the East African embassy bombings

in

Nairobi,

where

that was an al-Qaeda operation.

That was bin Laden's.

Which he kind of learned, did he not?

Correct.

Correct.

He learned from the master terrorist Emed Moghnia during that time period.

That's correct.

Okay.

And so we don't ever hear

about

his teacher.

We never hear.

I've never heard his name before.

Never heard his name.

Then we hear about Osama bin Laden.

And I remember I was in, in 1999, I was on the air.

And I just, I'd like to take people at their word.

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.

You can brush that off.

They tell you they're going to kill you.

You should take them at their word.

You should believe them.

You should believe them.

And I was on the air, a conservative radio station, WABC in New York, and I said,

I think it was the aspirin factory bombing.

And I said, look, this,

they're trying to get after this guy.

And I said,

I don't know anything about him, but I started doing my homework on this guy.

He's coming.

He is coming.

And there'll be blood, bodies, and buildings in the streets of New York City in the next 10 years, and it'll have this man's name on it.

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

What's life

been like for you to know all of this stuff, to be there,

and to see,

I don't know.

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.

Nobody wants to see it.

Nobody wants to believe it.

Is that frustrating?

It's extraordinarily frustrating.

Remember, in the 1993 first World Trade Center attack, which was a huge wake-up call for us, that was on my watch.

I've gotten much more credit than I deserve for the capture of Ramzi Yosef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing.

He was bin Laden's number one bomb maker.

He had tried to kill the Pope in the Philippines.

When we grabbed him in Pakistan, he was planning to kill the United States Ambassador to Pakistan.

He had the Bojinka plot.

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.

The list goes on and on and on.

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

You had one of Bin Laden's field operatives,

a shooter by the name of El Saeed Noser, assassinate Rabbi Markahani of the JDL.

So that was really the first jihad on the streets of America during that time period.

Then you have the 93 World Trade Center attack, and then you had Al-Qaeda trying to kill President Mubarak and Addis Abba Ababa Ethiopia.

So then you have that kind of lead up.

I mean, we saw it coming.

Those of us that were...

But were people listening?

No, no, nobody listens.

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.

Nobody was cooperating.

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.

The world is different today.

But look, governments are reactive.

They're not proactive.

It's not like private business or any other entity.

And it takes tragedy, I'm sad to say, to force change.

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

And that's what happens in government bureaucracies.

Nobody wants to hear about what's on the horizon.

We'll just react to the problem once it happens.

Now, we've gotten a lot better since 9-11.

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

They've done a great job here domestically.

People, 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.

I mean, I think the country has been,

these guys, Thomas Jefferson talked about,

you know, Islamicists that They're not going away.

They're not going away.

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.

And we just keep seemingly pushing them back.

Now, ISIS.

It's over.

Nobody's paying attention to what's happening.

It's still happening.

It's still going on.

They're not going to give up.

No, they're not.

This is generational, Glenn.

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

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.

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.

This is something that's going to go on forever.

This is not a problem that you can

eradicate.

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.

But in essence, how do do you defeat an ideology?

You can't.

Where were you on September 11th?

I was in Austin, Texas.

I had left the service by then, and

I vividly recall the planes hitting the trade towers.

I hearkened back to the 93 First World Trade Center bombing, and I said, This isn't surprising in the least.

And to me,

the shocking part is the folks that say, I never saw this coming.

You could see it coming.

You had enough intelligence to indicate that it was right around the corner.

I'm a self-educated,

pretty much boob most of the time, especially back in 1999.

I didn't know what I was talking about.

I could, in public, with very little internet access, could figure out Osama bin Laden and see this was coming.

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.

That's what they say they want to do, and they still want to do that.

And they will keep trying.

They're laser-fixated on aviation.

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.

They have historically always done that.

That goes back to the Black September days, the Radical Palestinian Organization.

They were so good at hijacking.

You know, Al-Qaeda has learned from the likes of Hezbollah and Emad Mughnia and Black September before them.

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

How do we win

or

make significant progress without becoming what we despise?

I think that you have to do what

boils down to a fairly common sense kind of actions, Glenn, on the part of everybody that watches your programs or listens to your podcasts, meaning you have to learn to take care of yourself, to look out for your neighbor, to know basics of how to stop the bleed, which is a wonderful program that's got a lot of legs here in the United States now.

Learn how to put on a tourniquet so you can help yourself or your family member or your coworker in a mass casualty-style attack.

I don't mean it that way.

I mean, as a nation,

as a culture,

when you have

ruthless people that will have no problem shooting children, you know,

taking nine years old as slaves because God tells them,

and will just torture and destroy.

When Mubarak left Egypt, I was so torn because

it's not hard to see what the Arab Spring leads to a caliphate.

That's what they want.

That's what they say.

So it destabilizes that.

And I was not cheering for

Mubarak to leave by any stretch, but I was also really uncomfortable with

a group of people, us, saying, 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.

I feel like if we if we want to do that, if we feel that's important, we should man up and say,

this is a different world and this is how we have to deal with this and we do it under these conditions but I'm torn because don't we then become

them

well the one thing I've learned in this

over my course of lifetime in this business Glenn is this is a very dirty business and most people don't want to realize that you get it a lot of your viewers and listeners get it But the reality is there's so many folks that don't get it.

And that at the end of the day, we're a nation of laws and that we operate under the United States Code and that

we've had some great strides on the battlefield at trying to stop a strategic strike on the United States.

I'm optimistic that the FBI will keep that watchman kind of status on full bore as long as they're funded properly and we have a lot of resources devoted to the problem.

But I'm not overly optimistic that this is a problem from a nation that we're going to be able to combat in our lifetime.

And I'm not optimistic that this is a problem that's going to go away in our kids' lifetime.

George Bush said,

I spoke to him

in the Oval, and

I said, no offense, but

you're hated by so many people.

And he said, I know.

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

He said, but I think,

I think in 40 or 50 years,

when

our children, our grandchildren are

possibly seeing the end of this, they will look back and say, they understood it and they stood and did what they had to do at this time.

So

speaking to him, thinking,

before you went to Afghanistan, you were thinking, this is 50 years of trying to change this.

How?

How can you possibly change this?

I speak as somebody who

I'm a hawk, but I'm also becoming more and more

Washington, not our business, because

no matter how hard we try in the Middle East, they don't care.

They hate us.

They will hate us.

And it's not because they're jealous of us or any of that crap.

They're being spoon-fed an ideology that I believe is evil and says conquer the world and behead any infidel.

You're not going to change that.

And there are a lot of good people on the ground in the Middle East that are completely alone that,

you know, I'm not.

I'm not speaking out against that because, you know, I'll just keep my mouth shut.

I want to live.

We come in, they spin us, we do bad stuff, you know,

much better than everybody else, but still, we're a country, we screw up, we make deals with people, it happens.

I don't want to pull out

because that just creates this giant vacuum.

But I don't see anything but another

50 years going going back to FDR, another 50 years of making the same kind of mistakes in a war that you really can't win.

Does any of that make sense to you?

It certainly does.

I understand.

I think that what we're fighting is an unwinnable war, that we're back to just

tactical considerations to try to take out the next Emed Moghnia or Osama bin Laden

to prevent a weapon of mass destruction from being detonated on U.S.

soil.

That's what we're down to as a nation state.

So you think that we are

never-ending war.

Never-ending war, Glenn.

Yeah, the future is not bright when you look at this problem.

If you try to forecast out the last 30, 35 years of the problem, do you see it getting better in a place like Afghanistan or Pakistan?

No.

Or Iraq.

And in fact, I see a couple of things.

I remember a time

I remember my parents and my grandparents seeing something, and it changed in Iran.

They used to say they have American passports.

Nobody's going to hurt an American, okay?

Because we carried the big stick and nobody would screw with us.

Now, an American passport makes you an absolute target.

So that's changed dramatically.

And we're still dealing with foes

like China.

And I don't know where you stand on China and Russia, but

with

what Russia is at least kicking up, I don't know if they're seriously prepared now, but what they're kicking up with the chaos that they're planting all over the world.

And China with what they're building

with their,

what is it called their sharp eyes program that you know right is imprisoning everybody right especially the Uyghurs right

and then the Middle East how does a free nation remain free here well I think you we can't lose sight of the eye on the ball that we have to recognize that from a strategic perspective that Russia and China are are at the great game that this this is a great powers kind of exercise, very similar to what we combated back in the 40s and the 50s.

But we are in, in many ways, a very interesting time period where you see perhaps some cooperation between the Russians and the Chinese and even the Cubans.

Like, for example, the sonic attacks on our diplomats in places like Beijing and Havana.

I didn't know it was happening in Beijing, too.

Yes.

Explain what those are for people who don't.

Yes, those are for the past three years or so, we've had a good good number of American diplomats, United States and Canadian, by the way.

I've not seen any reports on Brits.

It may have happened, but it's just not reporting, where they've been injured with a high-frequency kind of sonic wave attack of their families, which appears to be directed towards their primary residences off compound, which are not at the same kind of security level.

It's frightening, as you can imagine.

for anybody in the diplomatic corps.

And these have been occurring in Beijing, Havana, and in Moscow.

And so you have this kind of great power potential alliance.

But this kind of great power,

as you say, playing Beirut rules.

Yes.

It's not the game of gentlemen anymore.

You're targeting families.

Yes, you're targeting families and loved ones and significant others and spouses that are on assignment on

diplomatic missions within the Foreign Service.

You have a new rule that's being cut out there.

I mean, look what the Saudis just did with the

assassination of

Khashoggi inside their foreign diplomatic mission in Istanbul.

I have never, in the course of diplomatic history, and I've studied a lot of attacks on diplomats around the world of all ilk, I've never heard of something like that occurring.

where you've had an individual go into a foreign mission and pretty much be murdered and dismembered on that property, which is just surely frightening from that aspect.

Who was heard?

Like, for instance, there has to be cases where somebody walked into an embassy and they were disappeared

and later they showed up someplace.

But this was Russians.

Right, but this is bold.

This is so bold.

This is over the top.

I've never heard of that.

I've never investigated that kind of attack.

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

This is something we've never seen before.

This is an extraterritorial killing of an individual on foreign soil on diplomatic property.

So let me bring you there.

This new Saudi prince, I think the guy's a monster in some ways.

But if you want to look at his reality, he's in a mob family.

The whole thing is mob.

You know,

Muhammad was a warrior.

Jesus was a peacemaker.

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

That's how you keep the peace over there.

At least traditionally speaking.

Am I right or wrong on that?

Yeah, you're right.

Okay.

So here he is, a mobster in a mob family, in a place kill or be killed.

With a lot of money.

With a lot of money and a lot of enemies.

And

he's just pissed off half of his family by taking their stuff.

He's then trying to modernize and bring...

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

He's making enemies everywhere.

I don't want to do business with him.

I don't like that.

I think this is shocking and horrifying.

However, this is kind of where I go back to George Washington.

I don't want any part of any of that, but

what else is going to happen there?

You know what I mean?

You're not going to put a sweetheart of a guy in the business.

It can't last.

It won't last.

He'll be dead within a week, if that long.

So

how do we judge?

our relationships anymore.

Like, what should we do in Saudi Arabia?

This is an extraordinarily difficult challenge because

we do, I can tell you from behind the scenes, we depend upon the Saudis for intelligence.

There are no friendly intelligence services.

So you have to go to bed with some of these ruthless kind of people at times to get intelligence and information to safeguard Americans around the world, I'm sad to say.

So you have to step back on one of these kinds of incidents and try to let the diplomats negotiate some sort of appeasement so everybody's happy from what just took place.

But the reality of what just took place is something right out of like the Gambino family, where they're, you know, they're picking up people and disappearing them.

Correct.

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

We just know about this one.

But we are talking about Saudi Arabia and everybody's making a big deal out of Saudi Arabia, and it is a big deal.

He did it in an embassy, okay?

On foreign soil.

Yeah, on foreign soil.

However,

the Uyghurs, two 2 million are in these concentration camps where they're being tortured, brainwashed, some of them tortured to death, just disappeared in the middle at 2 million.

Nobody's talking about that.

No.

No.

I think you look at it from the standpoint of nation-state to nation-state to great power, Glenn, that if you look at some of these great power arrangements from a historical perspective, there is always going to be tragedy at a very personal level, at a localized kind of level, that in many ways as a nation, although we try not to turn a blind eye towards it, we still allow it to occur because our options are very limited.

What can we do about the Chinese holding 2 million Uyghurs?

What can we do?

Our options are are very limited.

Couldn't we as a nation, I think one of the things that helped collapse the Soviet Union, one of the things, and there were many things, but one of them, was Reagan willing to call it out by name?

It's an evil empire, and it's against what we stand for.

And you know what?

If you want to rise up in your own country, there is freedom on the other side of that curtain.

You know what I mean?

We've tried to do that in Iran.

Right.

Look, we've tried.

however i think if we would have supported them when they rose up a few years ago during the obama administration during the obama administration things may have been different much different yes i think that could have actually taken off but we did nothing right we did nothing we didn't even support them we didn't even come out as a president or as a country and say good for you right

instead we end up flying how many millions of dollars which ends up in the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that help finance groups like Hezbollah,

which take our American CIA station chief hostage.

Right.

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

We're paying them all this money.

We're treating them like, oh no, you're going to be fine.

And then they launch a missile named

after the after the terrorist, right?

Yeah, the Magnia.

Right.

They launch a missile named after the guy that took our station chief, and we don't notice that?

Of course we do.

Right?

We do.

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.

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

And I don't mean just talk.

I mean doing it.

This is what we stand for.

This is what we support.

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.

Correct.

And to act the way Donald Trump acted by moving the embassy and saying,

this is our friend.

Is it hurt us or help us to be clear on who our friends are?

I don't even know if Great Britain is our friend friend anymore.

I mean, I don't even know.

I don't know where we stand.

I don't know where they stand anymore.

From an intelligence perspective, the Five Eyes nations

are still doing their job.

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.

Thank goodness.

Thank goodness.

Is Great Britain?

I can't even believe I'm going to ask you this question because it seems so insane.

Is England over?

And here's why I ask.

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.

This was absolutely wrong to put her in prison with the clerics in the room staring them down.

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

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

And there's uprisings in the street.

And England says no

in a

roundabout way because we're afraid of our own population here.

How do you survive?

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 UK, they could have jihadis running people over on bridges, that they are overwhelmed with domestic terrorism problems in the United Kingdom.

And

I think that it's a problem that has just grown out of control.

They've allowed so many jihadis into their country.

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.

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

So you have that.

Then you have things like Brexit.

And

it's not my country.

I don't want to get involved in it.

I can just look at what I think I'm hearing from many Europeans.

And they don't have an American system of small government.

Okay.

They don't understand that.

They have communism and fascism and everything in between, but they don't have limited small government freedom of the individual kind of mentality like America does.

So you get into the EU.

It's not working out well.

It's not doing what it's promised.

People are being told not to be Belgian, not to be Swedish, not to be German, not to be Italian, not to be English.

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.

We don't know who these people are.

Now look at our crime rate.

Look at our daughters being raped at an unbelievable rate.

Stabbings.

Stabbings.

All of these things that are going on.

And the average person sitting at their table hear, well, these people are fine.

There's nothing wrong.

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

And

common sense tells them, this is wrong.

This is just wrong.

They're not racist.

I mean, I'm sure there are some, but they're not racist.

They're not xenophobes.

They're not anti-Islamic.

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.

They just want to be French.

And they'd love people to come to their country.

They just want you to be French, like us.

We just want you to be an American.

And because the government and the EU denies that there's any problem,

and because the press says, You didn't see that.

Nothing to see here.

There's no stabbing problem.

What?

Rape problem?

There's no rape problem.

I don't know what you're talking about.

The only one that says the truth, it's like 1930.

The only ones who come up and say anything that's true are these monsters, these nationalist, extremist Nazis who say,

you know what?

I'm proud of my country too.

And they're not doing anything until

some government, and I don't even see us, I think we're playing with it.

We're getting closer than we were, but until some some government actually

has the balls to stand up and say, look, this is the problem.

This ideology is a problem.

Borderless countries don't work.

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

We want what built.

It's a reasonable request.

Reasonable.

Reasonable.

Until somebody starts talking reason in the press and in power,

you're adding to all of the other problems chaos.

You're feeding, the governments are feeding

this disconnect from their own government.

They don't trust them anymore.

How do you, I think the military called it the Bubba effect.

You know it?

No, I'm not familiar with the Bubba effect.

So I was with some special forces guys out east.

This is years ago

with

Bush was in office.

41 or 43?

43.

And

I said, so what are you guys most worried about?

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

I said, what's the Bubba effect?

They said that

because so many people are

in countries are living in denial,

the people aren't stupid.

And at some point,

you know,

Mohammed will go and blow up something.

And Bubba, who's at the cash register at the local 7-Eleven,

will see

a Sikh come in and see the turban and just not know and just think, oh, he's part of the problem.

It's you people.

And he'll shoot him.

Everyone will know Bubba was wrong.

Bubba should go to jail.

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

It's you that have caused Bubba to do these kinds of things.

I see.

You know what I mean?

I do, very much so.

That seems more and more realistic every day.

Does it not?

Well, I think when you look at that kind of scenario, you could certainly see how that could unfold, especially in our nation today.

Yeah.

With

it, you have such a polarized nation.

And I'm surprised on basics from a counterterrorism perspective that we still can keep an eye on the ball based on all the problems that are going on inside of Washington.

But I do know, Glenn, that, and I talk to these agents every day in different capacities, that at the end of the day, you still have very hardworking men and women

doing their job.

No doubt.

These are the cops assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

You have law enforcement and public safety doing their job.

No doubt.

And that's what gives me hope.

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

Do you follow Russia at all in what Russia is doing now?

Sure.

Have you ever heard of Alexander Dugin?

No.

Okay.

He was the guy who kind of

created the Crimean policy for Putin, and he's a guy who's developed what's called the fourth political theory and he has major backing

and he's a chaos guy and with a blind eye from Putin although he's not blind on anything

the

he's established and is supporting all of these extremist groups on both sides.

His philosophy basically is what we had happen with our own digital media here, where they would take the side of the police and they'd take the side of Black Lives Matter.

They're just stirring it up.

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

They did the same thing to us here in the United States.

If you look at,

there's a friend of mine who's written a wonderful book called Days of Rage.

I don't know if you've read it by Brian Burroughs.

And if you look at the tempo and the sheer scope of attacks in the continental United States in the 60s and 70s, they far surpass anything that we're seeing today.

And that was all Soviet KGB funded.

And the Soviet grand strategy along those lines is that if they can create so much chaos inside the United States, that we would be so dysfunctional from a government perspective that they can continue around the world.

I think their plan now is to collapse us.

I think that that's their strategy.

But I also think that there's some very smart people inside the CIA and DOD that understand that.

That how are we going to try to get in front of this, at least also from a cyber perspective and so forth?

How can we stop them from meddling in elections?

How can we go after some of their how can we turn the tables on them from a covert operations perspective?

I've talked to several people about Russia and China, and they're split.

China has no teeth.

They're, you know, they're so close to economic collapse and revolution in their own

nation.

You know, their military is a paper tiger.

And I hear the same thing about Russia.

They're not a threat.

Then I hear the exact...

I don't find a lot of people who are in the middle.

What's your take on those two?

Well, I think you're dealing with,

if you look at the People's Liberation Army of China,

their Ministry of State Security, from an intelligence perspective, they are as good as the CIA or the Israeli Mossad.

If you look at the Russian SVR, their external service,

and the FSB, their domestic service, they are as good as the CIA and our domestic FBI.

So if you break it apart from an adversarial perspective, these are very capable nation states.

Now,

on the battlefield,

what China has can far surpass us from from a sheer manpower perspective.

They can drop people out of planes and bombs.

Exactly.

Forever.

They can keep dropping people.

But from an intelligence perspective, these are noble adversaries.

Same with Iran.

I mean, what most people don't realize, Glenn, is that Iran has just as capable of intelligence service as any first world nation state.

Wow.

That's how good they are.

How did you feel the day we made that nuclear deal?

Oh, it made me.

I did not like it.

I did not agree with it.

I knew that the money that we would hand over that was allegedly frozen, which reportedly was part of their proceeds that was frozen during the 79 embassy takeover.

I knew exactly where that money was going to end up.

It was going to end up in their intelligence services' buckets.

Why would we deliver cash?

I mean, everything bad is usually a cash business.

Right.

Cartels learn that every day.

Yes.

I will just deliver that to me in cash.

Right.

Why would we do that?

Well,

that was a foreign policy decision that the Obama administration made.

I do believe that they thought that perhaps it could buy them some time or help with the nuclear proliferation program.

I knew from a practical level that that money would just show up in the coffers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and that Solomani, the general now in charge that reports directly to the Ayatollah, bypassing the president, that he's got a windfall of money to carry out covert activities all around the globe.

You have Russia, Iran, Turkey

destabilizing all of it and really taking Hezbollah and Hamas and surrounding now

Israel.

What do you think is coming, if I could ask you for a crystal ball?

What do you think?

What's coming our way?

I think, Glenn, that let's not forget that the Israeli Mossad are laser fixated on Iran.

The launch time from Iran to Israel is very short.

And that I'm highly confident that the Israelis are monitoring the Iranian nuclear development program on a weekly basis at best, and that the moment that they lose that window of intelligence coverage and whatever they might have, Human, SIGIN, ELINT, whatever,

that they're going to take some sort of action is my personal opinion on that.

But I'm confident in the services of the state of Israel to know that they're not going to lose sight of that eye on the ball.

I've seen reports from

one of the big guys that was

pretty nasty in Saudi Arabia, has come out openly in support of Israel.

You're starting to see almost a coalition.

And I know it's all about Iran.

Sure.

But if Iran attacks, do you see

Arab going after Arab because it is about Iran?

I do.

I'm pretty confident about that, that the Saudis are scared to death of Iran.

They should be.

And should be, and rightfully so.

We've gotten a taste of Saudi covert action, as distasteful as that might be with their actions in Istanbul.

I think what a lot of people don't understand is that, remember, these services aren't just dedicated to internal nation-state activity.

They operate globally.

That

you have the long reach of all these intelligence services, which is kind of scary when you think about it.

It wasn't that long ago that Iran and Hezbollah planned an assassination of the Saudi ambassador to the United States out of Mexico City of all places.

So that is the kind of a reach that as the world has shrunk from an intelligence service capability, that you have all these nation states Saudi Arabia Egypt Jordan

the Iranians they operate in a global kind of context now

let me take you to our southern border

again I'm a guy with no

you know I've got a few people on my staff that we just read we're going online

and we're we have long memories and we watch what people say and

and remember that and then match the actions, even if they're a few years later.

And what's happening on our border, twofold,

I think we're being set into a

Gaza-Israel kind of situation to where, God forbid, there ends up being some compound on the other side of our border of these refugees.

That's a constant battle that we'll have.

And the big, bad Americans, you know, firing off tear gas.

Obama did it 1,600 times on the same border.

Trump does it once, and it's, you know, horrible.

A, do you think that is possible that we are looking at a group of people, and I'm not talking about the actual people that are there,

but foreign forces and actors that would like to see us in a Gaza situation on our border?

Absolutely.

And who stands to win in that kind of scenario?

Moscow, follow the money into what could be taking place in a lot of these kinds of actions.

Well, that brings me to the other part of this:

Cuba and Venezuela

had a good friend in Honduras.

Right.

And

he was kicked out.

And

we have pretty compelling evidence that they are,

it's this, you know, alienated party that really kind of puts some of this together.

And now it is being funded by

open borders people that generally are Marxist.

And

without

a media telling you the truth, in fact, telling you to deny what you see,

how does the American,

how do do American people

figure out who the good guys and bad guys are?

I think it's very difficult to do today.

It's always been somewhat of a daunting task for the average viewer or the average Joe that's going to work every day, that can only turn on their TV at night or watch a podcast or only has time to do that.

It's very challenging from a public perception perspective.

But remember, the Soviets, the Russians, have always been very good at information management and disinformation and creating chaos.

So chaos at the border for the United States is a good thing for Moscow.

Good thing for anybody who doesn't like us.

Exactly.

And for that to continue is something that I think is going to continue for the foreseeable future as well.

We're still going to have these flare-ups at the border with these border rushes and so forth.

So I think as you look and pull the veil behind some of this money that's being used to finance some of these organizations, you've got something that's right out of an old KGB playbook.

Are you optimistic for the Western culture?

I have faith in

the kids that I go and talk to, at the universities I speak to, that there's a lot of interest in the topics that we're just discussing, Glenn.

That gives me faith.

I'm not very optimistic of Washington.

I left Washington for a reason.

I think that it's very difficult to fix some of these problems from inside that kind of bureaucracy, that it takes voices on the outside

to shine a spotlight on certain issues, which you have done so well.

And so I think that this you could have almost more of an impact outside of government, and I'm sad to say.

Aren't we in a

We're in an interesting time.

I've been saying this for a while, for almost 20 years.

And I used to say, there's going to come a time, but I think we're in it now,

where all of the progress of the Industrial Revolution that took 120 years is all going to happen in about a 10-year period.

Because the pace of technology, that we are just changing everything.

And some of the angst that people feel, and they're not putting their finger on it, they can't put their finger on it, is the corporations know this doesn't really kind of work in the new world.

The banks, it's not quite right.

I mean, we got this, but it's not quite right.

The power of the government, the way it works, technology has moved past the old structure.

And in the next 10 years, it's going to blow by it.

You just, you won't be able to regulate fast enough for technology.

And I don't think anybody knows what to do.

And most people don't even,

you know, they're not looking at technology and they're not looking at the future and they're not seeing that

the people in Silicon Valley are trying to create a world that has 100% unemployment

and the people in Washington are trying to have zero unemployment and the people here in the middle

don't know that this gigantic battle is on the horizon, you know?

In your experience looking at

wars, civil wars, conflicts,

what is the thing

that

allows a nation to do

what really we've done the whole time, even in our civil war, and that is come back together.

After times of great strife, we still hold on to each other and we still come back together.

But

where is there an example outside of the United States?

Is there anything that you've learned that you've seen that we need to remember?

I think tragedy forces that kind of assembly of all different faiths and cultures and common mission.

You're a student of history.

I am too.

I think that if you look at some of the catastrophic events that's happened to our nation, whether it be the strike on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln,

the attempts on Garfield and McKinley, the shooting of Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, the events of 9-11.

Hearken back to President Bush 43 standing on the rubble

with the bullhorn.

That brought our nation together, but I'm not smart enough to know, Glenn, what causes those kinds of things.

All I know is that that kind of a tragic event.

Do we come back together like we did on 9-11 next time?

I think so.

I hope so.

Yeah.

I really do.

I'm very optimistic that.

But the sad part to your to your point, Glenn, is that it would take something like that

to bring our nation back together again.

One last question.

What is the one thing that keeps you up at night that you think, oh man, if I could just get people to understand this one thing,

we'd make great progress.

I think that

I've seen so much human tragedy and picked up so many body bags from a terrorism perspective where I was down in the weeds, that I think as a nation, the farther we get away from 9-11, the less and less people recall

how much human casualty that caused and how much strife that

brought our nation to its knees.

I don't want to see us lose sight of the Bill Buckleys of the world that have dedicated their life and died

in a very tragic way.

That I'm grateful for people like that that have devoted their entire life and have sacrificed for our great nation.

But I don't want to see us lose the eye on the ball based on all the different political rhetoric and all the different problems and social unrest that we have here in our nation.

I think it'd be very easy to do.

I know I said last question, but one more.

Biggest problem we face, we have to fix, what would it be?

We could only fix one or concentrate really on one, put everything else, you know, still the stove is still burning, but this one is a priority.

What is it?

I think that as a nation, we need to get together

and start almost a new Manhattan kind of project with the greatest minds that we can assemble to look at issues such as effective border security, that you just can't arrest your way out of this problem, that it's just not a law enforcement entity because there's public health problems.

I think the southern border is an issue that, as we fast forward into the next election, will become a huge hot button.

So, I think we need to have the greatest minds our country can assemble to figure out that kind of solution for massive immigration flows that

are pending and are going to continue to try to come in every day from our southern border.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for your service.

Oh, thank you, Glenn.

Sincerely.

Thank you.

Thank you.