Ex-Agent REVEALS: CIA Makes Peace Impossible | Larry C. Johnson

## Intro The conversation lays bare a single, unsettling proposition: the security apparatus that is supposed to protect democratic order often functions as its most effective saboteur. Drawing on decades of experience listening to Russian perspectives, former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson argues that intelligence operations, partisan entanglements, and institutional opacity have combined to produce misleading foreign-policy narratives and domestic political disruptions. What emerges is not merely a critique of particular episodes like Russiagate, but a broader diagnosis of a security state that, by its incentives and methods, makes negotiated peace and truthful public discourse far harder to achieve. ## The Origins of Russiagate: Intelligence Operations & DNC Hacking Claims The exchange revisits the genesis of Russiagate with a forensic eye. According to Johnson, the episode did not emerge organically from a genuine outsider threat but from premeditated intelligence activity. He describes a tasking in 2015, convened at senior levels, to collect intelligence on most presidential candidates — a sweep that allegedly enlisted liaison partners abroad to bypass domestic collection restrictions. The result, in Johnson’s account, was a patchwork of surveillance and entrapment that was then recast into a single, politically explosive narrative: that Russia had intervened decisively to tip the 2016 election. Central to this account is the disputed provenance of the DNC emails. Johnson contests the widely accepted story that Russian state actors hacked Democratic servers, instead suggesting that internal leaks — notably attributed to Seth Rich by some sources — were intercepted and then repackaged as a foreign attack. He highlights anomalies in the technical claims made by cybersecurity firms at the time and underscores the coordinated role of multiple Western intelligence agencies in amplifying the Russia story. Whether one accepts every chronological detail he offers, the broader point is salient: intelligence-gathering is seldom neutral, and the way raw collection is interpreted and presented can have enormous political consequences. If the conclusion of that period was a single story — “Russians did it” — then the process of reaching it often involved domestic actors projecting operational thinking onto political rivals. The conversation insists that these were not simply analytical errors but deliberate choices about what to highlight and whom to blame, choices that cascaded into investigations, prosecutions, and a public discourse reshaped around a manufactured crisis. ## Absurd Narratives: Venezuela, Election Interference & Media Gatekeeping Beyond Russiagate, the discussion maps a broader culture of narrative production in which the security state and compliant media create simplified enemies to justify policy and deflect scrutiny. Venezuela becomes an illustrative case. Outrageous claims linking Caracas to distant conflicts get recycled as received wisdom while the complex regional dynamics that actually exist — diasporic merchant networks, informal trade zones, and localized criminal economies — are reduced to sensationalist slogans. In this telling, the public is steered toward easy villains that conceal how power is exercised. Media gatekeeping plays a vital role in this process. The conversation argues that mainstream outlets often reproduce intelligence-sourced claims without independent verification, treating leaks and briefings as definitive. When narratives that serve powerful interests are repeated enough, they ossify into “common sense,” crowding out alternative explanations and closing avenues for critical inquiry. In practice, this means that whether a story hinges on technical forensic claims about a cyber intrusion or on geopolitical spin about foreign election interference, the public debate is shaped more by signal amplification than by methodical assessment. Johnson’s critique is also normative: the real scandal is not merely that mistakes are made but that institutional incentives reward dramatization over restraint. Agencies gain budgets, prestige, and informal power by generating crises. Media outlets benefit from scoops and controversy. Political actors leverage alarms to mobilize bases or neutralize opponents. The combined effect is a marketplace where truth is often a casualty of expedient storytelling. ## Is the New National Security Strategy Meaningless? The conversation turns to high-level documents and strategic proclamations, asking whether new national security strategies represent meaningful recalibration or performative rhetoric. The critique is blunt: a strategy that is not underpinned by honest intelligence, clear lines of accountability, and realistic assessments of capacity risks being little more than window dressing. When the apparatus that produces intelligence is itself politicized or institutionally immune to oversight, strategic statements become slogans rather than roadmaps. Johnson’s account implies that a national security strategy divorced from effective oversight is especially dangerous in the cyber and information domains. If agencies cannot be reliably held to standards of evidence — if they can coordinate cross-border collection and then repurpose material to support policy goals — then strategy documents will be built on unstable foundations. Moreover, grand strategic commitments like extended economic and military competition assume a public consensus that cannot persist if foundational narratives are later discredited. The consequence is a brittle policy environment in which long-term planning is constantly undercut by episodic scandals and shifting truth claims. The conversation also flags an important political dynamic: strategy matters not only for statecraft but for domestic legitimacy. When citizens perceive that the instruments of state security are being used in partisan fights, public faith in those instruments and the policies they justify erodes. A national security strategy that fails to confront internal dysfunction thereby compounds the very vulnerabilities it claims to address. ## Can the US Reform? (Plus: What the West Can Learn from Russian Hockey) Reform is the natural question once dysfunction has been established. The exchange offers a sober assessment: institutions can change, but only if political will and institutional incentives align to make transparency and accountability priorities. Johnson argues that top officials can act to expose wrongdoing, but such moves are politically costly and often resisted by entrenched networks that benefit from ambiguity. The choice to reform, therefore, is as much political as it is technical. What is striking in the conversation is the way reform is connected to cultural learning. Johnson uses a metaphor that at first seems jocular — lessons from Russian hockey — to underline a more serious point about organizational cohesion and discipline. Russian hockey, he suggests, is marked by a pragmatic focus on collective performance, adaptability under pressure, and a willingness to exploit asymmetries in opponents’ expectations. For Western institutions, the lesson is twofold: cultivate collective competence and resist the temptations of spectacle. In other words, security institutions should prize calibrated effectiveness over the theater of crisis-making. Practical steps for reform suggested by the exchange include stronger congressional oversight with real investigatory teeth, clearer rules on cross-border liaison intelligence to prevent procedural circumvention, mandatory auditing of covert collection with independent review, and protections for whistleblowers who reveal politicized operations. Equally important is a media ecosystem that reasserts the norms of verification and skepticism, resisting the rush to publish intelligence-flavored claims as if they were journalism rather than raw product. The conversation is candid a

Ex-Agent REVEALS: CIA Makes Peace Impossible Mainstream Media keeps feeding us narratives about Russia without ever bothering going there. In contrast, a man who has been listening in on the Russian viewpoint for a long time is Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and member of group “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity”. Links: Sonar21: https://sonar21.com/ Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Goods Store: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com TImestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:05 Larry Johnson's CIA Background & Early Views on Russia 00:06:28 The Origins of Russiagate: Intelligence Operations & DNC Hacking Claims 00:15:47 Who Controls the Security State? (CIA/FBI Lack of Oversight) 00:22:20 Absurd Narratives: Venezuela, Election Interference & Media Gatekeeping 00:32:22 The Best Government Money Can Buy: Corruption in Congress 00:35:48 Is the New National Security Strategy Meaningless? 00:42:27 Russia's Pivot East & The End of Eurocentric Dominance 00:47:14 Can the US Reform? (Plus: What the West Can Learn from Russian Hockey) #Pascal Mainstream media keeps feeding its narratives about Russia without ever bothering to go there. In contrast, a man who has been listening to the Russian viewpoint for a long time is Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and member of the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He's joining me again today. Larry, welcome back. #Larry C. Johnson Hey, Pascal. Thank you again for the invitation. This time I don't have to show up as Larry Wilkerson—I was able to grow my hair out. #Pascal The background story here is that I reached out to you thinking I was contacting Larry Wilkerson, because the emails got kind of entangled. But I'm very glad you came on the show and that we now get to talk as well. I want to dedicate an episode to your work, because you've been working with and about Russia for a long time, trying to understand them. So I wanted to ask you—during your time at the CIA, as an analyst—how did you get into the topic of Russia, and how did you approach it in the early days? #Larry C. Johnson -- 1 of 16 -- Well, actually, my only exposure to Russia back when I started at the CIA was an eight-week internship on the Afghan Task Force. That was when the Soviets were in Afghanistan, and I worked in the covert action arm. We produced propaganda to try to rally world opinion against the Soviets. My contribution was that I had T-shirts made with pictures of Afghan refugees, and we were passing them out—CIA was passing them out—on the beaches of Uruguay, in Punta del Este. The T-shirt said, “These children can’t go home for Christmas.” Now, ignore the fact that they were Muslims and didn’t celebrate Christmas, okay? All right. So I talked about my first real exposure. Then, when I became an analyst, I remember one time we got a collection of documents where the Sandinistas were desperate to get advice from the Russians on how to deal with the threat of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles against helicopters. My job was to translate those documents. But, you know, I had never really delved into Russian culture or Russian history that much until the start of the special military operation. And it just... it seemed off. I mean, I was saying, you know, we're trying to provoke a fight—we're not trying to avoid it, we're trying to provoke it. And hence the title of Scott Horton’s book. Yeah. So then I started just digging in and recognizing that, you know, we just had a blind spot in the United States when it came to Russia—not even knowing the history. You know, when I read Alex Krainer’s book several years ago, about Bill Browder, the grandson of one of the heads of the Communist Party in the United States, and then Browder’s subsequent anger at Putin basically because Putin is not a communist, I just—well, I started writing, trying to be objective and step back and say, look, this constant expansion of NATO to the east was without justification. And, you know, when you go back in history and say, “OK, give me the list of all the countries that Russia has invaded since 1991.” Well, none. And people say, “Well, what about Georgia?” Well, in the case of Georgia, the Russians had deployed peacekeepers there since the collapse of the Soviet Union because there were still territorial disputes within Georgia between these other territories. And it was the Georgians who attacked the Russians—with strong encouragement from NATO, by the way. So, you know, as I sat back and looked, I realized Russia has been the victim in this. I got into it a lot in 2016 with the whole Russiagate nonsense because I had some access to information at the time. I'm the one who went to Devin Nunes in March—I want to say around March 12th, 2017—to warn him about Russiagate, that this was an intelligence operation involving MI6, GCHQ, the FBI, and the CIA. I gave him a couple of names of people he needed to talk to and the kinds of documents he needed to see. And that’s what led Devin Nunes to launch that whole investigation. Kash Patel was his investigator. At the time, I knew that Russia was being completely set up as the fall guy. They were just a convenient enemy. And so, when you start—well, I get angry when I see people lying about issues like that, because people end up getting killed. #Pascal -- 2 of 16 -- The thing is, they lie on so many levels. And just as a side note, there’s an official report commissioned by the European Union and carried out by a Swiss diplomat, Heidi Tagliavini. The Tagliavini Report explicitly states that the first shots were fired by the Georgians—there’s no question about that. Who started the war? And still, to this day, the German chancellor and others keep repeating that Russia started the war against Georgia. It’s just, you know, the untruths, the lies that are being told—they happen on several levels. With the Russiagate issue, I’ve been wondering—some people, like Glenn Greenwald and others— they interpret it mainly as a way for the DNC, for the Democrats, to kind of excuse away this absolutely unforeseen loss of the presidency. They really thought they had it locked in, right? Until the end, they thought Trump was someone they could easily take down. So, he interprets this as a way the Democrats started a rumor that just completely went haywire. Do you also see it like that, or do you see other motivations behind Russiagate? #Larry C. Johnson Oh no, it was far deeper than that. One of my former CIA colleagues—let me just say, he served in several hotspots, in Lebanon and El Salvador. He was in Lebanon when the chief of station, William Buckley, was kidnapped and then killed. So he was an experienced guy, involved in operations in some of the most sensitive areas. I had started writing in 2016, after the Christopher Steele document came out, because my small consulting firm—I had two other partners at the time—you know, we wrote reports, but not like that. I mean, that thing was an embarrassment. It had so many obvious errors. So I started writing about it, and in the course of that, my CIA buddy called me up and said, “Hey, you’re not going to believe this.” He said he’d just had a conversation with one of his former colleagues who was still at the agency. That colleague told him that in the summer of 2015, John Brennan, then head of the CIA, organized a task force. A task force brings together people from other agencies—so you’d have folks from the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, from the National Security Agency, from the DOD on the operational side, and maybe from State INR and the FBI. Peter Strzok, for example, was, I think, at one point part of that task force. The task force, in the summer of 2015, was told to collect intelligence on all of the presidential candidates except Hillary. Tasked by who? Well, John Brennan assigned the task, and he was doing it at the behest of Hillary and her campaign. At the time, remember, it wasn’t certain—most people were joking that Donald Trump would never win the presidency. So they were collecting intelligence on Trump, on Marco Rubio, on Ted Cruz, and on Bernie Sanders. It wasn’t just on Republicans; it was also on Sanders. And the way they got around this was by using foreign intelligence operators. The NSA is prohibited from collecting intelligence on me, but they can call GCHQ in Britain—my God, they can collect on me—and then pass it to the NSA because it’s what’s called liaison intelligence. So that’s what was going on. It wasn’ t just GCHQ; the Belgians were involved, the Germans were involved, the Aussies were involved. -- 3 of 16 -- And this was a pretty comprehensive, coordinated effort. So, for example, how did they get onto George Papadopoulos? I mean, George Papadopoulos—nice guy, nice kid. I've met him and his wife, talked to him, and interviewed him. But he was a nobody. And yet, in August of 2015, he's in London, and he either called, texted, or emailed Corey Lewandowski saying, “Hey, I'd like to get involved with the Trump team.” Well, guess what? That communication was intercepted by GCHQ, and it was then filtered into the John Brennan task force. Then an intelligence operation was constructed to entrap— I mean, it sounds crazy, but this is exactly what happened. Papadopoulos, then out of the blue, gets offered a job as a vice president for this consulting firm in London, which later turns out to be an MI6 front. And then we have an email exchange between Brent Budowsky, who was a longtime Democratic operative in Washington, D.C., and John Podesta. It was dated December—this came out in the WikiLeaks dump of information. In that exchange, Budowsky and Podesta were talking about how they were going to hang the Russian affair on Trump, make it all about Trump and his “boyfriend,” Vladimir Putin. So as the campaign went on and it became clear that Trump was most likely going to win, that’s when it all shifted to Trump—and the full force of the covert operation that Gina Haspel, the former CIA director, was coordinating with British intelligence officers went full blast, starting in May 2016. And that May 2016 date also coincides with when CrowdStrike claimed the Russians hacked the DNC. Complete nonsense. They didn’t hack the DNC. Go back and read Dmitri Alperovitch, who was the head of CrowdStrike at the time. He gave two different accounts within two weeks of what happened—one saying it was the end of April, the other saying the first week of May. Okay, you can overlook that. But the message was that CrowdStrike knew, no later than May 5th, 2016, that the Russians had penetrated the DNC. They were on the inside, by God. So, you’re a cybersecurity guy—what do you do? They sit back and do nothing until June 10th, 2016, at which point, you know, two weeks— actually, more than two weeks—after the emails had been taken from the DNC. Because the DNC emails were taken—the last day was May 25th. So we’ve got 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31—that’s six—and then ten more days, June 10th. That’s when CrowdStrike goes, “Stop the presses, shut down the servers! Oh my God, the Russians are here!” Now, what happened was that both the CIA, NSA, MI6, GCHQ—everybody and his brother—were spying on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Everything that was sent to them, they knew. They weren’t a real threat, right? #Pascal Oh, yeah. What do you mean by that? WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks was a real threat to the intelligence community, right? Well, from the standpoint that it published truthful information. Exactly. Precisely. I don’t mean it’s a friend to us, the commoners—it’s an enemy to those who work behind the shadows, right? Correct. #Larry C. Johnson -- 4 of 16 -- Correct. Correct. So what happened was, sometime—I don’t know if it was Monday the 27th or Tuesday the 28th—they intercepted a communication between Seth Rich and Julian Assange, or with WikiLeaks. And it was Seth Rich who sent the information to WikiLeaks. Now, how do I know th