 I gave this curious title, you know, if the shoe fits, wear it. If the missile fits, beware. You should get an idea of what I'm talking about as we go along. But let me start by saying that when I don my old hat as representative of the Director of Central Intelligence, this involved my having access to the very best specialists, whether they were from NSA or whether they were from the Pentagon. I had my tasking at one point, it was Western Europe as well as the Soviet Union, and I could pick on these people and draw on their expertise, learn from them, and then tell it like it was. Now, one recent example, just to set the stage here, is a fellow named Bill Binney who was, by and large, the smartest guy ever worked at NSA. Even his old colleagues that don't abide by his opposition to a lot of what NSA does, agree on that. I was able to turn to Bill Binney in our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity group to tell me, what about this Russian hacking bill? For God's sake, all kinds of circumstantial evidence is being adduced by the New York Times and by the intelligence community, but there's no evidence for God's sake. Tell me about this. So that's what Bill did. He picked some slides made locally available from Ed Snowden, slides showing how NSA would have intercepted anything that was a hack from the DNC computers, and this conclusion, I actually printed out here, it says the bottom line is that NSA would know where and how any tech emails from the DNC, from Hillary Clinton, or any other servers were routed through the network. They don't know that, and they're on hangs a tail. The date of that memo that we wrote as VIPS was December 12th, 2016. So Trump hadn't even become president yet. He was president-elect. Now, less than one year later, the head of the computer firm that was to look into the DNC hacks really leaks, testified under oath to Congress saying, there is no evidence that Russia or anyone else hacked the DNC emails. There is no exfiltration that we looked after our comprehensive and thorough look. So it wasn't a hack by Russia or anybody else. That was December 5th, I repeat, 2017. Huh. Raise your hand if you know about that. Oh, I don't see many hands going up there. Why? The New York Times has suppressed that story from December 5th, 2017 through today. What's today? April 25th, 2023. So all I'm saying here is that very crucial judgments could be made if someone takes the trouble to combine various sources, including open source material with the experts who know which end this up and who will tell the truth without fear or favor. Maybe I'll let it go at that and simply add that in this case, Ted Postal, whom some of you know, was my technical expert. There is no one who knows more about this issue than Ted Postal. Matter of fact, he's published on it and he's been shunned about some of his conclusions having to do with how the U.S. violated the INF Treaty, the Treaty on Intermediate Nuclear Forces. The one that banned a whole class of missiles and their launchers had them destroyed. And Scott Ritter, my good friend, was one of the people who inspected that destruction. So Ted Postal has given me some sexy slides. The first one you'll see are kind of pedantic, they're sort of like, not very sexy, but it's the political analysis that I used to do based on media analysis, which is really just a sub-discipline of political science, okay? You look at what leaders say and you try to glean interesting information from those. So what I saw Mr. Putin saying, and actually I was in Russia at the time he said these first remarks to Western journalists, was really intriguing. I have three slides, which I will read through very quickly for those who maybe later have podcasts, earplugs or whatever. And we'll go through that and I'll tell you what I thought about that. Will we have that next slide, please? Okay. So there was a captive audience. These reporters were up there for an economic summit and Putin said, look, you come here. I'm going to give you the straight scoop on this very, very important subject, crucial subject. I don't expect you to publish on it. I don't even expect you to tell your editorial staff about it, but I want to talk to you, human being to human being. And this is some of what he said. They, the U.S., has placed their missile defense system in quotes in Romania, saying that we must protect ourselves from the Iranian nuclear threat. Now, just as an aside, I asked Ted Postal, could you do a map of Europe and Poland and Romania and Iran? He said, why? I said, well, you know, a lot of Americans, they thought Ukraine was in the middle of the Pacific. So I just, he said, look, you'd be insulting people. Everyone knows that Iran and that are in. So there's no map of Iran in correlation with Poland or Romania. Here's what Putin is saying. There is no Iranian nuclear threat, especially after that five power agreement was reached, but the missile systems are continuing to be deployed. We're talking about Romania. This is 2016. So they built the system, and now it's being loaded with missiles. Next slide, please. These missiles are put in capsules, containers, used for sea-based mid-range Tomahawk rocket launchers, which are offensive missiles. Now, one could put them into position in Romania, for example, in a matter of hours. And then what kind of system, what kind of anti-missile system are we talking about? More important, how do we know what kind of missiles in there? All you have to do is change the program. That's all it would take. Next slide, please. Finishing up on what Putin told these Western reporters, this could happen. That is, changing the program could happen very quickly, and even the Romanian government itself wouldn't know what's going on. Do you think they would let the Romanians call the shots? Nobody is going to know what's being done, not the Romanians, not the Poles. The Poles were slated for this kind of installation as well. The Poles won't either. He doesn't say this, but neither will we. Neither will we, Russian planners, Russian military, me as President of Russia. We won't know what's being done. So he finishes up by saying, well, from what I could see, we are in grave danger. Now, I came by that transcript just luckily, because I was plugged in with some people who not only get a hold of it, but put subtitles under it. I may have used this in one of my previous talks here. In any case, it's available on the web, and I'll give you the URL for it later. Maybe we have the next slide, please. So we fast forward now. That was 2016. Here's December 21st, 2021. Okay. The balloon is about to go up. Soviet forces, Russian forces are near Ukraine. And so Putin makes this formal address to the, it was the state of the military address. Okay. And what he says to them, he looks at these generals and admirals and defense minister Shoigu, and he says, this is extremely alarming. MK 41 launchers, the correct designation. They're already in Romania, and soon they'll be in Poland. The deadline for Poland was the end of last year. There's some talk about some delay there, but it looks like they're fully ready to put them in Poland as well. So here's Putin again. These MK launchers can launch offensive strike missiles. Note the date here, December 21st. He goes on, a few US missiles are deployed in Ukraine. Their flight time to Moscow will be about seven to 10 minutes or even five minutes if we're talking about hypersonic systems. Again, this is a huge challenge for us, for our security. Okay. Now, after he made his formal remarks, Shoigu, the defense minister and others got up and talked, and then he said, I want to, I want to say a couple, I want to say some more words. So you don't, you don't deprive the president of your country of the microphone. Next slide, please. I'd like to have a few words. Okay. It goes into the, what he, what he deems the illegality of what the US did in Yugoslavia in Iraq and Syria, and then he makes a distinction. He says, what the US is doing now in Ukraine is not happening thousands of kilometers away. It is on our doorstep. We simply have nowhere to retreat. He's telling his leading generals and admirals this on the 21st of December. The US does not have hypersonic weapons yet, but we know and we will know when they have them. They know what we know. They know that we know. Okay. They will supply hypersonic weapons to Ukraine. Putin's words on the 21st of December. Okay. Next slide, please. Next thing you know, the Kremlin calls the White House and says, Mr. Putin would like to talk to Mr. Biden like, like right away. White House was flummoxed. Look, we're going to get together in Geneva, our representatives, we're going to start talking about these important, why now, please? Mr. Putin wants to talk to Mr. Biden right now. Now, to his credit, Biden accepts the call on the 30th of December. And what's the outcome? Well, it's confirmed that the negotiations would take place in Geneva, January 9 and 10. And also, and this is important to Putin, that the presidents themselves would personally supervise the negotiating tracks. That's important because he's had bad experience with presidents of the United States once these fires go up and smoke at the hands of the U.S. Air Force. Now, here we have the key. In this context, President Biden emphasized that Russia and the U.S. share a special responsibility for ensuring stability in Europe, and that Washington has no attention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine. Wow. So, December 21, Putin says, when they get hypersonic missiles, they're going to deploy them in Ukraine. This is a real threat to us. On the 30th, Biden tells him, Washington has no, this is a quote from the readout, Washington has no intention of deploying offensive strike missiles in Ukraine. Whoa. Next slide, please. What was the reaction on the Russian side? Whoa, Ushakov. Yuri Ushakov was the main aide to Putin on these matters. He says, well, really pleased. He emphasizes that Biden's pledge not to deploy offensive arms in Ukraine amounted to an acknowledgement of Russian security concerns. Wow. This is something that the Russians were lusting after, right? A acknowledgement that they have security concerns here. Ushakov stressed that this was one of the goals that Moscow hopes to achieve with the proposal it had just made, the proposals for security guarantees from the U.S. and from NATO, those draft treaties that were given to the U.S. and NATO just a week or two before. Well, actually, if you look at it and you read the text of those draft treaties, Ushakov is understating the case. Probably, well, I'll just read this, that the U.S. non-deployment of offensive missiles in Ukraine, that kind of assurance addresses a key issue embedded in no fewer than five of the eight articles in the Russian draft treaty on security guarantees. So, you got more than half of the main issues listed in the draft treaty addressed by this one thing here, which seems to have happened all of a sudden, right? Biden made this assurance and it was just nine days after Putin was telling, or 10 days after Putin was telling his folks, this is a real problem. Whoa, so no wonder Ushakov is upbeat. Okay, next slide, please. Uh-oh, uh-oh, downbeat. February 12th, what's that, about six weeks later? 2022 now. Ushakov briefs the media on Biden, Putin's most recent, actually, maybe their very last telephone call or tet-a-tet virtual. So, this is a quote from Ushakov. The Putin-Biden telephone talk today followed up on that, on the one from December 30th. Okay, so it's a follow-up. I want to note, straight away, that Putin made clear that Biden did not really address the central key elements of Russia's initiatives either with regard to non-expansion of NATO, or non-deployment of strike weapons systems on Ukrainian territory. So, something fell into cracks. One can speculate that when Biden woke up on your sleeve, Jacob Sullivan and Blinken were there and I said, Mr. President, you didn't really say that to Putin, did you? Well, yeah, I thought we'd get the negotiations off, but I forgot about it. Well, I don't know if that's the way it happened, but the U.S. side, I forgot about it. Okay, so this is February 12th now, 2002, 2022. Now, we know that that's just what, 10 days before, two weeks before the invasion of Ukraine. Am I saying this is the only reason? Of course not. Am I saying it's a contributing factor? I am saying that, partly because of the lack of trust that Mr. Putin perceived in this promise, this maybe not promise, maybe it was an assurance NATO, we have Washington has no intention of putting offensive strike missiles in Ukraine. Give the next slide, please. Now, I promised you more sexy slides, right? And I told you that Ted Post will work with me. Actually, we spent several evenings discussing all this, me asking him questions, just like I asked Bill Benny, what about this or what about that? Ted is a terrific guy. He was really, really helpful. He constructed this map. I said, Ted, take a generic ballistic missile, okay? And would you show where the site in Romania is and where the site in Poland is? And give us an idea, launch to target. I mean, is Putin blowing smoke? Or does he have actual reason to be concerned, okay? Well, you can read for yourself. The one from near Kyiv, it's about seven minutes of time to target. The one from Mania and from Poland, longer. But it's a real, it's a real distance, it's a real thing, okay? May we have the next slide, please? Okay, now, the problem is that, no, this is not a Lego thing that I gave my grandson for Christmas. Now, this is more serious, okay? This is a canister. What's the big deal here? This is a canister being loaded on a destroyer, okay? And it's, you'll see later in the next slide what happens. This canister can accommodate all manner of missiles, cruise missiles, as well as anti-aircraft missiles, as well as anti-submarine missiles, okay? You can't tell from the outside what's in that canister. Here they are loading it or unloading it. We were not really quite sure yet on one of these cruise missiles, one of these Aegis type destroyers. May we have the next slide, please? Okay, just to show you about these canisters, okay? They can accommodate a Tomahawk cruise missile, that's the one on the left, and they can accommodate all these other things to the right. I'm not gonna go through the others. The idea is that what the Russian word is container, these containers can contain any variety of these missiles, and you don't know from looking at the top which ones are in there. Next slide, please. Okay, now here they are. It looks like they're inserting it into one of those things on ship holes, okay? Now, I don't know about you, but I'm so an old guy and I have this pillbox, you know, and I don't those things look a little bit like pillbox, so you don't take too many pills one day and not so many nights. That's what it looks like. And when I talked to Ted about this, you know, I said, Ted, you know, can't they get that thing in there easy enough? I mean, why do they have that guy in the middle with the red hat? Why do you have to download the instructions, for God's sake, from Google and then that woman in the yellow hat? I think she's, it looks like she's doing a little tai chi or something to spirit the thing down into the hall. He said, Ray, don't say any of this stuff. This is serious stuff. So I'm not gonna say any of that, okay? This is how they load it in or they pull it out. Again, that canister can accommodate all manner of different kinds of missiles, Aegis missiles, AAA missiles, the gamut. Okay, next slide please. All right, this is the way they are deployed on a ship. This is a destroyer, okay? Now you have many of them in the back, what for? You have two in the front. That's the way they are on a ship. You'll see later from model how they look in Romania. Next slide please. So there's Romania. This is a mock-up. I was in error when I said there are holes in Romania. It's above ground. It's above board. They're on concrete slabs, as Ted told me. And as you can see, that canister, they're 24 missiles that can be launched from that one launch, and it can be expanded to the 200s, okay? Now that's a vertical launcher enclosure. It's exactly the same kind of thing that's on the ship, except it's now on land. Can you determine what's in those canisters? No. And therein lies a problem for those who really need to know what kind of missile is in that canister. May we have the next slide please? Okay, here's sort of a combination. There's that picture that I showed you before with the lady. Now, they're trying to load that into one of those capsules on ship, and that's how the Tomahawk looks and how air interceptor, the surface-to-air missile looks when it's fired. And I have to tell you that after Ted briefed me on all this, next time I looked at my pillbox, I pulled up one of those things really, really carefully. He told me not to say that either. Okay, next slide please. Well, as you can imagine, and you can see this from Poutine's briefing of these Western correspondents in 2016, the Russians are really upset about all this. It defied lots of stuff. In their view, it was a clear violation of the INF Treaty in which we still existed. Donald Trump not leaving that one until 2019. So here are the Russians complaining. What about all this? This could be Tomahawks. These are offensive missiles. What's going on in there? Now, the State Department reply was, no, no, no. Can't be Tomahawks. Can't be offensive missiles. Why? Because the system lacks the software, fire control, hard layer, support equipment, other infrastructure needed to launch an offensive ballistic missile or cruise missile such as the Tomahawk, BS, rubbish. Ted Postal tells me that Poutine was right on this. All you need is a, you don't even need a DVD. A CD will do it or a thumb drive to stick in that computer and change the program. So when Poutine says the program can be changed, he happens to be right on this. These were very disultory, almost offensive answers to Russia's concerns. Ted gave me a very elaborate graphic to show how all this has done these three things that could be easily done overnight. But I won't bore you with that. I was a little busy. We have the next one, please. Okay. Now, we have heard that Poutine might be legitimately concerned because, well, let's say, let's just say that the Russians over through the government in Mexico City, let's say, and then they got that government to request the Russians to put in intermediate or medium-range ballistic missiles in Mexico. That's a hypothetical, but how would the US react? Well, guess what, guys? You don't have to be hypothetical. So this happened. It happened in 1962, 60 years ago, plus. Now, I happen to be reporting for active duty at Fort Benning, Georgia, as an Army Infantry Intelligence Officer, to take training and train on some of these weapons. Okay? Guess what? There were no weapons at Fort Benning, the Army Infantry Training Center. Now, McGovern naively asked, where are the weapons? And I was told, they're all in Key West, Florida. They have been there for several weeks. It looks like they're ready to go into Cuba, although right now, we're talking November 3, right now, it seems that the extensions have died down. Okay. I'm just saying that because that was what I experienced personally. If I were a year ahead, I would probably have been down there in Key West with my colleagues in the Army. Okay? Now, so what I'm saying here is that when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened, and those of you who are a little bit younger than me, which include probably a lot of you, I remember that Khrushchev got this idea, hey, Fidel Castro wants me to put these ballistic missiles in Cuba to defend them so the U.S. won't try to overthrow his government anymore like they did before. And that would give us a really leg up. I mean, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Let's try it. It's a gamble, but let's try it. Okay. Now, long story short, all manner of medium range ballistic missiles showed up in Cuba. And because of cloud cover and some other considerations, we didn't find out about them until they were there. We didn't find out about them until they were in place. We didn't find out about them until they were armed. Okay. Now, John Kennedy saw this as an existential threat. I mean, hello. Take a look at those circles there. The one in the middle designates how far an IL-28 Soviet bomber with nuclear weapons could reach. The next one, which is the operative one, shows an SS-4 range. SS-4 is a medium range nuclear missile. Now, were they dangerous? Were they highly explosive? Well, you remember that the atom bomb over Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, right? Well, the warheads on these SS-4s were megatons, meaning a million tons of TNT. How many were there? I didn't want to make any mistakes on this. I made a note. 24. Three regiments, two sites, four launchers per site. Were they armed? We didn't know for sure, but I have just uncovered a memorandum from Ray Klein, who was the deputy director for intelligence of the CIA at the time, and for whom I later worked when he was in Germany. He warned the president, look, we have to assume that eight of those missiles can be fired right now. And we also have to assume that they will be armed with nuclear warheads. Why? It just doesn't make any sense to shoot them off, to fire them unless they have nuclear warheads. Whoa, that was about five days into the crisis, October 20th. Worse still, intermediate range ballistic missiles. That's the big circle. That includes San Francisco, Los Angeles, lots of other places, Omaha, where our strategic arms command was. They were also on their way. How do we know that? U-2 photography from October 15th showed emplacements being ready for intermediate range ballistic missiles. Take a look at that map, folks, and see. They're called SS-5s, right up there on the top is the label. That's the arc, and that's how much they could cover. Guess what? They didn't make it through. If you look at the little box in the lower left corner, you'll see a depiction of the blockade. Blockade? Isn't that illegal on the international law? Oh yeah, but hey, Kennedy was provoked, right? Okay, so there's the blockade, and as luck would have it, he put the blockade, he called it quarantine. Sounds a little nicer, right? So he put the blockade, the quarantine in place just before those intermediate range ballistic missiles got to where the blockade was. So they were deterred. They never reached Cuba, but Kennedy of course insisted that all the things be taken back to Russia. He didn't want this existential threat right on our periphery. Now, I don't remember anybody saying in those days, no, wait a second, wait a second. International law allows any country to pick its own alliances. So Cuba has every right to have Russia introduce intermediate range and intermediate ballistic missiles, doesn't it? Nobody seemed to make that argument about that, about any country having the right to do whatever it wants when it threatens the existence of a major power. That's a little diversion here, but you're getting my drift, right? So what happened? Well, Kennedy had some really good advisors, okay? He insisted that Ambassador Wellin Thompson, who was back, who had been an ambassador to Moscow a couple of months previous, he said, Tommy, you sit in on every one of those key meetings and be a voice for a reason which he was. The Joint Chiefs were going AP on the Hershey Highway, as we would say in the Bronx. I mean, they were really, they were really a problem for Kennedy. Wellin Thompson helped and Bobby Kennedy helped. They worked out a deal. Now, there was communication in those days, teletype, but it worked, right? Jack Matlock, my friend was on the other end of the teletype in Moscow, okay? Pretty exciting times. What else? Well, Kennedy made sure that the Joint Chiefs staff would never left the loan. In other words, he knew what they wanted to do. He heard us so many of those guys, this is our chance to get the Russians for God's sake, we're going to get a further away this chance. In any case, what I'm saying now is there was communication with the Russians. There were people who had their heads screwed on, right? Think of comparisons are invidious, but compare Wellin Thompson or George Kennan with the likes of Michael McFall. I won't say anything more. Comparance really can be rather invidious. The point I'm trying to make here is that we don't have to go to hypothetical situations about, oh, I suppose the Russians overthrew the government in Mexico City and put it over. We have to do that. This all happened before. What's different? Well, two things very, very different. One, no communication this time around. And two, you have the likes of Michael McFall advising people like Jacob Sullivan and Tony Blinken. My God, no wonder they're going off half cocked. Now, I'd like to show you one more, one more photo. Could we have the next one, Amar? This is another difference. Okay. Now, this is not a really good photos, a YouTube photo. It was very, very helpful back during Cuba. Why? Well, because we had, we had thousands of photos of what SS4 ballistic missile sites look like. You know, you have a missile reactor, you have all those things, a shelter and so forth. So there was what we call an image, imagery analysis, we call a signature, right? This was like, hey, we are, we are SS4s. So the only real doubt was whether they were armed. I told you about how the intelligence community came down on that. We learned later, decades later that indeed they were armed. It was not, it was safe to assume they were armed. We damn well did well in assuming they were armed because they were. Some of them. Ray Klein said eight. Eight can do a lot of damage. Eight times one megaton. Anyhow, one reason for me showing this photo is that we know what's there. We know what we were contending with. Okay. Think back to those kill boxes, those capsules or those canisters. We don't know what's in those. Now, am I saying that this signature was an argument for stability because we know what we were contending with? I am saying that. And I'm saying that if the Russian military are looking at these canisters in Romania, and they're probably now already installed in Poland, they don't know what's in those canisters. Okay. Those canisters, as I tried to prove, can accommodate all manner of missiles, including, remember, offensive strike missiles. So just to finish the little chronology here, well, I won't go over the chronology. I think it was clear enough, December 21st, December 30th, and the next summit, all that kind of thing. Okay. Maybe I've gone on long enough here. Maybe what we ought to do is just finish up. And I want to show you two more slides. Maybe we have the next one, Amar. Okay. Here's Stan Ellsberg. He talks a lot about the Cuban missile crisis in his terrific book. If you haven't read the Doomsday Machine, you need to. It is, in my view, the most important book out there these days. Well, it's out there 15 years or so now. It needs to be read. So what Dan says there is, as I saw it, and I presume Khrushchev saw it this way, he was just as outlined in strategic nuclear forces as he was obviously in conventional terms in the Caribbean. The Caribbean, okay. Well, think the Black Sea, do the comparison. Khrushchev's long private telegram, says Stan Ellsberg, told me that he understood, and Khrushchev had his feet on the ground. He knew when a gamble had failed, he didn't want to unleash destruction. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Sorry, Fidel. We'll pull it out. We know, we know, international law requires that we do what you ask us to do, but you have the very right to ask us, but we'll pull it out. Okay. Next slide, please. Okay. Here I'm going back to Obama, who I think was president when Joe Biden was vice president. And he famously said, you know, the real axiom is, please don't do stupid stuff. Okay. Used another word. Now, what he said on Ukraine is pretty telling. In 2016, he warned, look, Ukraine is a core interest for Moscow in a way that it is not a core interest to the United States. Core interest. That's the word that the Russians are using now for Ukraine. And the Chinese are using now for Ukraine and Taiwan. And they're on Hangse, another and even more important story. He added, that is Obama. We have to be really clear about what our core interests are and what we're willing to go to war for. Oh, sensible, huh? Okay. Obama resisted sending arms to Ukraine because you know what he said? He said, this would encourage the Ukrainians to think that they could actually defeat the far more powerful Russians. And he asked his aides, what if we send in equipment and worms and stuff and it ends up in the hands of thugs? Gosh. What I'm saying here is that there can be reasonable approaches to these things on the part of Khushchev, who backed down as Dan Ellsberg was sure he was going to. Who's going to back down this time? Does Putin view these missiles and other threats having to do with Ukraine as an existential threat or as a core interest? I think he does. Does the Biden administration consider Ukraine a core interest? An existential threat? Well, from a political point of view, I suppose, but from a strategic point of view, I don't think so. And so what's the bottom line here? I think people like Massachusetts peace action, they have to be informed about such things. Please, don't anybody think that I'm saying this is the only reason that Putin decided to attack Ukraine? There are at least two of the main reasons I'll mention in passing. One was the fact that the Ukrainian forces trained up to NATO standards with NATO weaponry were about to descend on the Donbass, and that's clear now. And the other even more important factor was that Putin, contrary to all expectations, got Xi Jinping's buy-off on this. Got his knee-hill upstart. He explained to him on the 4th of February, this is what I'm going to have to do, given the circumstances. And Xi reversed centuries of declaratory Chinese policy. He said, we'll make a special exception here. We give you a waiver on Westphalia. That's what happened. That's the biggest thing that happened, and it's gotten even closer now. So when we talk to people like we're talking now here, from Massachusetts Peace Action, let's kind of remember that once we know more about what the situation is, that pieces, at least in the biblical sense, are simply the presence of justice. And justice has to be fought for sometimes and sacrificed for. And so if peace action is equally, if both words are of equal merit or equal emphasis, we need to do action at this point. We're coming to a dynamo. I don't know what the adolescents who are advising President Biden will encourage him to do once things get even worse in Ukraine. But we have to do everything we can to make sure that we raise our voice and maybe put our bodies into it to prevent the worst from happening. And I hope that you all will go ahead and do that. Thanks very much for your attention.