Ray McGovern at Zero Days Screening (01/05/2017)

Supplemental document for: "Theory that Roger Stone's back channel to Wikileaks was Randy Credico", link: https://wakelet.com/wake/2d352ae9-febe-44a1-a7bb-51674a2e4bf5

Ray McGovern at screening of Alex Gibney's _Zero Days_, at Fordham University. Event title: "The Center On National Security At Fordham Law Presents: Is The United States Prepared? Zero Days, Cyber Wars, and the Russian Hack". Event date: January 5, 2017.

Full video can be found here: http://www.centeronnationalsecurity.org/events/zerodaysfinished

This transcription is of an excerpt that runs approximately from 1:10:00 to 1:17:00.

Video of this excerpt can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd8I6bIXelk

Those in video and transcript are as follows: Karen J. Greenberg - host of the event; Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, head of VIPS, friend of Julian Assange, and contact person for Wikileaks; David Sanger, journalist for the New York Times, author of _Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power_.

(January 5, 2017)

KAREN J GREENBERG
Go ahead. Wait for your microphone.

RAY MCGOVERN
Hello, my name is Ray McGovern. I was a CIA analyst for twenty seven years. And I'm co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. [someone, a single individual, claps] I, uh, I'm detecting a kind of aura of unreality here. Things are being treated as flat fact, which are totally unproven. It reminds me of weapons of mass destruction . When the forerunner of James Clapper, told his British counterpart, on 20 July, 2002, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that the intelligence was being fixed, around the policy, the New York Times, nine days later, had an article in which seven times "weapons of mass destruction" were mentioned as flat fact [link: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/world/us-exploring-baghdad-strike-as-iraq-option.html ]. And so it is here, with the Russian hack.

I hate to disappoint all of you, you nourished on the New York Times as I used to be...I grew up here in this city. But there was no hack. Okay? It was a leak. How do I know it was a leak? Because among our retired experts is the former technical director of the NSA [William Binney]. He devised these collection programs. And with the help of Ed Snowden, he can explain exactly how they work. And he says, if NSA had detected a leak, they would know it. Now: what's my question? My question is this: there all kinds of hints out there, that have not been pursued. There's an ambassador in London, named Craig Murray. He says, he knows who the source was. He says, he'd been in touch with people in touch with the source. And when I asked him, he's a friend of mine, have the New York Times, or the Washington Post been in touch with you? He said, "No." I asked two days later, I said, "Well, they have these big reports here, they're treating it as flat fact that it was a hack, and not a leak - he say, 'They still haven't gotten in touch with me.'"

So, twofold question here: number one, why has the New York Times, and I direct this to David [Sanger], why have you not checked with a former British ambassador, who claims to have met with _the leaker_? Not the hacker. The second part of the question is, why do you still...after the experience of fourteen years ago, why do you still do stenography on what secret, anonymous government sources, including James Clapper, who perjured himself before the Senate, what they tell you? It's not proven, it's treated as flat fact. And it ain't.

GREENBERG
Let me ask- I want to add to that, a question that's sortof...does it matter? Whether it was a leak or a hack? Because there's an awful lot of talk about what really mattered here, is the weaponization of information. And so, just...do you want to-

DAVID SANGER
I'll [inaudible] Ray's first part of this. We devoted a huge amount of effort to this. And, I think the Times made its share of errors during the WMD time...and we also have our share of extremely skeptical stories, during the WMD time. But the main lesson that we learned, was that...we were unable before the war broke out, to go find the dissenters within the system. And we didn't put enough- And we did not put enough effort to find the dissenters, who, as we learned later, in [Department of] Energy, and then the State Department intelligence arena. In this case, we put a fair bit of energy, into that. And it's an extraordinarily different kind of case, investigation than Iraq WMDs has been. And I think the President Elect has been right to remind everybody, that the CIA and other intelligence agencies made a big mistake during WMD time. That it had disastrous consequences. I could add, and I'm sure you could add, given your background, fifteen other bad calls...by intelligence agencies. In this particular case, we have the advantage that we could go to some of the victims, and figure out what happened to them. So, start with John Podesta, who had a gmail account, in which you've now read a lot of the material. We know exactly who had authorized access to that gmail account. It was a very small group. We have found the piece of code from, and published it. You can go look it up in "The Perfect Weapon" story [Title: "The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S." https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html ], that came in a fake email to him. He remembers the moment, as does his tech advisor, when he pressed the button [clicked the link] on this fake email. And we have now seen how that gave an outsider access to his account. And...it's fairly similar to the story you'll see at the DNC and elsewhere. So, in the Podesta case, if there was a leaker, the only leaker could be Podesta, and anybody else who had authorized access to his account. [MCGOVERN starts talking in the background]

GREENBERG
No, Ray!

SANGER
Podesta was one of the key parts of this. There were two main leaks there.

GREENBERG
[said during SANGER's last line, to MCGOVERN, who is still trying to interrupt] You've had your question. Other people have questions. This is not a debate.

SANGER
There was the DNC. And there were the Podesta emails. And of those two, to tell you the truth, I think the Podesta emails were probably the far more important out of that group.

GREENBERG
More questions. Over here. Wait for the microphone.