Ex-CIA Director Discusses post-Cold War Threats, Defends Defector

After speaking to the Financial Policy Council at the City University of New York, former CIA director R. James Woolsey spoke briefly to Breitbart News about the post-Cold War security outlook and the highest ranking Cold War-era defector to the United States.

Woolsey said that, shortly after the end of the Soviet Union, a “rich trove of material” was brought to the US, with Russian permission. “Most of it was not classified, but was very useful”. 

By the end of the 90s, the KGB were largely back in control of Russia. 

Latin America, Woolsey explained, was subject to “a concerted effort by Russia and the Cubans” to turn our southern neighbors Red. It was the result of “Russian money and Cuban work.”

Woolsey said that Iranian influence in Europe is “troubling” but “it will be a lot worse if they get Nukes, and I fear they are very close to that.”

Woolsey has written the forward to Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion and Promoting Terrorism, a book by Ion Mihai Pacepa, the one time chief of intelligence in Communist Romania and highest ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence official ever to defect to the United States. In our interview, Woolsey said of Pacepa, “I’ve only met him once. I had read his books, and spoke with him at length about detailed matters. I was very impressed by him.” Accusations that Pacepa was a KGB “Dangle”–a fake defector dispatched to an opposing nation to spread false information–were dismissed by Woolsey as “idiotic.” Woolsey slammed the main advocate of this story, a pro-Ceausescu American who left the United States to live in Communist Romania, Larry Watts, as a “blithering fool.” Watts claims that Pacepa had admitted to Woolsey that he was a KGB agent working to undermine the “patriotic” Ceausescu regime. When asked about this, Woolsey said that Watts is a “liar.”

In his speech, Woolsey focused on the threat of a natural or Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) to our electric grid, and the need for America to compete in the oil market. He told the audience that Americans must force congress to upgrade the electric grid, and, during the Q&A session, recommended the book Petropoly by Anne Korin and Gal Luft for ideas on how to address the latter problem.