WE STARTED publishing edited sections of Joe Rogan’s epic two-and-a-half hour interview with Mike Benz, the former US State Department Cyber Division head, before Christmas. In my view it was the best analysis and explanation of the US ‘deep state’ I had come across and deserved the detailed attention that only print can provide. The first three edited transcript sections can be found here, here and here.
This last one ended with Joe and Mike looking at a video produced by the under-the-radar National Endowment for Democracy (NED) from one of its global censorship programmes. This is where today’s next excerpts from the interview take off from, as Benz moves to a full description of their intervention methods abroad, how ‘counter disinformation’ programmes came to be restyled as ‘strategic communications’.
The full interview is here. The edited extracts follow below it.
MIKE BENZ: It’s entirely funded by the US. I can break this down in detail.
The CEPPS programme [which describes itself as pooling the expertise of three premier international organisations dedicated to democratic development, one of which is the National Democratic Institute] is in large part the reason that the Brazil censorship state was erected – this came a little bit later in the game, but it’s a spawn-out of this NED censorship network, explicitly created by the CIA director – self-confessed, effectively – CIA cutout. What CEPPS does is they manage an umbrella portfolio of all censorship institutions [so] that they’ve capacity-built in a region. ‘Capacity building’ is a phrase in statecraft that effectively means building up an asset . . . capability to be instrumentalised by the US State Department. So, for example, whenever we’re trying to do something in a foreign country, the first thing we do is we look at the state of the chessboard. What assets are on our side there? What political groups? What demographic groups? What religious groups? What political parties? What universities? What media institutions? What capacities do they currently have? What capacities do they need but don’t have?
And that is where the flood of State Department and USAID and NED funding comes in, to capacity-build them, so they can be instruments of US statecraft. Now, it doesn’t mean they always use those capacities. Sometimes we create those capacities even if we don’t intend to use them right away, just in case we might need them later . . . what CEPPS does is a joint programme by the US State Department, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Now, USAID is a very notorious . . . sort of switch player. There’s no ‘aid’ in USAID, by the way . . . your brain is being tricked when you see the phrase USAID. It’s not an aid organisation. The ‘AID’ in USAID stands for . . . Agency for International Development. It is developing, internationally, around the world, all of the institutions that the State Department needs to use. So when they are capacity-building activist groups in a foreign country, that’s because the State Department wants those activists there.
Now, USAID . . . was created in the early 1960s by JFK, in 1961, because you had all of this intelligence statecraft and military support and logistical aid that was tripping over itself, basically. The military would be running aid to certain groups in the region. The State Department would be running aid to certain groups in the region. The Intelligence community would be. And there was no sort of central co-ordinator of those capacity-building operations.
USAID has a $50billion budget. The entirety of the intelligence community is only $72billion. So it’s more than the CIA and more than the State Department . . . USAID is effectively a switch player to assist the Pentagon on the national security front, to assist the State Department on the national interest front, or to assist the intelligence community on a sort of clandestine operations front.
You can look up funny moments, by the way, in USAID being a CIA front. For example, you want to pull up the Wikipedia of ZunZuneo, when USAID created a CIA Twitter in Cuba . . . basically to try to get a free speech internet, a free speech Twitter knockoff in Cuba, at a time when Twitter, in 2014, was restricted. USAID laundered money that was earmarked for Pakistan in order to create an identical version of Twitter, but just for Cuba, and to recruit them using messaging that at first involved music, sports and hurricane updates. And then, in their own documents, once they had accumulated about 100,000 users, they would start to feed them, in the algorithm, messaging to make them want to overthrow their government and form smart mobs to bring a Cuban spring to Cuba, in the same way that the CIA, the State Department and USAID pulled off the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, 2012.
I’m not even opining on whether this is good or bad. But you can’t bring that home and you can’t target US companies like they’ve done here.
USAID provides most of the money. The State Department provides the policy vision for the CEPPS censorship program. And NED does the technical implementation work. You saw in that video there were two organisations that were listed – the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, IRI and NDI. There are the two political branches of the National Endowment for Democracy.
When this CIA cutout was set up in 1983, they set up their four-core force. One of them . . . the first two are the political cores. The IRI – the Republican, GOP wing of the CIA, effectively; the NDI – the Democrat Party wing of the CIA; and then two others, one called the Centre for International Private Enterprise, which is the Chamber of Commerce – it’s basically the CIA liaising with multinational companies, with our big US national champions; and then the fourth one is called the Solidarity Centre, which is the CIA’s work with unions, which has been a part and parcel of our CIA work since the 1940s. So you have . . . these two political branches of the National Endowment for Democracy designed to basically gel to both sides of the political aisle, to make sure they have support for CIA activity in a region.
For example, there was a split on Russia between the GOP and the DNC up until Ukraine in 2014. You may recall in 2012, there was that debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama over Russia policy, where Mitt Romney was flanking Obama from his sort of hawkish Russia right. He was saying, ‘Obama, you’re soft on Russia. You’re letting Vladimir Putin get everything he wants in Eastern Europe. And Obama’s response was, ‘The 1980s called. They want their foreign policy back.’
Because at the time, it was primarily the GOP economic stakeholders whose energy investments were being sabotaged by Russian activity in Georgia and Azerbaijan. It hadn’t yet hit the NDI network – the DNC side of the economics – until Ukraine in 2014. That was when there became a bipartisan consensus on the need to effectively go to war and launch this big energy sanctions operation against Russia.
That’s who’s running that CEPPS programme, both sides of the political aisle, but both of them hate Trump. Both of them hate populists, whether it’s the US with Trump, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and again, the whole suite of EU countries that we just talked about.
They descended on Brazil just two weeks after Bolsonaro was elected in 2018. The Atlantic Council and NED held all these meetings about how Bolsonaro only won because of, basically, social media. Social media and end-to-end encrypted chats like WhatsApp and Telegram; that we need to basically stop Bolsonaro’s presidency in its tracks and stop him from getting re-elected by creating a censorship infrastructure in Brazil that is powerful and institutionally as wide and deep as our other diplomatic work.
Hunter Biden was on the chairman’s advisory board of NDI, the DNC CIA wing. So if anyone is a little curious as to why the CIA intervened on the Justice Department investigation, folks – remember, the IRS wanted to question Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, who paid his taxes for five years, and then the CIA intervened and told them, ‘Do not look into who is funding Hunter Biden’. I find it curious that the CIA’s DNC branch, Hunter Biden was on the chairman’s advisory board.
But so, NDI sets up this sprawl of coalitions called D4D – Design 4 Democracy. And Design 4 Democracy, in tandem with this CEPPS programme, goes on to work with the TSE (Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court) and de Moraes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_de_Moraes the censorship Voldemort, on their TSE court. This is the guy who’s gone to war with Elon Musk. They help this censorship court set up a disinformation task force.
And their (USAID, CEPPS etc) own institutional assets get put on the advisory committee of the Brazilian censorship court to direct the censorship policies of the same institution that banned X from Brazil, that seized Starlink’s assets. They worked with the universities, the FGV DAPP, and other very significant Brazilian universities. They set up disinformation centres in them and got academic thought leadership published in Brazil about the need to pass anti-misinformation laws.
Their own NDI fellows and operatives were publicly testifying to the Brazilian Parliament on the need to pass these laws. They were publicly speaking to the prosecutors’ association groups in Brazil, telling them they need to prosecute misinformation on this. They were funding millions of dollars to Brazilian media institutions to promote internet censorship and to promote the banning, effectively, of any pro-Bolsonaro content on social media or on end-to-end encrypted chats.
The USAID then kicked in millions of dollars of funding to Internews, which is another US government funded media projection arm, to promote media literacy programmes, information integrity programmes, countering mis- and disinformation programmes in Brazil.
So at every level, Brazilian media companies, they partnered with Globo, for example, the largest media outlet in Brazil. The media institutions, the universities and thought leaders. The politicians. The judges. It was full spectrum. It was the same thing that we do when we try to regime-change a country.
By the way, this is in USAID’s charter. This is one of the reasons they’re able to get away with this. In USAID’s charter, it allows USAID to capacity-build assets to do so-called judiciary reform, which means influencing the laws and the structure of the judges, and to be able to have our foreign aid money get laws passed or get structural changes made to the court system there. And that is what CEPPS did – this State Department, CIA-front censorship organisation.
They developed a strategy they called EMBs – Election Management Bodies – which was basically focusing in on the court system of different countries that are charged with adjudicating elections – in order to get them to grow a censorship capacity to censor the ability for people to question their elections.
And they had all these stakeholder meetings. Some of them are really funny. Some of them said, ‘Well, some of our EMB partners didn’t want to actually . . . didn’t think they could pull this off. They couldn’t convince the other political stakeholders in their country to grow their censorship capacity.’ And they advised them about how they could cleverly use rhetoric to disguise the programmes. ‘Don’t call it a counter disinformation programme if you think that will ruffle too many feathers. Instead, simply call it strategic communications. And because, listen, every government agency has some sort of public affairs branch, some sort of communications capacity. Simply say that this is for monitoring and engaging in strategic communications, and then you can mass flag the accounts of the US State Department’s political opponents they want to stop from winning the election.’
JOE ROGAN: This is why, you know, when you’re saying it’s going to be insanely difficult and Trump is going to face so many headwinds trying to unravel all this stuff . . . there’s so many organisations. And there’s so many people involved. And there’s so many countries that are in lockstep.
MIKE BENZ: Because we waited too long. And now, look, it’s not full blown. This has not yet reached full maturity where we are at complete 1984 on all of this. But it is no longer in its infant stage . . . if Elon [Musk] had [been], if Congress was aware that CISA – that cybersecurity branch at DHS – was the real Ministry of Truth, in 2019 instead of in 2022; if people were aware of the State Department’s Global Engagement Centre and USAID’s Democracy Human Rights and Governance, and all of this in 2018, 2019, when it was really getting its feet down, it may have been easy to have been pulled out at the roots then.
