No matter what you may think of Wilkerson, it’s gotta be a given that he has good sources from his years as CoS for Colin Powell both at Defense and at State. The interview itself covers a lot of ground—Ukraine, Israeli terrorist attacks, the Brits, and most of all, DoD muscling Sullivan and Blinken aside. Here are some excerpts:
Re the pager explosions and the Pentagon drawing a line in the sand re Netanyahu:
LW: I think what we're seeing here is another attempt--because a 100 plane strike didn't do it--by Netanyahu to provoke Hezbollah to some sort of action that he can then declare is warlike to the extent that he can do what he wants to do with them, even though I'm told [by a source in whom I have great confidence] that the latest two visits by the Central Command [CENTCOM] unified Commander [Kurilla] were to tell [Netanyahu] that we would not be with him in the event of his getting into a war with Hezbollah that he provoked, nor will we be with him in a war with Iran he provoked, and we made it quite clear that we would know if he provoked it.
Judge: So Scott Ritter agrees with you. Doug McGregor says he can't imagine Austin and Blinken letting General Kurilla do that. It's very, very interesting. Is this speculation on your part or is it based on sources?
LW: It's based on some pretty reliable sources, and here's the bigger picture--and I hope the others told you this too--Biden's fury. You could see he was seething when he met with the British prime minister.
Judge: Yes, yes, we have that clip.
LW: He was out of control with anger. And what he had just been told, apparently by the Pentagon, was: 'No dice Mr President! No dice on Ukraine and no dice on Gaza. We're in charge! No dice!' ... I've been told--again, by fairly reliable sources--that Blinken and Sullivan--Blinken primarily, but Sullivan, too--have been sidetracked. What's happened is the Pentagon has essentially taken over diplomacy as well as any military action with regard to both theaters of war. So they're now in charge and I have to change my evaluation of secretary Austin. If that's the case it means he listened finally to the people in the bowels of the Pentagon who know the truth, and he's reacting to that and he's told President Biden that and, to Biden's credit, even though he was furious he finally took that advice.
Note that Wilkerson is a bit ambiguous about exactly what it was that had Zhou in a blind rage. Was it that the DoD told, Hey, man, we’re in charge here? Or was it that the Pentagon had told him, Look, the Brits and Blinken are trying to get us into a direct war with Russia. Do you really want to lose the election with a disaster of a war? Because we know the only strategy now is to avoid a collapse until after November 5. If you do this, you’ll guarantee a collapse.
On General Kurilla (head of CENTCOM), what did he tell the Israelis on his two very recent trips to Israel?
Judge: Who told General Kurilla to tell prime minister Netanyahu, 'If you invade Lebanon you're on your own?'
LW: It was, I think, Austin, but that's the chain of command. Austin conveyed that message to him but I think it was Austin that convinced Biden to give him that command so he could transmit it to Kurilla.
Back to the pagers:
Judge: The attacks of the exploding mobile devices--will this change whether or not America is involved or will this just anger the people in the Pentagon who advised the President: 'We cannot go into this war, we can't, we just can't do it?'
LW: I'm not even sure, Judge, that we didn't have some complicity in this operation.
Judge: That was going to be my next question: How could CIA not have known about this?
Current Ukraine strategy
LW: They're trying to eke out another 50 plus days of 'We aren't cutting and running' in order to assure--they think--the Democrats win the presidential election. That's the only conclusion I can come to.
Judge: Do you think that that statement by President Putin resonated in the Pentagon and through the Pentagon into the White House?
LW: Well, the Pentagon's talking with people in Russia--I'm convinced of that, and I've had one or two sources kind of indicate--
Judge: Wait a minute, wait a minute! America's chief diplomat, Blinken, does not talk to Sergey Lavrov but Lloyd Austin talks to the head of the Russian defense Ministry?
LW: I know that Mark Milley was doing so and I'm very confident that either CQ Brown or Austin or both of them are--and maybe even some of the service chiefs are, because they have contacts in the Russian military and they have not cut off those contacts because they realize it would be very dangerous to do so. Just as it would have been during the Cold War, when we talked to Russians and they had missiles on alert and we had missiles on alert. So the sanity is now coming from that region of the US government where sanity with regard to war in particular normally comes from--the soldiers, the sailors, the airmen, and the Marines ...
Brits
LW: He [Boris Johnson] reminds me of the cable that was sent from the [CIA] Station Chief, I think he was in Beirut at the time, but he had about four or five different stations in 1946 and 1947 and he was really posted to those stations to begin to work up a plan for the CIA--fresh off the Wild Bill Donovan drawing board if you will--to fight the Soviet Union, because they realized the Soviets were going to be quite an antagonist. This guy sent a cable back to Washington and he reinforced it with several more that said said, 'Hey, man, you guys need to get your act together. The Real Enemy here is not the Russians it's the British!' And he was right, because they were trying to reestablish their empire and continued to try right up to 1956 when Eisenhower put a stop to it. So the British are as much our enemy as anybody else.
Regarding the British, what could eventually happen with the Royal Family if the Muslim population increases and the native population is sidelined, so to speak? Does anyone think that the Royals could be in danger? I have not seen any discussion on this. It seems they are taking away fuel subsidies from the elderly now, before the winter comes. Britian is in turmoil.
Best wishes for the op recovery.
The timing of the pager explosions is interesting in that there is chatter it was meant to coincide with an invasion, which certainly makes sense, it would completely disrupt communication at a critical point.
So we’re left with either the Israelis feared Hezbollah was getting suspicious with the comms or Austin pulled the plug on the invasion and Israel pulled the chord earlier than intended.
Either way Israel lost the surprise factor and Hezbollah will certainly be more cautious going forward.