by Jerry Kuzmarov, Covert Action Magazine, 5/27/22

Colonel Richard Black has been one of the few former high-ranking military officers or government officials to speak out against U.S. military intervention in places like Syria and Ukraine. He is extremely concerned about the prospects of nuclear war breaking out and appalled at the callousness in which some government officials talk about a nuclear first strike.

In a May 17 interview with CAM, transcribed below, Colonel Black emphasized the grave danger associated with Ukraine’s sinking of the Moskva, Russia’s flagship Black Sea missile cruiser, with assistance from U.S. intelligence. According to Black, this act was tantamount to an act of war. He warns that we’re now “at a 1914 moment [year when World War I broke out].”

The triggering act for the latter was the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist (Gavrilo Princip), while the sinking of the Moskva may very well be the triggering act for the outbreak of World War III.

In the Tradition of George Washington

Colonel Black flew 269 combat missions in the Vietnam War, winning a Purple Heart. He served in the Virginia State Senate from 2012 to 2020 and was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates from 1998-2006.

Black is that rare breed of principled conservative who supports limited government including in the realm of foreign affairs. He operates in the tradition of George Washington, who warned in his farewell address about the threat to democracy of a large standing army.

CAM is rooted in the political left; however, an anti-war and anti-imperialist political coalition could be forged with principled conservatives like Black and challenge what veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls MICIMATT—the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank complex.

Black’s outspoken opposition to U.S. involvement in Ukraine contrasts markedly with so-called progressives like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and members of “the Squad” who have aligned with the Democratic Party establishment war-makers and voted in favor of the recent $40 billion military aid package to Ukraine—among others there.

In 2016, Black traveled to Syria and met with its president Bashar al-Assad, to whom he had written a letter thanking for saving Christians in the Qalamoun Mountain range. In his letter, Black praised Assad for “treating with respect all Christians and the small community of Jews in Damascus,” stating it was obvious that the rebel side of the war was largely being fought by “vicious war criminals linked to Al Qaeda.”

The Islamic State subsequently included Colonel Black on a list of enemies, calling him “the American Crusader,” and quoted a statement he made suggesting that, if Damascus fell, “the dreaded black and white flag of ISIS will fly over Damascus.”

Below is an edited transcript of my interview with Colonel Black:

Jeremy Kuzmarov: Thanks for joining us Colonel. I want to mainly discuss the conflict in Ukraine and Syria with you. But first, if you can start with just a bit about your background, including your involvement in the Vietnam war and how that might’ve shaped your outlook towards war and military intervention.

Colonel Black: I retired out of the Pentagon in 1994 and I have spent a lot of time in the Virginia legislature. I was in the House of Delegates. And in the Senate over a span of 20 years. And Vietnam was an important factor in all this because I want to make the point, I don’t come at this as somebody who is anti-American or anything of that sort. I’m patriotic. I volunteered to fight in Vietnam. I was a Marine Corps helicopter pilot and flew 269 combat missions and was hit by ground fire on four occasions. And then I volunteered to fight on the ground with the First Marine Division. I was a forward air controller and fought in the bloodiest engagement of the entire war for the Marines. During the final battle, I served in about 70 combat patrols, most of them at night, most of them in heavily enemy-controlled areas.

And on the last patrol we were trying to rescue a Marine outpost and during the attack to do that, I was wounded and both of my radio men were killed right beside me. So I put my life on the line many times for the country, hundreds of times, literally. And so I just say that to lay the background, because sometimes you’ll get people who are critical of someone who takes a different point of view like I have and say, well, you know, he’s never done anything for this country.

Actually, I think you’ll find most of the, most of the people pushing for war have done precious little for the country. And so anyway, I just put that by way of background. Now after fighting in Vietnam, I attended law school and I was an Army JAG officer and did a great number of things, including serving as part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Germany for three years.

During the height of the Cold War at that time, NATO was a very good defensive alliance. And we were faced with the Soviet Union, which was a very aggressive entity right across the east-west border. Eventually I was in the Pentagon where I advised the Senate Armed Services Committee, and wrote executive orders for the president. And so I come at this as somebody who’s very much, I guess, a part of the American establishment. But I have very grave differences with the direction that we’re headed right now.

Jeremy Kuzmarov: And just for clarification, what years did you serve in Vietnam?

Colonel Black: I was there in 1966 and 1967. I was in two small unit battles where men won the Medal of Honor. It was a time of blistering bloody combat, something that I don’t wish on other people. I have no interest in seeing young Ukrainian men or young Russian men killed in battle for the glory of the politicians and the global elite.

Jeremy Kuzmarov: It seems that you were generally supporting U.S. policy in the Cold War. In hindsight, do you think Vietnam was a misguided war?

Colonel Black: Well, in this sense [yes, it was misguided]. The president of South Vietnam, Ngô Đình Diệm, was a very talented politician. He wanted the United States to provide him with weapons because he was fighting an insurgency and eventually an invasion from the North. But he did not want us to come in with military troops because he said, as soon as you do that, you’re going to be viewed as another colonial empire.

Just like the French, just like the Japanese. When Diệm was assassinated—at the behest of the President and at the orders of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—the North Vietnamese were absolutely stunned. Ho Chi Minh was amazed. He was deadly enemies with Ngô Đình Diệm, but he said the Americans have been astoundingly stupid.

This is because they have killed the one man that we could never outmaneuver. It wasn’t just [in the realm of the] military. Ngô Đình Diệm understood the politics and the complexities of the Vietnamese culture and the North Vietnamese [would have had difficulty] overcoming his insight and wisdom. But we, like we do often, decided, well, he’s an impediment to what we’re doing. We’ll get rid of him. He was taken out by a General’s coup. They captured him eventually with the help of the CIA, took him off in an armored personnel carrier and killed him, assassinated him and his brother. So we never needed to be there [in Vietnam].

Now, once we were there, the people who fought with us [the U.S.] fought with enormous gallantry and courage and self-sacrifice. In many ways. I think we were fighting for a good cause, but we were fighting a war we never needed to fight. And that was really the key issue at stake; that we never should have been there. It would have saved a lot of bloodshed and the war [within Vietnam] would have ended differently.

Jeremy Kuzmarov: Thanks. It’s interesting to hear this. I interviewed a lot of Vietnam veterans before [for my book, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs], and it’s always interesting to hear their points of view. Now you worked for NATO in the 1980s during the Cold War. Can you briefly relay your experience and compare the situation in the 1980s with today?

Colonel Black: [When I worked for NATO] it was at the height of the Cold War and the Soviet Union was very threatening [as Black saw it] and a tremendous nuclear power. There were tanks lined up on the border. Thousands and thousands of tanks. And we thought there was a substantial chance of the outbreak of war. But one thing that was different from today was that both the United States and all of the allies and Soviet Union were extraordinarily cautious about an accidental outbreak of nuclear war. There was an understanding that, if a nuclear war broke out, everybody was the loser.

In one particular incident, we had three young JAG officers and their wives who wanted to go to East Berlin. And the corridor to East Berlin was controlled by the Soviet Union. And we were not allowed to take photographs. And so this group stopped at a checkpoint and there was a Soviet soldier who walked around the car while they went in and submitted their documents at the checkpoint. And one of the wives, she didn’t mean anything by it, she just wanted to get a little piece of history and she snapped a picture of the guard, just an ordinary photo, but some proof that she had lived through this period.

Within 24 hours, the Soviet authorities reported that to the United States. Those three officers and their families were on a plane out of Germany, forever. All of their household goods, their furnishings and things were packed up on an emergency basis. They were on a plane. There was no evidence that they had ever resided in West Germany.

And it just shows the dramatic efforts that we made to make sure that there was not some spark that would trigger World War III. Had we reported that a Soviet soldier did something similar, the same thing would have happened to him. He would have vanished.

But now we’ve become really quite reckless with the way that we talk about nuclear weapons. Just recently there was a Republican Senator Roger Wicker [from Mississippi] and he’s very senior on the military committee in the Senate. And he said we should not take off the table the idea of putting American troops on the ground and using nuclear weapons. And he was saying, we should be willing to consider a first use of nuclear weapons.

And what he’s talking about is that we should be willing to consider launching a preemptive Pearl Harbor-type strike on Russia with Americans being in the shoes of the Japanese, launching the attack. I think that is insane. It is [also] immoral. It’s a terrible thing for any American to suggest the first use of nuclear weapons.

Jeremy Kuzmarov: Thanks. I feel the same way. And maybe before getting into the current conflict and dangerous situation, if you can say something about, having served with NATO, what your attitude toward the issue of NATO expansion in the 1990s under the Clinton administration is. And how do you think this expansion has contributed to the dangerous situation we have today?

Colonel Black: Yeah. See, here’s the thing; we used to constantly send out messages: “we are a defensive alliance.” Now this is before the fall of the Berlin Wall. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1991, it signaled the dissolution of the Soviet Union; this great empire, literally just fell to pieces. It wasn’t conquered, it just fell to pieces. And the philosophy of Bolshevism, Marxism, communism simply dissipated, it fell apart.

And so what happened is that there was a defensive alliance that the Soviets had—the counterpart of NATO called the Warsaw Pact. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact disappeared and everybody went home.

And one of the great tragedies of human history is that NATO did not dissolve. It had no purpose to its existence now that the Soviet Union was gone. There was no threat anymore. But you had this enormous bureaucracy with all of these military think tanks. And these people had a lot at stake, a lot of money, a lot of income and so forth.

And so NATO continued and it gradually converted to a very aggressive, assertive alliance. And it began this inexorable march to the east.

Now in 1991, there was a thousand mile buffer between nuclear-powered forces in Germany and nuclear-powered forces in Russia. This was a tremendous safety buffer. And what’s happened is we have gradually marched all the way literally to the Russian border.

And in 2014, we overthrew the legitimate government of Ukraine. There was a presidential coup and the CIA conspired with counterparts in Ukraine and conducted a violent overthrow of the government. A lot of people were killed in the process.

And they installed this revolutionary government. Well, what happened as a result of that is there were a lot of Russian-speaking people in Ukraine, about a quarter of them, and they tend to be focused in the eastern parts, in the Donbas and in Crimea, The people there refused to recognize the new revolutionary government.

They were fine as long as they had a vote, as long as they could participate in the election of their government, but they were not going to join a revolutionary coup. And as a result the Russians were very threatened by what was happening because their Black Sea Fleet was stationed in Crimea at Sevastopol port.

And they were afraid that the new revolutionary government would renege on the 99-year lease that Russia had there. So they moved in now. Crimea was solidly part of Russia, and it had been Russian for 500 years. It is a kind of a historic anomaly that it was temporarily in the hands of the Ukrainians.

And so the Crimean people welcomed the Russians in; they came in quietly, there was not a shot fired. They took over Crimea, held a plebiscite. About 92% of the people voted in favor of becoming a part of Russia. Donbas was a little bit different. They declared their independence from Ukraine.

And that’s really the source of the continuing problem. NATO and particularly the United States and United Kingdom flooded enormous quantities of weapons. And they also sent troops in some cases on the ground in Ukraine, training Ukrainian soldiers to kill Russians right across the border.

And I think there was an intent virtually from 2014 to start a war with Russia. And eventually they got the Russians backed into a corner where they were forced to fight, but before the war broke out, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government made desperate attempts to achieve peace.

They actually put written peace proposals on the table with NATO, trying to establish a zone that would be de-militarized. And that was rejected out of hand because NATO fully intended to compel Russia to force them into a war, which they did.

Jeremy Kuzmarov: And what do you think the motive is? Why did they want to force Russia into war? This could trigger a world war.

Colonel Black: It’s a very good question. I think that there are several reasons….

Read full interview here.