YouSaid · the spoken record

John Sweeney

lines on the record: 22
first: 2024-02-21
most recent: 2024-02-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well done, President. He gave a long and boring and fundamentally absolutely dishonest answer, but he gave me an answer so I couldn't say he didn't answer me. And that guy, so he's become more nationalistic. It may be because he thinks he's dying, in which case, by the way, he may be wrong about thinking he's dying, but if he thinks he's dying, then he's got to move quickly because he's run out of road. But I feel that the best way of ending this is to give the Ukrainians a heavy metal so that Putin's war has failed. And then the Russian people, the oligarchs, some of the secret policemen around him think. Disguise useless. Let's get rid of him. And the moment that sets in, then... Then that's not good news. When a Russian leader loses a war. Their longevity is limited.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't see Trump being re-elected because I think he's too mired in filth, but probably DeSantis could make it, but DeSantis is good on Ukraine. I'm having less nightmares about Trump, which is sweet. So I think that... The serious danger is that Western politicians are used to trading and dealing and compromising, and that's kind of in their DNA. And with dealing with Russian fascism, by the way, Putin didn't used to be quite as fascistic as he is now. So there's something around about the start of COVID where he goes into a darker place. So when I met him in 2014, he was subtle and sensitive enough to say, oh, here's an irritating prick from the BBC panorama show. You know what I'm going to do is I'm going to treat him as if I'm a Democratic president.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Immediately after that happens, Boris Johnson goes to a NATO meeting in Brussels. Then he flies, he ends up in Perugia, Perugia Airport, goes to the Lebedev's Palazzo Terra Nova. So the danger is the old man, Alexander Lebedev, who was a KGB spy in London from 88 to 92. The KGB is like Hotel California. You can check out, but you can never leave.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Weirdly, a friend of a friend's son's father is the dean of Salisbury Cathedral. And I managed to climb up Salisbury Cathedral. It took me about half a day because I've actually been inside the fucking spire. And while I was there, suddenly I was going on about, so the GRU, you know, as soon as you never, the video is up there online of the bells going. And boy, can you hear it? I felt, you know, never mind the hunchback at Notre Dame. What we did was we kicked out like 20 tips diplomats and then Eurof and the Americans kicked out another 100 or so. And Bill Browder says, so what? They just print another 120 passports. Doesn't matter.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My view is that the MI6 foreign office Tony Blair knew that September 1999 was a Black Flag operation. They knew that. They read the papers. They would have read my own piece in the Observer in March 2003 when I set out the evidence. And they looked the other way and they wanted Putin to be Mr. Nice. And he wasn't. 2006, the poisoning with polonium 210. They waited like whatever it was, eight years before there was a public inquiry. And that was after the shooting down of MH17. So 2014 is a big moment. I don't do the right thing then. Salisbury poisoning. I mean, come on, folks. Oh, okay, the Russian position is that two Russian sports nutritionists want to see the 123 meter tall Sorcery Cathedral. I actually...”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somehow makes it so it doesn't wake up. I would imagine if I'm the CIA, I'd be saying to all of the Kremlin's doctors, you can live in Beverly Hills forever. So that's number two. Number three, this is my favorite outcome, that actually he has been overdosing and abusing steroids. And he's got some kind of cancer, as Ashley thinks, of cancer of the lymphatic system, and that Putin may die because he's got cancer because he's ended up poisoning himself. This is an ending befitting of Shakespeare.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was talk of nuclear escalation will go up and we've got to see through his bluff. That's my take. And I'm anxious that I think there are far too many people in the West who haven't been listening, haven't been understanding the nature of this guy. Once again, the Chinese are watching. If Putin wins, then the Chinese will look at the West and see that we prefer comfort over victory and therefore I think that if we allow Putin to get away with what he's done in Ukraine, then the Chinese will try and gobble up Taiwan. So the world becomes a more dangerous place by appeasement, not a safer place. So my take is the best thing to do is to give the Ukrainians the heavy metal they need, that that will cause the Russian army to be defeated. Number two, Putin has surgery for whatever's wrong with him, and a doctor.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are three problems for the Russian army. Number one is morale. They don't have a good reason to fight the war. Ukrainians are defending their homes. Number two, the Russian logistics are dreadful and the recent arrival of the American long-range Homars rocket artillery systems is killing all the Russian ammo dumps. But a major problem in logistics. Number three, bad leadership, bad in the sense of incompetent, bad in the sense of evil. Putin all the way down. So I think the army's in trouble. The Russian army is in trouble. And this autumn through the winter into the spring, so long as the West stands by our Ukrainian heroic friends, then I think the Russian army is in trouble. And if they're in trouble, then Putin's in trouble too. Where it becomes scary is that he...”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I kind of don't want to give the ending of my book. Well, I'll give the ending away. The idea So it's possible that a general comes back from the army accused of cowards or whatever and just pops in with his revolver. That's always a possibility because the Russian generals are risking.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will hit the street. Navalny is still alive. Why? Navalny is incredibly rude about Putin. Why is Navalny still alive? Because Putin is afraid to have him killed because if he has him killed, people will go out in the streets to protest. So Putin's weaker, and I think his control is weaker too.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a bit of example from history. JFK had Addison's disease and you treated it with steroids. It was an early days of steroid treatment and they overdosed him. He looked like a hamster and he was erratic and he helped generate the Bay of Pigs crisis. So you can actually think of like two great crises, the one now and the Bay of Pigs, Cuban missiles crisis could both be Rudrage. We'll see. I think Putin's much weaker than everybody thinks he is. For example, he still doesn't call it a war. It's a spiritual military operation. He's not calling for universal conscription because he's afraid to call kids who live in Moscow and St. Petersburg because their moms and dads.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he thinks that however the, I've forgotten the name of the guy who runs Britain's military these days, he's the first sea lord or whatever. But they said the way we look at it is that we think Putin's in there for the long game. There's consistency. So obviously the British, they're not buying Putin's ill. All I know is that when I met him, he looked like a weasel and now he looks like a hamster. And my friend Ashley Grossman, professor of medicine at Oxford, thinks indicates steroid abuse.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cheap stuff with straw. And my friend Ashley Grossman, I said, would you better Fiverr that he's been overdoing it on the steroid, some kind of steroid abuse? And as she goes, no, 50 quid, 50 quid on some kind of cancer of the lymphatic system. That's Ashley's take. And Ashley's... Very, very, you know, he's professor of neurochronology at Oxford. He really is intelligence cubed. Well, I'm intelligence half.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in terms of the health, it's very difficult to get a proper fix on it. There's a simple reason for that. There's all the people who were good and rush out to do my kind of job. They've either been poisoned or shot or had to flee or they're in jail. So when people say, well, why don't you know? Well, because everybody who tries to find out gets killed or has to go or gets locked up But when I met him in 2014, I doorstepped him after the shooting down of MH17. His face, he had Botox, so it was weird and plasticky, but the structure of his face was he looked like a space alien or a weasel. Now he looks like a hamster.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So your most dangerous if you're Russian or speak Russian completely fluently and I don't so that I'm trading in English or I'm dealing with English although I'm one of the more I would say I'm in the top 10 of the most annoying journalists In the English language, I'm not in the Russian language. And at the moment, my book hasn't been translated into Russian. I would like that to happen. But that's number one. So that lowers the risk. Secondly, I'm based in London. And so what happened was that I would go over there, do a film for Panorama or News Night, but actually always Panorama, and then come back to London, then the film would go out so that the risk is mitigated. You know, listen, I pour my own drinks, I pour my own tea.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like all that happens is that Putin gets the spy factory in Moscow to print out four more diplomatic passports. So this is a game where we are losing. And Libenenko was a British citizen at this point. And there was a lot of polonium littered across London. We're losing people, our people And Putin's playing with Monopoly Bunny. And so what you get as well as war crime after war crime after war crime, I'll repeat, we're not standing up to him. And Schultz is not standing up to him. And I'm worried about Rishi Sunak if he gets it. I'm worried about the West revolve to stand up to this serial pillar.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He can tell you that the polonium 210 that killed Litvanenko was cooked up, was baked in the Saov nuclear reactor in the city of Avangard. I might have got that, but all these names sound like something out the Lord of the Rings, but Norman's on it, completely on it. His working hypothesis is that the Russian secret state wouldn't abuse polonium to TEM first on Litvinenko without trying it out on others here. And so he believes that Shack of Chicken was poisoned with 210, polonium 210, as were the Russian gangster who knew the dirt about Putin, Roman Sepov, as was a Chechen warrior called Lucha Ismailov, if memory serves. And those three were the guinea pigs. Trying it out on Lit Benenko. But the significance of all of this is that after Litvanenko, the British government kicked out Four diplomats who were spies.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pass an exam, so I passed a few. Where do you get a degree? Oxford. They give them away there. And he goes Irritated, irritable. He goes. And I did my doctorate Caltag, where my supervisor was Murray Gellman, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the clock. So that shut me up. And then, by the way, Norman opened a can of Spitfire beer. Like it was 12:30, drinking before I was. Terrible. But Norman...”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she feels sorrow for this old lady who looks like her grandma. And she goes to the Morgue guy and says, I can't find Yuri. He's not here. And the Morgue guy who's over there. And it was the grandma, i.e. that Yuri Shaka Chicken's lover couldn't identify him because the poison had changed him completely and utterly. So he was unrecognizable to his own lover. My friend Professor Norman Dombey, who was Marina Lipbanenko, is expert witness at the long delayed inquiry into the poisoning of Libenenko is a kind of Sherlock Holmes. Dombey is super clever to tease him, I'm always provocative. I said, do you know anything about theoretical physics? A little bit.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The spirit of Russian ethno-nationalism and turbocharges it through this hate speech against the Chechen terrorist enemy. And the evidence is overwhelming, I said it out in my book, that the Moscow apartment bombs was a black operation by the KGB. No question. And then everybody who starts asking questions with the same kind of, I don't give a fuck that I have gets poisoned or gets shot. In particular, there's a guy who I never met, but I love him from Beyond the Grave, there's a guy called Euro Shaka Chicken. He was investigating the Moscow apartment bombs. He drinks tea. His hair starts to fall out, his skin starts to flake, and his girlfriend, he died, and his girlfriend visits him in the morgue. And she can't find him, but there's an old grandma who looks like her.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so actually a reporter from Germany asked me, how many people do you think he's killed? And I actually haven't put it in this bit, but for the next edition, I'll run through some numbers. So what happens very early on is in September 1999, there's the Moscow apartment bombs. Basically, Putin's got, he's an insipid secret policeman, a rather creepy one, and his poll ratings are 2%. Yeltsin has given him basically he's made him his heir apparent, but people are saying, who the fuck are you? You're nobody. And then Chechen terrorists blow up Moscow. 300 people are killed in Moscow and some cities in southern Russia. Putin blames Chechen terrorists and said we're going to wipe them out on the bog. We're going to get them on this tough talking. It makes him enormously popular overnight. And he kind of captures.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or the secret policeization of the gangsters. And so what you've got in Russia under Putin is a hybrid state of an intelligence service slash the secret police slash the Gambino crime family. I mean, honestly, you can read my book, but the other thing you should always read or reread is Bertolt Brett's The Irresistible Rise of Arturo Yui, to kind of understand this stuff. And what drives me nuts, Carl, is when people like Schultz, possibly down the track, Rishi Sunak, if it becomes Prime Minister, we say, well, let's see if we can do a deal. And it's like doing a deal with Hitler or the Gambinos or Al Capoam. You can't do a deal with these people. You've just got to stop.”
2024-02-21 · Intelligence Squared · Archive: Killer in the Kremlin, with John Sweeney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT