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Home » Transcript: Security Expert Gavin de Becker on Joe Rogan Podcast #2411

Transcript: Security Expert Gavin de Becker on Joe Rogan Podcast #2411

Here is the full transcript of security specialist and author Gavin de Becker’s interview on The Joe Rogan Experience #2411, on “Government Operations and Public Skepticism”, November 13, 2025.

Introduction

JOE ROGAN: How are you, sir?

GAVIN DE BECKER: I’m well, thank you very much.

JOE ROGAN: Great to see you as always.

GAVIN DE BECKER: Good to see you too.

JOE ROGAN: You got a bunch of notes, you got a lot of things to talk about. We were starting to talk outside. We’re like, hold this, hold these, hold these thoughts. Let’s bring them in here.

Project Gladio: A Hidden CIA Operation

GAVIN DE BECKER: Well, here’s where I am as a criminologist. I take a different approach to things. I’m not obviously a doctor or a scientist, thankfully. And as a criminologist, you get a view of the world that’s quite interesting. So I took a deep dive into pharma. But I want to put that off for a second because I know a lot of these CIA operations like Paperclip, where we bring over people who are working on bioweapons from Japan and from Germany, and we don’t prosecute them and we use them to be the beginning of the US bioweapons program.

And I know you know MKULTRA and Mockingbird, but do you know the one called Project Gladio?

JOE ROGAN: No, I do not.

GAVIN DE BECKER: Put your seatbelt on because this one just tops it all. So this was World War II ends and the OSS, which was the CIA at the time, decides to leave behind, rather than take everybody home, all the American soldiers, they’re going to leave behind a bunch of them. “Hey, you guys, hide your weapons, hide your rifles, secrete all the grenades and ammunition and put it in bunkers and just sit, sit tight until we have some ideas of things you ought to do.”

So eventually a few hundred of them stay behind and they are going to do things in Europe to stop communism, to stop socialism, to fight the Soviets. But what do they actually end up doing is terroristic incidents against our allies. They blow up a train station in Bologna, 285 people injured, 85 people killed. Done and funded and operated by our CIA.

They do the 1989 assassination of a guy who’s a journalist who’s writing about this. They shoot him twice in the head. They do another bombing, 17 people killed, another one, Oktoberfest, in Germany, not Italy, 17 people killed. Why? Because they see that certain candidates are doing well and might become prime ministers, for example, or important legislators.

So when you have a big giant terrorist incident done in some train station, for example, that moves the public toward a more right-leaning government or a more totalitarian government. The CIA can deal with and away from anything where communism can happen.

There’s the assassination of Aldo Moro. He was a former prime minister, five bodyguards, they’re all killed. He’s kidnapped. A few weeks later, he’s shot in the head and put in the trunk of a car. That was done by Project Gladio. In other words, these things were done by the United States to our supposed allies. And hundreds of these leave-behinds operated eventually a 20,000-person army all over Europe.

Now, I don’t expect anybody to believe a word of it. You got to go to Wikipedia and put in G-L-A-D-I-O, just one D. And you see that this insanity is true. The punchline on it for me, the one that really blows it out of the water, is that it ended in 1990. Yeah. And George Bush was president and he’d been former director of CIA, of course, and he denies it like crazy, but eventually an Italian prime minister really goes to the mat on it.

And it becomes so well established that the US government funded and managed these operations blowing up regular citizens in Europe that a lot of the people who were imprisoned for them, for those incidents, terrorists, terrorist groups, were released on the defense that it was actually done by CIA. I did tell you to put your seatbelt on.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God. Is that just an idea that starts off as a precautionary measure that just got completely out of hand because there was no oversight?

The Importance of Public Skepticism

GAVIN DE BECKER: Yeah, no oversight is the key to a bunch of stuff I want to talk about today. Because when governments, big centralized governments and other power centers become without oversight. And where does oversight come from? It comes from us, the public having to be skeptical.

And if the public is not skeptical, if they’ll buy a story like, “Oh, a terrible terrorist group assassinated this guy Aldo Moro. How terrible.” And they’ll buy the story with no skepticism, because that’s what we’re told. Then there will be no oversight and power centers. It’s no surprise. We could talk about every country on earth. I’m not, I happen to love America, but I’m not saying it’s just America. It’s the nature of espionage and the nature of war.

But I want to answer your question about, is it just because of no oversight? The United States doesn’t end wars very often. For example, World War II ends and you’re all excited about it and you’re mounting things and you’re doing all this stuff and then it ends and everybody’s like, “Hey, but we were really into this thing,” and so we don’t let them end.

We leave 300,000 troops in Germany, 300,000 troops in Japan, hundreds of thousands of troops in South Korea. Why don’t we bring these people home? If the war is over, the war is over, but that’s not how Empire works. And so the US tends to continue these wars in the versions I just described to you, which is more secret versions.

And it’s dark, man. I mean, if somebody, and maybe somebody has, but if somebody came into America and did a bunch of terrorist incidents in America that killed a lot of Americans, oh, geez.