Oliver North joined me in my Californai studio today en route to an appearance at the Nixon Library to promote his new thriller, “Counterfeit Lies,” coauthored with long-time FBI agent Bob Hammer.  All information on the colonel’s book tour is at OliverNorth.com.

I’m more than a little picky about thrillers, and have allocated air time in the past only to those authors whose every book I read –the late Vince Flynn, Daniel Silva, Brad Thor, C.J. Box, Stephen Pressfield and Robert Ferrigno.  So when I saw a new thriller from North/Hammer I thought “Well…maybe.”

Good thing I did.   Terrific book. Superb in fact, doing what the best thrillers do –inform as they entertain, this time about the inner workings of FBI-CIA joint efforts, North Korean counterfeiting etc.  Colonel North joins me in studio for the first hour, but get the book as a great Father’s Day treat if your dad or grand-dad is a thriller addict.

Along the way, Colonel North and I found time to talk about his life and career, and the possible future ambitions of North’s on-time boxing opponent, former U.S. Senator James Webb.

The audio and transcript will be posted here later:

Audio:

06-06hhs-north

Transcript:

HH: I have the perfect guest to begin today’s show in the first hour. Colonel Oliver North of the Fox News Channel, author extraordinaire, in studio with me in California as he launches his book tour for his brand new novel, Counterfeit Lies, Colonel North, welcome to the studio which might feel a little bit homelike to you.

ON: It is. I’m looking at the gear here. I’m looking at these microphones, Hugh, I’m looking at, we did not have a flat screen computer monitor/tv screen in the studio. We didn’t have that camera mounted up over there, so I could pick my nose without worrying about somebody else seeing. But this is the setup for when I was out here for our broadcaster, Salem Radio Network.

HH: And Oliver North used to work for my parent company, Salem. And when he got out of the business, I got into the business. And we got all of his equipment. So it is like, it’s déjà vu.

ON: It is, all over again.

HH: Oliver North, congratulations, you are at the Nixon Library tonight.

ON: Yes.

HH: And I want people to know that at 7:00 tonight, if they want to get a copy of Counterfeit Lies and get you to sign it like I’m going to have you sign my copy, they can come and tickets are still available at the door. And I have just tweeted out a list. You are working hard. I mean, you are going all over the place. Tomorrow, you’re at Camp Pendleton exchange at Noon.

ON: 12:00

HH: Noon, absolutely, 12:00, Camp Pendleton exchange.

ON: 1200 as we’d say.

HH: 1200. Then at the Church at Rancho Bernardo on Saturday night, and a couple of times Sunday before you head back east to do Virginia, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. And it’s all over at www.olivernorth.com. Why are you working so hard?

ON: I’m married and I have a mortgage.

HH: Yeah, I don’t buy that. Is it because you want, I mean, I didn’t even know you were a novelist until this book arrived yesterday.

ON: Well now listen, I did my first three novels with Broadman & Holman. I did the fourth novel with Simon & Schuster/Threshold Imprints, and now this is my fifth. And they’ve all got the same character of Peter Newman in it, who’s a legendary Marine, who’s done some remarkable things. I mean, take today’s headline – hostages, terrorism, counterterrorism, rescuing people, going after the bad guys in various places to include Asia and the Middle East and Latin America, and the drug cartels down in Colombia, and Peter Newman is back in this book, which by the way, is set right out here in this neighborhood.

HH: In Los Angeles.

ON: Yes.

HH: And I’m going to give, my audience knows I’m very picky about thrillers. The late Vince Flynn was a friend and would always come in.

ON: And a great guy.

HH: Daniel Silva, Brad Thor…

ON: Friend.

HH: C.J. Box…

ON: Yeah.

HH: Just guys, only the top drawer. So when this came yesterday, I thought it was going to be another War Story. I love your War Stories books. We’ve talked on the air about them a lot.

ON: Yeah.

HH: And you’ve been doing great work chronicling the lives of our heroes in the field right now. So I thought oh, good, I’ll be able to sit down with that last night, and I’ll go through it like I normally do. And they give me a novel. Well, you can’t cheat on a novel. You’ve got to read a novel. So I’m at Page 191 in 12 hours, Oliver North. So I am riveted. It’s good stuff.

ON: Well, thank you.

HH: Let’s talk a little bit. You’ve got a coauthor, Bob Hamer, FBI guy, and maybe that’s why since this is set in the FBI land, CIA/FBI, Secret Service, North Koreans, Hezbollah, how much did he have to teach you about the Bureau? You know about the Marine Corps and the spy stuff. How much did he have to teach you about the Bureau?

ON: Yeah, Bob and I have been friends for a long time. He’s been our West Coast guy for Freedom Alliance, the foundation that does so much to help our wounded, and Lord, we hope someday the VA will as well. We do a lot together, and so Bob and I had just finished work on our last non-fiction. He and I worked very closely on that. It’s about soldiers, sailors, Marines…

HH: Right.

ON: …who have been grievously wounded.

HH: We talked about that on air, and I had that book here until three weeks ago.

ON: Inspirational Stories.

HH: Yeah, extraordinary.

ON: And we were in the middle of working on that, and Bob and I are talking, and it’s late at night for me, it’s not quite as late, he’s not, he was a Marine, and of course, once a Marine, always a Marine, so it’s around Midnight, and he and I are talking, I’m from back east, and he and I are talking about something to do with that book, and he said you know, it is so much easier to do fiction. And it really is, because I mean, first of all, if you’ve lived lives as exciting as mine and his, you don’t have to make a lot of stuff up. You just have to change enough of the dates, times, places and names that you don’t run afoul of the non-disclosure agreements that we’ve all signed. And so just for the fun of it, we said you know, we’ve got some really big events coming up here in the next 12 months, and some of these things are going to affect the outcomes, are going to affect basically the safety of not just our country but others. I had just returned at that point from Israel, and I wrote the forward to this book…

HH: Yeah, it’s in Jerusalem, yeah.

ON: In Jerusalem in February, and I had been told the story that’s in this book about, and I don’t want to give away this thing, but how it is that the Iranians have suddenly agreed that now, they’re going to stop their nuclear program, and the sanctions are going to be lifted, something that the Obama administration desperately wants to happen. So if you notice the dates in this book all begin earlier this spring…

HH: May.

ON: And it takes place in a ten day period. And of course, we’re right at the cusp. And once this whole scandal thing with Bergdahl and the VA, the next big story that’s going to come out in America is the story about how the Iranians have agreed to stop making nuclear weapons, and why it’s all a counterfeit lie.

HH: And so thus, the title Counterfeit Lies.

ON: Right.

HH: Well, it is extremely well-plotted, and people go and check it out. And I think they ought to go to the Nixon Library and pick this up. I want to zero in on a couple of things and ask you just, without giving away anything, true/untrue, Hezbollah sleepers in the United States? You don’t have to persuade me of that. I know they’re here.

ON: Sure.

HH: I don’t know the numbers. What do you think are the numbers?

ON: You’re talking of real sleepers, in other words, participants in the jihad who are from the Shiite sect, not Sunni, but Shiites, and who were sent here in most cases, the route that they get here is through Venezuela, up through Mexico, and then across the border illegally. You’re talking something in the number of a thousand that are here, and they’re waiting. And I can draw from personal experience on this, because the sleeper cell that tried to kill my wife and children on February, some days in life you ought never to forget, February 11th, 1987, the People’s Committee For Libyan Students office, which was a sleeper cell for the Islamic Jihad organization gets the order from Tripoli, Libya, to carry out target number 11. That was me. I was on their list of people to get killed. And the FBI, I can say his name today, I couldn’t before, his name is Dave Beisner, he was the head of the Counterterrorism Unit in the Washington field office. And Dave Beisner, who Bob Hamer knows well, called and alerted my family. I wasn’t home. I was off on duty with the Marine Corps, and back in the Marines since November of ’86. And they sent the big, black Suburbans with the blue lights to evacuate my family out of our home, and to move us down to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, eventually found me that night, and flew us down to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. And we lived with federal agents until I retired from the Marine Corps the following year. So I know a little bit from personal, but Bob Hamer had a life of that. And so Bob and I collaborated very closely on what, he knew what I knew…

HH: And most recently, we discovered their plot to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador. They were going to bring them up from Mexico.

ON: Exactly.

HH: …along the route line.

ON: Right.

HH: So that rat line is familiar to those of us who follow this. And I think I follow this stuff pretty closely. I was unfamiliar with the idea that the North Koreans would actually be in the United States working their super dollars. And that’s the concept, I knew they counterfeited, I didn’t know to the extent, and do you stand by in Counterfeit Lies the numbers you’re talking about here?

ON: Oh, yeah. Yeah, and look, the U.S. Government just put out a brand new $100 dollar bill that has additional security in it, measures, taken in it. It’s brand new. I mean, it’s literally, the first of them are being circulated around right now. And of course, banks are very happy to have those. You try to transact a $100 dollar American currency anywhere else in the world, they won’t take it. I mean, they’ll take it at certain casino places and things like that where high rollers walk in with big dollars. But if I went into a souq in Egypt, as I’ve done in the past, or I went to some place in Cyprus, or some place in Italy and handed them a $100 dollar bill to buy something, they’d say no, no, no, no, no. We don’t, because they’re so worried about it being counterfeit. The super notes that were being produced in North Korea and in China, okay, on Intaglio Presses, it’s in this book, are so good, a bank teller in America holding a real one up and a phony one up would tell you that the real one is more likely to be counterfeit.

HH: You see, that’s what makes a great thriller is when you teach people stuff like that. There’s also a section in here where one of the good guys gets brutally beaten to death, I mean, executed. And that’s got to be hard to write, but that is the mark of a good thriller, because good men come to bad ends in the real world as well.

ON: Yeah.

HH: How long did it take to write, I’m not going to tell who it is. I don’t want to give it away. But how long did that segment take?

ON: Well, look, I know how Bill Buckley died.

HH: That’s what I was…

ON: I know how Bill…

HH: CIA station chief in Beirut, 1986, right?

ON: ’85.

HH: ’85, okay.

ON: And I know how Bill Higgins, a Marine colonel who was the head of the United Nations mission in Lebanon, I know how he was killed, because the people who killed him videotaped in both cases, and audiotaped in both cases the murders of those two men. And so it is very graphic. I mean, I would not recommend this book to a ten year old. I mean, it is a graphic description of a murder being perpetrated by the kinds of people who have absolutely no moral compunction whatsoever about doing those kinds of things.

HH: But it serves the purpose, and it advances the plot, and it is part of the reason why I can recommend to you Counterfeit Lies.

— – – —

(Ronald Reagan 1984 Boys of Pointe du Hoc speech)

HH: The man we both served, you served him well. What do think of that, Ollie North?

ON: 40th Anniversary.

HH: 40th Anniversary, you’re right.

ON: This is the 70th. Those of us who were there will never forget that speech. That, his comments…

HH: Oh, I didn’t know you were there.

ON: Well, I was staff duty officer. And those who attended, and who have seen it since, ought never to forget it. And I don’t mean to make politics on a day like this, which is a remarkable anniversary, how unlike that speech was the one that was given today by the present commander-in-chief? Ronald Reagan never mentioned himself once in that speech. It was all about them. And it was all about the courage, the perseverance, the tenacity of those who scaled those cliffs, and all the other 120,000 who came ashore over the course of 48 hours across that beach. My dad’s unit landed four days later, and my dad fought across the hedgerows to St. Lo, and then all the way up to the Siegfried Line, was wounded at Metz. I never even knew it as a kid, because they never talked about it. And when I interviewed for War Stories for Fox News, the boys of Pointe du Hoc, and as I took back a veteran of not the beach, but the landing that was done at H-5 hours, at 1:00 in the morning, the 82nd and the 101st Airborne divisions parachute in, 12,000 paratroopers and paratroopers and gliders get behind enemy lines and seize the crucial crossroads of Sainte-Mère-Église before anybody else is ashore, before there’s been a single bombardment of all the German positions. And immediately as they’re on the ground, they become the pathfinders for the gliders coming in. And I took John Perozzi, one of those now-94 year olds back, and that’s, if you go to that website, at www.olivernorth.com, you can see John Perozzi who at 94 gives a remarkable testimony to the courage of his comrades, and reminds us as we stand there, and you’ve been there, Hugh, you know what it’s like, that remarkable cemetery at the top of Omaha Beach where there are 9,400 American graves marked with nothing but a white cross or a star of David, and the name and the date of birth and the date of death. And if you look at them, all of those youngsters that served in that, average kid was a little bit over 19 years of age. John Perozzi was 20. He was an older guy. He’d never finished high school. He’d become a master welder, and was working on, at the Navy shipyard that was building a ship called the USS New Jersey, he wasn’t simply deferred for service, he was exempted from service. And he went in, in 1942, and said I’ve got to go. And his foreman said son, you don’t have to go. You’ll never have to go to this war. You’re exempted from service, because you’re a master welder working on this great warship. And he said I’m gone. He becomes a paratrooper, and he stood there and told me a remarkable story about how he had gotten on seven U.S. Government airplanes, and he’d never landed in one.

HH: You see, that is a remarkable, and that’s at www.olivernorth.com, right?

ON: Yes, it is.

HH: Are you going to show that on the Fox News Channel?

ON: It’s going to be up on the Sportsman’s Channel, an excerpt of it. It’s up on that website. If you click on that, it’ll take you right to that. The very funny part of it was, he said, I said John, how can that be? He said I never landed one, because I jumped out of them, one at Normandy, and the other one at Nijmegen in the Bridge Too Far.

HH: That is, wow…

ON: And John comes back and rebuilds, helps rebuild America.

HH: But I had forgotten, and I want to correct the record. The only American cemetery I have visited in Europe is the one outside of Florence. I have not been to Normandy. I’m going this summer for the first time. But at Florence every summer, the Florentines march out and honor the American dead, and at 70 years later, they’re still doing that.

ON: Yeah.

HH: I want to play for you a little bit, I didn’t want to, I didn’t like the President’s remarks today, so I went and got a clip of Prime Minister Harper at Juno Beach today. And here’s what Prime Minister Harper had to say at Juno Beach, our Canadian allies, cut number four:

SH: It’s an honor for me to be here with you today for the 70th anniversary of D-Day, and surrounded by Canadian youth, and in the presence of our distinguished veterans. We are commemorating a day whose successful end foreshadowed the ultimate conclusion of a long and bloody war. And the triumph of the values for which Canada stands – freedom, democracy, justice, all the things in fact that our enemy despised, and had extinguished from every part of the continent they had conquered. Through the smoke, through the minefields, through the barbed wire, through the obstacles on the beaches, always under accurate and deafening mortar fire, and into the teeth of machine guns, the same kind of machine guns that had caused the slaughter of their father’s generation during the first World War, only having run this deadly gauntlet could the survivors destroy the enemy strongpoints. And even then, only through savage hand to hand combat against some of the toughest soldiers in the world.

HH: Stephen Harper wasn’t talking about himself, Ollie North. He was talking about his Canadian forbearers.

ON: Yeah, and of course, we forget in America that Canada was in this war from 1939 on. And so by the time they get to Normandy, Canadians have died at Dieppe, they’ve died in the Battle of Britain. They’d died all over North Africa. And now they’re coming ashore with another entire division of Canadians, our North American allies, the ones that John Baird describes as the nice North Americans.

HH: We’ll be right back with Col. Oliver North.

— – – – –

HH: Col. North, a new commandant designate was announced today – General Dunford. What’s your reaction?

ON: Fighting Joe Dunford, a nickname that he was given as a consequence of the fight he led in the 5th Marine, he’s regimental commander of, regimental combat team 5 coming up from Kuwait all the way to Baghdad and beyond. And I’ll tell you a quick Joe Dunford story. I was embedded with that unit, and their air support arm, the CH-46 helicopter squadron, the Red Dragons. And I was on one of those helicopters doing a cas-evac, a medical evacuation now as some people call it. But they’re under fire evacuating a wounded group of Marines.

HH: Where are we? What year?

ON: In the Salman Pak, August 6th, 2003, and all of a sudden, there’s an enormous counterattack right against the Marines, right directly in front of the CH-46 helicopter. Well, those who can remember the old Phrog CH-46’s, the machine guns will only go so far forward. And so they’re charging toward us by the scores of them, and the Marines are firing heavily, and all of a sudden, into the midst of this intersection, in a city street that’s only got like a few inches of rotor blade clearance on either side of it comes three Huvees. It’s the command group for Joe Dunford. It’s the only time I know of since the Korean War where a regimental commander has been fired upon and fired back. And I watched Gunnery Sgt. Cheremy, his only man, his sole purpose is to keep the regimental commander alive, laying across the front of that Humvee while a machine gun, it’s a .50 cal on one of them, there’s a Mark 17 on the other one, there’s a 240 Golf Machine Gun in the turrets, everybody hammering away. The gunfire is enormous. And I’ve got my camera and my helmet cam in the cockpit of the helicopter, and you can see the RPG’s flying past the windshield. And all of a sudden, here’s Cheremy laying across the hood of that Humvee with a .12 gauge shotgun, happens to be made by Benelli, and I watched him drop people right in front of that Humvee as they were trying to assault the regimental commander. Joe Dunford is a hero. He knows what war is about. We need warriors as leaders of our armed forces. I can’t think of a better person who would make a better commandant than Joe Dunford.

HH: Great way to introduce the new commandant to the country. Another famous Marine is in the news recently with whom you have a lot of history, former Senator from Virginia, James Webb said this last week on PBS-NPR:

JW: We’re, Hong and I, my wife and I were just thinking about what to do next. And I care a lot about where the country is, and we’ll be sorting that out.

Diane Rehm Guest host: So that’s, I would say, is not a denial of interest in running for president. In fact, that would be, I think, journalistically seen as, given the question I asked, an expression of interest in the possibility of running for president.

JW: Well, if you look at how I ran for the Senate, you know, I announced nine months to the day before the election with no money and no campaign staff. When I, it takes me a while to decide things, and I haven’t, I’m not going to say one way or the other, really.

HH: Oliver North, what would you think of a James Webb run for the presidency?

ON: Look, Jim and I are classmates. Jim and I were contestants against one another as boxers at the Naval Academy.

HH: Very famous match.

ON: Well…

HH: I believe you won. Am I right?

ON: My recollection…

HH: It went the distance, though, right?

ON: It did. It did. And the next year, he dropped down a weight class to avoid me, and a classmate of ours, Tommy Hayes, who was actually a real 145 pounder, beat the living tar out of him because Jim lost so much weight. Look, Jim Webb is a noble warrior. He is a brave man. He’s a war hero. He picked the wrong darn party to run for the Senate in. He stepped aside from it. My sense is that he’s probably not going to run, because politics, particularly in Virginia, is a rough and tumble business. I know, and could have done that.

HH: But would it be good for him, for the Democrats, if he ran for the presidency?

ON: Well, he’d certainly make a lot better Democrat than any of the ones that I know today.

HH: Would you welcome him, then, getting in?

ON: Well, look, I’m a Republican. I desperately hope that we end up with a Republican president. And I think the dog catcher in Clarke County, Virginia, where I live, would make a better doggone president than the one we’ve got today. But look, Jim Webb would make a great president, but I’m hoping that we have a Republican.

HH: But wouldn’t you love to see him debate Hillary?

ON: I would have loved to have seen Newt Gingrich debate the current occupant of the White House.

HH: Amen to that.

— – – – –

HH: You know, I didn’t know that crystal meth kilos served as currency.

ON: Yeah.

HH: That’s one of those details in your book…

ON: Cocaine does, opium does, it all serves as currency.

HH: And it’s amazing.

ON: …for bad, bad people.

HH: Now the news of the week, of course, is the Bergdahl deal. And during the break, you were reminding me you were a national security staff from ’81-’86, and you were a counterterrorism official for President Reagan from ’83-’86. And you were in on a few hostage ceremonies.

ON: I was indeed.

HH: And how did they compare with the one we saw this week?

ON: This week was surreal. I mean, I was there with, we had a unit, and I’ll leave some names out of this, United States Army general was kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Italy, and I was there for that event. I was there when each of the three hostages were brought back from Beirut. I was sent off to do that, and that’s what we did. Now a lot of people have different opinions about whether we did the right thing or the wrong thing, but we got them home. I tried desperately to get William Buckley, the CIA station chief, home. And that failed, because he was murdered, and the same thing later on with Bill Higgins. So I’ve got a lot of experience in dealing with hostage situations, and with welcome home ceremonies. The welcome home ceremony that I saw in the Rose Garden this week was surreal. And unfortunately, what the commander-in-chief has done is invite the kind of criticism that has come out about this case. I know a lot about the Bergdahls. I’ve met the family. I was asked to be involved in some aspects of this situation, because of my experience before. And I did so at the request of a senior person in our U.S. Government. And I’ve heard a lot of things about the young man. I’ve never met him, but I’ve met the family. Some have posited that he’s betrayed his country, that he’s defected, that he’s actually taken up arms against them. Look, here’s my take on that. One, none of us who have ever been hostages understand fully what one goes through under those circumstances. That’s number one. The so-called Stockholm Syndrome is a real thing and we’ll leave it at that. Number three, he deserves justice. Justice can be either to him or for him. Now you as an attorney understand what I’m talking about. That’s only going to happen if some very senior United States Army officer, meaning a general, stands up on his hind legs and convenes an Article 32 investigation, which is the military equivalent of a grand jury. But…and for all those who are out there just raising their hands right now saying oh, there’s no such thing as military justice, or military justice is to justice as military medicine is to medicine, the reality of it is I asked for a court martial when I was indicted by the special prosecutor. And the reason he didn’t want me to have it is because he knew it was going to be a fair trial.

HH: Right.

ON: And I’d have a jury of my peers, not a jury with one high school graduate in it.

HH: That’s why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is actually better off getting military justice than civilian justice.

ON: Absolutely. Yes, and you get it. So here’s my take. What has to happen for justice to be done for this young man or agin’ him, whether he’s a knave, a villain or a hero, is going to be determined by someone with guts enough, meaning stars on their shoulders, to convene that Article 32 investigation, and then make a judgment as to whether there should or shouldn’t be a court martial.

HH: Now Oliver North, I don’t know of anyone who has spent more time as an embedded correspondent with the young men and women who are fighting the wars of the last 12 years than you. There might be some, there are a couple of guys out there like Del Wilbur and a few others, John Burns spent a lot of time in Iraq, but you’ve spent a lot of time out there. What do you think about sending back five, in essence, army group commanders? I mean, these are senior guys.

ON: Well, one, Hugh, Bergdahl was never held by the Taliban. He was held by the Haqqani criminal gang.

HH: Right.

ON: All they ever wanted was money. They never once mentioned in all of the dialogue that occurred trying to get him back earlier, that they wanted anything but money. So somehow, this administration concocted the release of five very senior, very brutal terrorists. Look, the senior guy in that bunch who was once the head of the so-called Taliban Army probably butchered, and forgive the use of the word on our network here, but butchered 100,000 people, Shiites, okay, because it was his mission to do that. And of course, they’re now free, and they’re walking around Qatar, and there’s no real control over whether they go back to the battlefield or not. The record is replete with examples of those who have been released from Gitmo who have gone back to the fight. We know that at least 25% of did, and the only reason we know that for sure is because we found their bodies later on after they’d attacked us. So the likelihood is very high that you’d have them go back to the fight.

HH: So why would he make this deal? How do you figure this deal? I’ve got my own theory, but what’s your theory?

ON: I don’t, you know, I’ve given up, Hugh, ever since we’ve watched this thing go on from Fast & Furious to the IRS enemies list to the NSA spying on reporters that I work with, to this whole thing with the Veterans Administration, to Benghazi, I can’t figure out what’s going on with these people.

HH: All right, let me ask you this. Six years on the national, five years on the National Security Council, and I was in the White House Counsel’s Office. I know the level of lawyers we have. You know the level of NSC staffer you had. Tommy Vietor is the guy who’s running the Situation Room on the night of Benghazi. What do you think of that?

ON: I think that you’ve got high schoolers who have, and I don’t mean to be personally insulting to them, but they have absolutely zero experience in doing what’s going on. Benghazi, we’d have had the President in the SitRoom. Where the heck was he?

HH: Do you have any idea where the Secretary of State was that night? Do you think she cracked that night? There’s this book, HRC, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, that implies that she broke down.

ON: Well, and of course, there’s now the explanation that we’ve heard that she was actually suffering from a brain injury of some kind. Look, you know, again, you and I are in the business of you know, the info business. One of my objections to everything from this event to the missing airplane over the Pacific from the Malaysian airliner is that there’s so doggone much speculation. I’d prefer not to speculate. I don’t know what happened. I would like to know. I would like to know where was the President that night? I would like to know did the President know that the Haqqanis, all they wanted was money? Why did the President include five top level terrorist?

HH: You see, I didn’t know that.

ON: All these…

HH: That’s amazing to me.

ON: Well, and it’s because…

HH: When did it morph into a release of butchers deal?

ON: Yeah.

— – – – –

HH: Oliver North, thank you for coming by. This is a terrific book, Counterfeit Lies. And I know the folks are going to drive down to the Nixon Library tonight, and are going to want to get in a long line. And I promised everyone I would at least let one person talk to you, so I’m going to go to your hometown. San Antonio, Texas, David, you’re on with Oliver North.

ON: David, how are you?

HH: Go head, David.

David: Hi, I’m fine, thank you, sir.

HH: Go ahead, quick.

David: Okay, question and then I’ll hang up. Why have not we put these men in Guantanamo Bay over there on trial? We got the information we need, and get the job done.

HH: Good question.

ON: Right on, David, absolutely right, and the reason why not is because the people leading the government of the United States and the Department of Justice, and the White House, and unfortunately the Senate, are adamantly opposed to putting people on military trial. In 1942, we put eight Germans who were inserted into the United States in a court martial. They were put ashore by submarine, one group of four up in Long Island, the other group of four in Florida. They were captured by the FBI. They were given a military tribunal. The Supreme Court upheld the process and the sentence, which was death. That’s what ought to happen here.

HH: All but one went to the gallows…You’ve got some friends around the country, Oliver North.

ON: I do indeed, brother. I’m grateful for it.

HH: So now what’s after Counterfeit Lies? Are there more in this series coming?

ON: Yes, there are. Yeah, Peter Newman is alive and well, and he’ll be back to tell some more tales.

HH: Now I want to emphasize, this is the first novel of yours I’ve read. They can be read out of order, though.

ON: You can indeed.

HH: I can go back and I will not have anything spoiled for me by having read Counterfeit Lies?

ON: No, in fact, if the next book you read was the last one which came out before, Heroes Proved, you would see a lot of what Peter Newman becomes, and then you could start all the way back with Mission Compromised. And just to give you a little teaser on that one, in that first novel, for the very first time, I was allowed to publish a picture of the passport that I carried while I was at the White House. It has my picture in it. It has the name William Paul Goode in the passport.

HH: Interesting.

ON: I couldn’t show the other passport, which had the name John Clancy in it.

HH: Very well said. Colonel North, have a great time tonight. America, make sure you go over to www.olivernorth.com to find out where the book tour is going, but also to see this film about Normandy. When did you shoot that?

ON: We shot ten days ago.

HH: Ten days ago. What a perfect way tonight. Gather around the kids. If they want to know, if they want to see what it was like 70 years ago today, to drop down behind enemy lines, because that was the toughest job of all. It’s five hours before…

ON: Anybody got to the beach.

HH: Yeah, that’s a long five hours.

ON: John Perozzi, American hero.

HH: Oliver North, thank you for being here.

End of interview.