Paul Rigby
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Did someone help Ed Snowden punch a hole in the NSA?
by Jon Rappoport
June 11, 2013
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/did-someone-help-ed-snowden-punch-a-hole-in-the-nsa/
Snowden worked for the CIA. He was pushed up the ranks quickly, from an IT position in the US to a posting in Geneva, under diplomatic cover, to run security on the CIA’s computer systems there.
Then, Snowden quit the CIA and eventually ended up at Booz Allen, a private contractor. He was assigned to NSA, where he stole the secrets and exposed the NSA.
The CIA and NSA have a long contentious relationship. The major issue is, who is king of US intelligence? We’re talking about an internal war.
Snowden could have been the CIA’s man at NSA, where certain CIA players helped him access files he wouldn’t have been able to tap otherwise.
You can bet your bottom dollar that NSA analysts are looking into this possibility right now.
Did the CIA give the NSA documents to Ed Snowden?
by Jon Rappoport
June 13, 2013
JON RAPPOPORT'S BLOG
http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/did-the-cia-give-the-nsa-documents-to-ed-snowden/
Current press reports focus on PRISM, the NSA’s relationships with the biggest tech companies in the world, and the spilled leaks of Ed Snowden.
I’ve already laid out serious questions about Snowden’s work history and whether he’s told the truth about it.
Is it likely he could have accessed and snatched thousands of highly classified NSA documents?
“Let’s see. Who’s coming to work for us here at NSA today? Oh, new whiz kid. Ed Snowden. Outside contractor. He’s not really a full-time employee of the NSA. Twenty-nine years old. No high school diploma. Has a GED. He worked for the CIA and quit. Hmm. Why did he quit? Oh, never mind, who cares? No problem.
“Tell you what. Let’s give this kid access to our most sensitive data. Sure. Why not? Everything. That stuff we keep behind 986 walls? Where you have to pledge the life of your first-born against the possibility you’ll go rogue? Let Snowden see it all. Sure. What the hell. I’m feeling charitable. He seems like a nice kid.”
Here is a more likely scenario.
Snowden never saw any of those thousands of documents on an NSA computer. Never happened.
Instead, he was either used or volunteered as a CIA operative to carry the endless turf war between CIA and NSA a new step forward. People at the CIA WERE able to access those NSA documents and they gave the documents to Snowden and he ran with them.
This was a covert op launched by the CIA against a chief rival, the NSA. NSA, the agency that’s far bigger than the CIA. NSA, the agency that’s been taking over intelligence gathering, that considers itself superior to everybody else in the intelligence field.
The CIA, of course, couldn’t be seen as the NSA leaker. They needed a guy. They needed a guy who could appear to be FROM the NSA, to make things look worse for the NSA and shield the CIA.
They had Ed Snowden. He had worked for the CIA in Geneva, in a high-level position, overseeing computer-systems security. People would later assume he had the wherewithal to get into NSA files and steal documents all by himself.
Somewhere in his CIA past, Ed meets a fellow CIA guy who sits down with him and says, “You know, Ed, things have gone too damn far. The NSA is spying on everybody all the time. I can show you proof. They’ve gone beyond the point of trying to catch terrorists. They’re doing something else. They’re expanding a Surveillance State, which can only lead to one thing: the destruction of America, what America stands for, what you and I know America is supposed to be. The NSA isn’t like us, Ed. We go after terrorists for real. That’s it. Whereas NSA goes after everybody. We have to stop it. We need a guy…and there are those of us who think you might be that guy…”
During the course of this one disingenuous conversation, the CIA is killing 37 innocent civilians all over the world with drones, but that’s beside the point. Ahem.
Ed says, “Tell me more. I’m intrigued.”
He buys in.
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NSA Deception Operation? Questions Surround Leaked PRISM Document’s Authenticity
Was Edward Snowden spotted before he decided to leak documents, and set up by the NSA?
By Steve Kinney
Global Research, June 12, 2013
“I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.” - Edward Snowden
Intelligence services have been feeding false information to known enemy informants in their own ranks for a long time, and they are very good at it.
Today, the potential whistleblower is one of the most dangerous informants an intelligence service can confront.
Was Edward Snowden spotted before he decided to leak documents, and set up by the NSA?
Substantial evidence supports the possibility that he was. Numerous questions cast doubt on the authenticity of the Power Point slide show describing PRISM, but the UK Guardian has not seen fit to release it to the public. Perhaps Glenn Greenwald should anonymously leak this file: In the words of Snowden himself, “The public needs to decide.”
Was Edward Snowden under surveillance at intelligence contractor Booz Allen in advance of releasing the PRISM document?
In the wake of the Wikileaks scandals, the U.S. intelligence community has answered “Who shall watch the watchmen?” by introducing active surveillance and detailed profiling of their own analysts and contractors, looking for potential whistleblowers.[1] By his own account, Snowden often discussed perceived Agency wrongdoing with his co-workers, which suggests that he should have been profiled and flagged as a potential leaker by the NSA’s internal surveillance process.
Interviewed by Glenn Greenwald, Snowden described his workplace behavior in the time leading up to his decision to leak documents:
“When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses, and when you talk about them in a place like this, were this is the normal state of business, people tend not to take them very seriously and move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it, and the more you talk about it, the more you’re ignored, the more you’re told it’s not a problem, until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public, not by somebody who is simply hired by the government.”[2]
Questioning The Document
Classified DoD briefing files are created to meet formal style specifications and are subject to stringent internal reviews. After the publication of pages from the PRISM presentation, independent analysts were quick to notice and report substantial deficiencies in the document.[3] Others have expressed serious doubts about the PRISM slide show’s pedigree, including the NSA’s former top attorney:
“Stewart Baker, the NSA’s general counsel in the 1990s and now an attorney at Steptoe and Johnson, said he was not familiar with PRISM or similar government activity, but the leaked Powerpoint presentation sounds “flaky,” as do the initial reports.
“The Powerpoint is suffused with a kind of hype that makes it sound more like a marketing pitch than a briefing — we don’t know what its provenance is and we don’t know the full context,” Baker said. He added, referring to the Post’s coverage: “It looks rushed and it looks wrong.” – Declan McCullagh, Wired, June 7, 2013[4]
The logos of major U.S. IT and communication service providers are splashed across the top of PRISM power point slides like sponsor patches on a NASCAR driver’s jacket. Vendor logos often do appear next to product illustrations in DoD briefing documents, and are sometimes used to indicate a vendor’s position in process or procurement flow charts. But the “ad banner” format present in the leaked PRISM slides is very unusual and apparently unique to the PRISM document. All of the vendors named have vehemently denied knowledge of the PRISM program described in the slides.[5] Some of these denials, such as those by Twitter and Google, are from companies which have previously fought court battles against arbitrary disclosure of their users’ data to Federal agencies.[6]
A second PRISM?
Unclassified documents available on the Internet identify a completely different PRISM program, a powerful integrated network communications tool for Department of Homeland Security counter-terrorism crisis management. This PRISM integrates incident reporting, GPS tracking of emergency service and law enforcement vehicles, “outbound 911″ public alert networks, CBN and other technical sensor data, etc. A detailed, unclassified 2004 description of the “DHS PRISM” is available at Cryptome.[7] A 2007 report from the RAND Corporation defines PRISM as a “Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management”[8]. It seems unlikely that two network-centric programs as large and different as the DHS and NSA PRISMs, both operating inside the United States, would bear the same name. Only Monty Python calls everyone Bruce “to avoid confusion.”
Would the NSA lie to us?
The National Security Administration is one of the country’s most officially secretive agencies. In the Washington press corps, its popular nicknames have included “No Such Agency” and the “Never Say Anything” agency.
It is against long standing Agency policy to comment directly on any classified matter, and its Directors have consistently refused to confirm or deny any Agency activity when questioned by the press. But when the UK Guardian broke the story of the PRISM leak, the Director of National Intelligence promptly confirmed the document as authentic, calling the leak “reprehensible”:
“The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.” – James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence[9]
This very unusual confirmation raises more questions about the PRISM document than it answers.
Is it possible that the PRISM leak was set up by the NSA as a deception operation in support of the Obama Administration’s ongoing wars against whistleblowers and the 4th Amendment? Documents from Federal intelligence contractor HBGary, published in 2011 by anonymous hackers, include a Power Point presentation proposing methods for attacking Wikileaks, and this document names Glenn Greenwald, who broke the PRISM story, as a specific target:
“The presentation, which has been seen by The Independent, recommends a multi-pronged assault on WikiLeaks including deliberately submitting false documents to the website to undermine its credibility, pioneering cyber attacks to expose who the leakers to WikiLeaks are and going after sympathetic journalists.
“One of those mentioned is Glenn Greenwald, a pro-WikiLeaks reporter in the US. Writing on Salon.com. Greenwald stated that his initial reaction was “to scoff at its absurdity.” – Jerome Taylor, The Independent[10]
The UK Guardian released the PRISM story on the opening day of PFC Bradley Manning’s court martial. The leaked PRISM document will certainly influence public debate on both whistleblower protections and State surveillance – and influence is one of our intelligence community’s regular daily chores. Some commentators have been very quick to present forceful talking points in favor of free and unrestrained State surveillance[11], and there is growing consensus that reports depicting PRISM as a mass domestic surveillance dragnet were a false alarm. The Washington Post, which broke the story at the same time as the UK Guardian, has walked back its position on the civil rights implications of the PRISM materials.[12] Meanwhile, it seems that everyone has forgotten about Romas/COIN.
Universal Surveillance: Romas/COIN, Odyssey and beyond
The same security breach at HBGary that revealed formal proposals to plant false leaks and target reporter Glenn Greenwald personally, also disclosed the existence of a real surveillance program with dramatically more dangerous civil liberty implications than PRISM: Romas/COIN, and its planned successor, Odyssey. Barrett Brown summarizes what is known about this program in an article on the Project PM website:
“A successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms – capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence. All this is merely in addition to whichever additional capabilities are not evident from the limited description available, with the program as a whole presumably being operated in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners.”[13]
According to its internal e-mail from 2010 and 2011, HBGary was a prime contractor coordinating bids from Google, Apple, AT&T and others to build an expanded, upgraded version of the Romas/COIN information warfare system. Minor publicity attending the naming of these high profile vendors in the HBGary documents may have inspired the NASCAR-style sponsor logos decorating the dubious PRISM slides.
When HBGary’s e-mails were disclosed, the Odyssey bid was on hold with HBGary and its partners waiting for a revision in program requirements from the DoD. Two years have passed since HBGary was preparing to bid against Northrop Grumman for the prime contractor position on the Odyssey program. Odyssey should now be completed or nearing completion.
Is it possible that the PRISM leak was intended to mislead the American people into dramatically under-estimating the real domestic surveillance capabilities of our National Security Agency? You might well think so, but this reporter could not possibly comment.
Notes
1) Eric Schmitt, White House Orders New Computer Security Rules, New York Times, October 6, 2011
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/us/politics/white-house-orders-new-computer-security-rules.html2) Glenn Greenwald interviews Edward Snowden, Guardian US, Sunday 9 June 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video3) Are the NSA’s PRISM slides photoshopped?, Top Level Telecommunications, June 7, 2013
http://electrospaces.blogspot.nl/2013/06/are-nsas-prism-slides-photoshopped.html4) Declan McCullagh, “No evidence of NSA’s ‘direct access’ to tech companies”, Wired, June 7, 2013 at
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-to-tech-companies/5) Joanna Stern, NSA PRISM: Dissecting the Tech Companies’ Adamant Denials of Involvement in Government Spying Program, ABC News, June 7, 2013
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/nsa-prism-dissecting-technology-companies-adamant-denial-involvement/story?id=193500956) Declan McCullagh, Justice Department tries to force Google to hand over user data, CNET News, May 31, 2013
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/justice-department-tries-to-force-google-to-hand-over-user-data/Declan McCullagh, DOJ sends order to Twitter for WikiLeaks-related account info, CNET News, January 7, 2011
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20027893-281.html7) MAJ Gregg Powell and COL Charles Dunn III, Homeland Security: Requirements for Installation Security Decision Support Systems, Battle Command Battle Lab (Gordon), March 21, 2004
http://cryptome.org/2013/06/dhs-prism.pdf8) Carl Rhodes, Jeff Hagen, Mark Westergren, A Strategies-to-Tasks Framework for Planning and Executing Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Operations, RAND Corporation, 2007
http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR434.html9) James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, DNI Statement on Activities Authorized Under Section 702 of FISA, June 06, 2013
http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-press-releases-2013/869-dni-statement-on-activities-authorized-under-section-702-of-fisa10) Jerome Taylor, The US bank and the secret plan to destroy WikiLeaks, The Independent February 13, 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-us-bank-and-the-secret-plan-to-destroy-wikileaks-2215059.html11) Tim Worstall, NSA’s PRISM Sounds Like A Darn Good Idea To Me: This Is What Governments Are For, Forbes, June 7, 2011
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/07/nsas-prism-sounds-like-a-darn-good-idea-to-me-this-is-what-governments-are-for/12) Peter Weber, Is the NSA PRISM leak much less than it seems?, Yahoo! News, Jun 10, 2013
http://news.yahoo.com/nsa-prism-leak-much-less-seems-141000562.html?.tsrc=rtlde/13) Barrett Brown, Romas/COIN, Project PM, http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Romas/COIN,
See also Barrett Brown, A sinister cyber-surveillance scheme exposed, UK Guardian, June 22, 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/22/hacking-anonymousSteve Kinney is an independent researcher and writer on computer and network security topics, with a long standing interest in the civil and human rights implications of Internet censorship and surveillance by State and corporate actors.
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The story about the NSA that has everyone up in arms is NOT NEW. James Bamford broke this story last year. Much of the story was available before that.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about all this, then, is not what's been going on, but how the media failed to report it, until it reached a tipping point, where it became all they wanted to talk about.
Weird.
The question of timing is an interesting one. The only sustained attempt I've found so far to make sense of it is the following. I can't say I'm in agreement with all of it, but it does offer food for thought, not least in its characterisation of Petraeus, and the enduring appeal of the man to a significant section of the US elite.
Britain, France prodding Obama into attacking Syria
Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
PressTV, June 8, 2013
http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/06/08/307786/uk-france-goading-us-into-striking-syria/
On the eve of this year’s Bilderberg meeting, the Anglo-French intelligence bosses have clearly shown their hand with two high-profile attacks on Obama. Wednesday, June 5 marked the liberation of Qusayr, the great Stalingrad of the Syrian terrorist death squads deployed by NATO against Assad. With the rout of these terrorists, the main units of the self-styled Free Syrian Army, along with the Nusra branch of al Qaeda, are likely to face annihilation in the short to medium term.
On the same day that Qusayr fell, the British and French governments hysterically demanded that Obama undertake a total bombing campaign against Syria, whatever the consequences in regard to Russia and other powers. To his credit, Obama is continuing to say no to this lunatic Anglo-French neocolonial adventure. On that same June 5, the London-based daily The Guardian, in an article by the expatriate American Glenn Greenwald, hyped a court order from the secret FISA panel of federal judges showing that the US National Security Agency was routinely monitoring the telephone records (including time, locations, call duration, and unique identifiers, but not the contents of the conversations) of possibly unlimited millions of Verizon phone subscribers. Back in the US, reactionary talk show hosts began screaming “Obama taps your phones!”
On June 6, again in advance of every other newspaper in the world, The Guardian published another article by Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill revealing that the National Security Agency, under a program called Prism, had obtained direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Youtube, Skype, AOL, and Microsoft, and was busily monitoring the content of e-mails, file transfers, and live conversations. Back in the US, reactionary talk show hosts began screaming, “Obama reads your e-mail!”
Under George Bush, warrantless wiretaps and similar illegal programs were revealed by various media organs. These revelations had minimal impact on Bush, whose base was indifferent to civil liberties. Obama’s base, by contrast, cares very much, and has been visibly upset by these new reports. While strongly condemning these totalitarian programs, we must also not lose sight of who is putting these reports into circulation, and why. Phone taps are bad, but a general war in the Middle East leading to a possible Third World War is far worse.
The British and French defense and intelligence establishment (they have virtually merged) want Obama and the American people to take the lead and shoulder the risk in a perilous attack on Syria, in time to preserve the death squads so they can fight another day in another country. London and Paris, of course, see themselves as the principal beneficiaries of the breakup of Syria. Since Obama is currently blocking their plans, they are bringing up their big guns of scandal, with the center-left Guardian evidently chosen to take the point, doubtless to obtain more attention among Obama’s leftist supporters. (During the initial Clinton scandals of Whitewatergate and Troopergate, the flagship of scandal was the reactionary London-based Daily Telegraph, especially through its columnists Peregrine Worthshorne and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.)
Coming as they do on the eve of the yearly Bilderberg conference, these scandals stamped Made in England suggest that the majority of this elitist cabal have maintained their anti-Obama line already evident in last year’s meeting, and are using the current gathering to further their plans.
From Lady Astor’s Cliveden Set to the Bilderbergs
This year’s Bilderberg conference is beginning today at the Grove Hotel in the town of Watford, England, not far from Heathrow Airport. Up to 150 announced and unannounced members of the transatlantic financier oligarchy and their retainers are expected to attend. Watford is only 15 miles away from Cliveden, infamous as the country home of Lady Nancy Astor, where some 75 years ago a clique of fascist “cagoulords” including Lord Waldorf Astor, Lord Vincent Astor, Lord Brand, Lord Lothian, Lord Halifax, Geoffrey Dawson of the London Times, and Sir Neville Chamberlain schemed with the likes of Joachim von Ribbentrop to build up Hitler and then play him against Stalin in an apocalyptic world war that somehow went awry. Today’s financier elite is ideologically very much the descendent of that “Cliveden Set” which often dictated policy to the British Foreign Office. Will any of today’s Bilderbergers make the 20-minute drive to Cliveden?
The big news at this year’s Bilderberg meeting is the arrival of General David Petraeus, who was forced out last November as head of the US Central Intelligence Agency under circumstances which strongly suggested that he had taken part in a Seven Days in May scenario, joining with a shadowy cabal of generals, admirals, politicians, pollsters and defense contractors to oust Obama from the White House regardless of the actual vote count last November, and to install a permanent dictatorship of war and austerity under the figurehead of the Wall Street financier Willard Mitt Romney. The best-known public manifestation of that effort has so far been the Benghazi incident of September 11, 2012, an orchestrated pre-election provocation (or “October surprise”) intended to put the Obama campaign on the defensive. The Benghazi incident occurred in the area of command responsibility of General Petraeus as CIA Director, and of General Carter Ham, head of the US Africa Command. Both of these officers, along with Afghanistan commander General Allen, NATO commander Admiral Stavridis, and a dozen or more others of flag rank were ousted for various official reasons in a post election purge. But there is good reason to conclude that the United States had narrowly escaped what might be called a veiled military coup d’état.
Last year’s Bilderberg meeting in Chantilly, Virginia was clearly dominated by anti-Obama and pro-Romney forces. At that time, it was revealed by Charlie Skelton ofGuardian - one of the very few serious and reliable Bilderberg observers -- that Romney had made an unannounced visit to the Bilderberg confab. Obama, on the other hand, had not attended, although both he and Hillary Clinton had reportedly been on hand in 2008. The Bilderbergers had also provided valuable assistance to the Romney campaign. One leading example, which I discuss in detail in my book Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of America - Polygamy, Theocracy, and Subversion is the activities of the PayPal and Facebook financier Peter Thiel, who contributed a reported $3.9 million to a super pack active on behalf of presidential candidate Ron Paul, who assisted Romney by draining votes away from serious candidates challenging Romney from his right, such as Senator Rick Santorum. Without a well-funded Ron Paul, the Ohio and Michigan primaries might have gone to Santorum, quite possibly giving him the Republican nomination. Ron Paul, representing the racist Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, was seeking to obtain the vice presidential nomination for Senator Rand Paul, his son. As it turned out, Romney did not need Paul’s convention votes, and turned elsewhere for his running mate.
At that time, it was widely recognized in Washington that Bilderberg was backing Romney. For example, an article in the superficial gossip blog Wonkette by Kirsten Boyd Johnson dated June 6, 2012 was headlined: “Did Bilderberg Monsters Just Crown Mitt Romney Your Next Leader?” We can therefore assume that be 2012 Bilderberg meeting also involved planning for the provocations and media strategies that would attempt to catapult Romney into the White House by fair means or foul.
In the event, the sneering plutocrat Romney turned out to be so inept and odious as a candidate that not even the massive resources of the Bilderberg network sufficed to make him president. This outcome teaches an important lesson: however preponderant their power, the Bilderberg elite does not possess magical powers to shape world events. If they want to take the presidency while preserving the formalities of an election, then they too must mobilize their forces for the long slog, and in this the Obama forces proved more adroit. But, by the same token, the Bilderbergers have not given up on their project of a permanent austerity and aggression dictatorship for the United States. Quite the contrary.
Petraeus and the problem of Bonapartist dictatorship
For years, General David Petraeus has been the principal focus of Bonapartist and authoritarian tendencies in US politics. We can think of him as a kind of American equivalent of France’s Marshall Philippe Pétain, especially as the latter emerges from the groundbreaking historical studies of historian Annie LaCroix-Riz. After World War I, Pétain - a defeatist and pessimist who had never really won a battle, and who collapsed psychologically during the final German assault of 1918 - became the convergence of French fascist forces associated with the secret networks known as the Cagoule and the Synarchie. General Petraeus, for his part, has long been the darling of the neocon faction, which wanted him to run for president in 2012. Petraeus has attended the Bilderberg meeting several times before, and has long been a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Petraeus has signaled that the disagreement with Obama’s policy of ending the Iraq war, and now of winding down Afghanistan. We can assume that Petraeus shares the violent contempt for Obama which was imprudently expressed by his close associate, General Stanley McChrystal, who got fired when his comments were revealed by a journalist.
It may be argued that Petraeus has never really won a campaign. One could just as easily argue that the US military has not won against an opponent capable of serious warfare since General Douglas MacArthur’s masterful Inchon landing of September 1950. Although Petraeus has bitter enemies, he is widely regarded as the leading general of the current age. His return to Bilderberg this year shows that last year’s Paula Broadwell adultery scandal has not removed him from contention. Pétain, after all, was also famous for his dalliances.
Petraeus’ patron, Henry R. Kravis of KKR
General Petraeus does not arrive in Watford alone. He comes as the central figure of his own delegation. He is accompanied by his current patron, the Wall Street financier Henry Kravis of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts. Kravis, with a personal fortune in excess of $4 billion, gives Petraeus a fantastically wealthy sponsor for his future activities. Kravis has just appointed Petraeus to head the KKR Global Institute, a new think tank supposedly devoted to studying problems of environment, economics, society, and governance.
In reality, the KKR Global Institute looks very much like the kind of private intelligence operation which would be needed to launch a rather unorthodox quest for the White House. One of Petraeus’ associates in his new job will be Ken Mehlman, a veteran political hack who once headed the Republican National Committee. Mehlman would not be much use for forecasting global trends, but would be tremendously valuable for someone attempting to assemble a political faction centered on Republican and reactionary circles. A certain Henry McVey of KKR will also be involved.
The Kravis family has something of a history of promoting presidential contenders. As I show in the chapter entitled “The Permian Basin Gang” of my 1992 George Bush: the Unauthorized Biography, the founder of the Kravis family fortune was Oklahoma oilman Ray Kravis, who became a close friend of GOP Senator Prescott Bush of the Wall Street firm Brown Brothers Harriman, for many decades the most politically connected private bank. When Prescott Bush wanted to send the young George H. W. Bush to learn the oil business, he asked Ray Kravis to give his son a job. Henry Kravis later served as a top financial angel for Bush 41. During those years, Henry Kravis wrote the largest single check in world history to complete his leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco.
Also part of Petraeus retinue is Henry’s third wife Marie Josée Kravis, the dominant figure of the reactionary/neocon Hudson Institute. With this, the Petraeus regroupment acquires the services of a significant think tank to generate policy positions, personnel and staffing choices, and the like. Also part of the Petraeus party is Michael Gfoeller, who has ties to former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and served for over a quarter century in the State Department. Gfoeller has been associated with Petraeus in the past, and is currently a political consultant with the lobbying division of Exxon Mobil.
The Bilderbergers supported Obama in 2008 because they wanted to use him as a tool to get the Anglo-American banking system safely through the world derivatives panic with US Treasury and US Federal Reserve bailouts, and a minimum of additional regulation. This was the function which Obama fulfilled. But now, the Bilderbergers are dissatisfied with Obama, and wish to reward him for his services by dumping him as soon as possible, as we saw in 2012.
On the one hand, the Bilderberg group remains deeply dissatisfied with what they regard as the slow and inadequate pace of primitive accumulation and austerity measures under the Obama regime. Obama promises the gradual demolition of Social Security and Medicare, but not fast enough to satisfy these austerity ghouls. Romney would have attempted a much more ambitious program of entitlement destruction, union busting, service cuts, and related measures.
Qusayr, the Stalingrad of the terrorist death squads
Another principle of Bilderberg complaint against Obama has emerged with greater urgency during the last several days. The civil war in Syria systematically fomented by NATO intelligence with the help of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and the other reactionary Persian Gulf monarchies has now reached a decisive turning point with the fall of the rebel stronghold of Qusayr on June 5. Tens of thousands of terrorists organized into anti-Assad death squads over several years with the help of the CIA and the State Department now face short-term defeat, rout, encirclement, and annihilation. In the meantime, the British and especially the French government are busy manufacturing dubious stories about the alleged use of poison gas by the Syrian government against the Anglo-French terrorist clients. This operation reeks of the worst neocolonialism: it is the Paris-London entente cordiale of 1904, the Sykes-Picot powers, and the infamous duo of Suez 1956, who are demanding the re-imposition of colonial rule in the Levant. Ironically, current Russian opposition and US skepticism in regard to this project are also a distant echo of that same Suez crisis.
The British, the French, the Israelis, and the neocons are doing everything possible to pressure Obama into attacking Syria and Hezbollah now, a move which would commit him to an attack on Iran a little later. Obama is guilty of numerous crimes and atrocities, including drone strikes, assassinations, cyber warfare, economic sanctions, the bombing of Libya, and many more, but the simple fact is that the Syrian crisis has gone on for more than two years and Obama is still refusing to launch the massive US bombing campaign demanded by the British Colonel Blimps and the French Vichy nostalgics. No one can tell how long Obama’s resolve will last, but this is the reality we have observed so far. Even Obama’s appointments of the warmongers and meddlers Susan Rice and Samantha Power to important regime posts can be variously interpreted. According to one view, these two charming ladies are being set up as prominent and visible targets for the raving attacks of the Congressional tea party fanatics, meaning that Obama personally will be spared a significant part of the flak. Whether Obama will ever follow their urgings towards aggression has yet to be seen. He turned down a demand from Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey and Petraeus to arm the Syrian death squads in the fall of 2012, and Rice and Power are both far weaker than that combination.
Assuming that Obama continues to resist an attack on Syria, and continues to move towards austerity at the current pace, the moment may soon come when the Bilderbergers will want to get him out of the White House. Last year, that operation could have been accomplished under the cover of an election, which is always the preferred way. This year, Obama’s ouster would have to involve impeachment and removal from office on the Watergate model. There is no doubt that House Tea Party fanatics would be happy to impeach Obama at any time. They have pushed aside all other public business to focus on their lunatic account of the Benghazi events, their grotesque interpretation of the Internal Revenue Service affair, and their endless tub-thumping about regime snooping on the Associated Press, Fox reporter James Rosen, etc.
At the present time, the impeachment of Obama might prove to be an exercise in futility, since his support in the Senate remains intact. But that can change. The chances of removing Obama have just improved today with the appointment of a new Republican Senator by New Jersey Governor Christie to replace the recently deceased Senator Lautenberg of that state until October.
Ray McGovern: Obama fears assassination by the CIA
And then, 50 years after the Kennedy assassination, there are more energetic methods, as Obama personally seems to realize. One source shedding light on this matter is ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern, the former intelligence briefer of President George H. W. Bush, and now a peace activist. On a recent Pacifica radio broadcast, McGovern has reported this interesting account of remarks made by Obama after hours with supporters:
“He’s afraid of what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And I know from a good friend who was there when it happened, that at a small dinner with progressive supporters - after these progressive supporters were banging on Obama before the election, Why don’t you do the things we thought you stood for? Obama turned sharply and said, ‘Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?’ That’s a quote, and that’s a very revealing quote. McGovern spoke on WBAI's show Law and Disorder this morning He was talking about his recent article calling Obama ‘a wuss’ and speculated that Obama had also placed John Brennan as head of the CIA out of fear that the CIA might turn on him, as it had on John Kennedy. I’m pretty convinced that the president of the United States is afraid of the CIA.” (Philip Weiss, “Obama told friends he reneged on progressive promises out of fear of assassination - former CIA analyst,” Mondoweiss, June 3, 2013)
The notion that Obama’s life is in danger has been methodically cultivated by his devoted supporters from the start of his presidential campaign in 2007. Ray McGovern, however, cannot be counted as one of those acolytes, and would be more likely to lambaste Obama than to make excuses for him. This account therefore acquires a certain authority.
From his own point of view, Obama has had a rough time lately. It has long been known that his greatest psychological satisfaction comes through the adulation he receives when making public speeches. When he delivered his speech on national security at the National Defense University, he was subjected to prolonged heckling by the veteran provocateur, Medea Benjamin of Code Pink. This heckling went on for a long time. Ms. Benjamin is very suspect, because she demanded that Obama stop old drone attacks and close Guant?namo, but said nothing at all about the far greater danger of a short-term attack on Syria, a country she has vilified in the recent past. And now, in an act of complete lese majesté, the hitherto untouchable First Lady Michelle Obama has been accosted at a private fundraiser by a lesbian activist demanding that Obama sign an executive order providing benefits for same-sex couples. Are these coincidences, or part of a psychological warfare pattern designed to remind Obama that he can be reached at any time?
Hollywood accredits the meme of storming the White House
There is also another dimension. Serious students of the events of September 11, 2001 are aware of the process by which the memes or elements of that tragic day were carefully introduced, accredited, and developed in the public mind, especially through a series of Hollywood movies. An example is the final scene of the movie The Fight Club, which shows the collapse of a number of skyscrapers in a manner eerily prophetic of the fate of the New York Twin Towers. Hollywood is, after all, not far away from Santa Monica, the home of that leading scenario factory known as the Rand Corporation.
Precisely in this field we have this sudden emergence of a new genre of a Hollywood blockbuster - the movie extravaganza devoted to an armed assault on the White House. The first of these arrived in March of this year under the title of Olympus Has Fallen, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Gerard Butler, Ashley Judd, and Morgan Freeman. Here a large force of North Korean rogue terrorists strafe and storm the White House and take the president prisoner in the situation room, demanding that the US get out of Korea. The tone is paranoid/serious, with no element of satire or irony. The accent is on a certain kind of naturalism, including by having the real-life MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell report the events in a newscast. Many images portray the blowing up of the entire West Wing of the premises.
Due in theaters in late June is a second movie with virtually the identical theme, this time called White House Down, from Sony Pictures and Columbia. The director is the German Roland Emmerich, known for Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Patriot. The stars are Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx. This time, the White House is attacked by a domestic paramilitary group led by Emil Stenz, according to the script by James Vanderbilt of the well-known oligarchical clan. The attackers also blow up the dome of the US Capitol as a diversion. So far as is known, Obama has not commented on either of these two motion pictures.
The Kokesh march on Washington: Rifle-toting reactionaries
Are there correlated developments in the real world? There certainly are: over a period of several weeks, the disgruntled Iraq war veteran Adam Kokesh was recently calling for a July 4 anti-Obama march of 10,000 black-clad white reactionaries to violate federal and District of Columbia law by crossing the Potomac from Virginia into the District and thence around the National Mall, passing by most of the executive departments, the Congress, and the White House - all the while armed with loaded rifles. Until about a year ago, Kokesh was a leading supporter of the Republican austerity fanatic and antigovernment demagogue Ron Paul, but he then broke with Paul and set out on his own course of provocation and adventurism. In the unlikely event that Kokesh’s march had succeeded, he would have had the equivalent of one rifle division in position to intimidate the Congress and the White House in turn - a clear step towards anarchy. After being arrested at a pro-marijuana rally in Philadelphia and spending a few days in jail, Kokesh has changed his strategy, and is now calling for marches on July 4 in the 50 state capitals to demand immediate secession and breakup of the federal union. Loaded rifles would still be de rigeur. The question of secessionism was answered with thundering finality in the American Civil War of a century and a half ago, an episode which caused this nation more than 700,000 dead. Since the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, anyone attempting to be open this question must be regarded as a dangerous madman. For our purposes here, it is enough to recall that the Kokesh march is too close for comfort to the two scenario films we have just discussed.
Such then is the immediate background for the Bilderberg 2013 deliberations this weekend. It remains to say a word about the abysmal quality of most Bilderberg analysis.
Last year at Chantilly, they obtained an incongruous situation in which the majority of the protesters assembled outside of the hotel gate were supporters of the Ron Paul presidential campaign. Whether they know it or not, these poor dupes were thus also supporting Mitt Romney, for whom Paul was serving as the right wingman. There was a direct convergence between Paul backer Peter Thiel inside the meeting, and the Paul backers outside. This amounts to a classic control the opposition. Things like this have been happening since ancient Greece, when it was the general rule that the cult of Apollo at Delphi controlled the various cults of Dionysios which appeared to naïve observers as the opposition.
Cutting through disinformation and controlled opposition
Any group as sophisticated as Bilderberg knows that its arrogant and oligarchical machinations will inevitably call forth a resistance. One way to control such a resistance is by providing them with a steady flow of disinformation, disguised as leaks from the inside. A conduit for such leaks was precisely the late Jim Tucker, who wrote for the American Free Press, the descendent of the house organ of the Roosevelt-hating and fascist-loving American Liberty League of the 1930s. Tucker was an unreconstructed Confederate racist. At his last Bilderberger meeting, Tucker told a group of journalists that he regarded the American Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.” He added that he wanted reparations, not for those who had been enslaved, but rather for the slave owners, whom he said had been illegally deprived of their property by the evil President Lincoln. Tucker claimed that the Bilderberg group was in favor of socialism, and ferociously opposed to free market laissez-faire capitalism. In reality, David Rockefeller, one of those who paid for Bilderberg activities over several decades, had hired the Austrian school libertarian economist Friedrich von Hayek as his personal tutor at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, and had later financed an American professorship for Ludwig von Mises, another Austro-libertarian luminary. This means that David Rockefeller must be regarded as a founder of both the Bilderberg group and the Austrian school of economics. But it did no good to call these plain facts to Tucker’s attention: he kept repeating that the Bilderberg group supported Obama for reelection.
Whether Tucker was fed these stories by a functionary from within Bilderberg, or whether he simply invented them out of whole cloth on his own, is a matter for further inquiry. To the extent that Tucker was seen as the public face of the opposition to Bilderberg, the elitists had nothing to worry about.
Similarly, at last year’s Bilderberg event it was breathlessly reported that the name of Ron Paul was being cursed inside the meeting. Since the Bilderberg faction around Thiel was contributing large sums to help Ron Paul’s campaign efforts, and since the overwhelming consensus of Bilderberg as a whole was pro-Romney, we might be driven to the conclusion that this report was just a face-saving trick by the Paulbearers to conceal the embarrassing elitist support for their man. But it is also possible that the name of Ron Paul was being cursed by the waiters, busboys, and cleaning ladies when they found out that Paul wanted to take away their union, their minimum wage, their food stamps, their unemployment benefits, their hope for Social Security and Medicare in their old age, the Head Start program and Pell Grants for their kids, and the WIC high-protein meals for their pregnant wives and babies.
The Paul supporters feel an enduring gratitude towards Thiel. This week, we read in an article by Paul Joseph Watson appearing on Infowars of June 3, 2013: “Another notable attendee is Peter Thiel, the man who provided the financial muscle for online ventures like Facebook and Paypal, as well as LinkedIn and Friendster.” More to the point is the fact that Thiel also “provided the financial muscle” for Ron Paul’s super pack to the tune of $3.9 million. The fear is evidently that this inconvenient fact might cause some pesky cognitive dissonance among Watson’s readers, many of whom were and are devoted supporters of the Paul dynasty’s inhuman super-austerity policies.
This line of argument currently also attempts to portray the anarcho-capitalist Thiel as a benign force for openness and transparency within the sinister Bilderberg context. This is so absurd that no comment is necessary. It will be wise to remain skeptical in regard to such accounts.
The inability of libertarians to discover and report the truth about Bilderberg comes down to this. Bilderberg is a creature of the Rockefellers, and so is the Austrian school to which the libertarians subscribe. They are thus pre-programmed, as if with an inner gyroscope, to converge on the policy goals of the financier elite. The Bilderberg group demands genocidal austerity across the board. The libertarians, calling this the fight against big government (even though the sacrifices are borne by innocent individuals), heartily agree. The Bilderberg group ardently desires to oust Obama from the White House. The libertarians, blinded by their fanatical hatred of Obama, and long since aligned with the far right demagogic line emanating from such scurrilous websites as Drudge and Breitbart, are totally on board.
Only when it comes to the attack on Syria, Hezbollah, and Iran, about which Obama is dragging his feet, might the libertarians have some objections. But by that point, they themselves, through their very own efforts, would have largely destroyed the institutional basis for resistance to a future and wider war - such as through trade unions, which the Pauls wish to destroy. The irony of the libertarians is that they always claim technically not to be fascists in the full 1930s central European sense of the term- but, as the example of German Chancellor Brüning shows, libertarian economic and social policies can be counted on to degrade social and economic conditions to the point where fascist rule becomes virtually inevitable, as seen in 1932-1933.
And remember: Bilderberg is of Dutch origin, and so is Petraeus.
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So who did instruct Rather to repeat his description of the Z-film, only this time with a shift in emphasis, so soon after delivering his first attempt on CBS TV on the afternoon of November 25, 1963?
After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, is reprinted below.
THE CIA AND THE MEDIA
How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up
BY CARL BERNSTEIN
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
The Columbia Broadcasting System.
CBS was unquestionably the CIAs most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS President William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well‑known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA (3); established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS newsfilm library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA. Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings.
The details of the CBS‑CIA arrangements were worked out by subordinates of both Dulles and Paley. “The head of the company doesn’t want to know the fine points, nor does the director,” said a CIA official. “Both designate aides to work that out. It keeps them above the battle.” Dr. Frank Stanton, for 25 years president of the network, was aware of the general arrangements Paley made with Dulles—including those for cover, according to CIA officials. Stanton, in an interview last year, said he could not recall any cover arrangements.) But Paley’s designated contact for the Agency was Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News between 1954 and 1961. On one occasion, Mickelson has said, he complained to Stanton about having to use a pay telephone to call the CIA, and Stanton suggested he install a private line, bypassing the CBS switchboard, for the purpose. According to Mickelson, he did so. Mickelson is now president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, both of which were associated with the CIA for many years.
In 1976, CBS News president Richard Salant ordered an in‑house investigation of the network's dealings with the CIA. Some of its findings were first disclosed by Robert Scheer in the Los Angeles Times.) But Salant's report makes no mention of some of his own dealings with the Agency, which continued into the 1970s.
Many details about the CBS‑CIA relationship were found in Mickelson's files by two investigators for Salant. Among the documents they found was a September 13th, 1957, memo to Mickelson fromTed Koop, CBS News bureau chief in Washington from 1948 to 1961. It describes a phone call to Koop from Colonel Stanley Grogan of the CIA: "Grogan phoned to say that Reeves [J. B. Love Reeves, another CIA official] is going to New York to be in charge of the CIA contact office there and will call to see you and some of your confreres. Grogan says normal activities will continue to channel through the Washington office of CBS News." The report to Salant also states: "Further investigation of Mickelson's files reveals some details of the relationship between the CIA and CBS News.... Two key administrators of this relationship were Mickelson and Koop.... The main activity appeared to be the delivery of CBS newsfilm to the CIA.... In addition there is evidence that, during 1964 to 1971, film material, including some outtakes, were supplied by the CBS Newsfilm Library to the CIA through and at the direction of Mr. Koop (4)....
Notes in Mr. Mickelson's files indicate that the CIA used CBS films for training... All of the above Mickelson activities were handled on a confidential basis without mentioning the words Central Intelligence Agency. The films were sent to individuals at post‑office box numbers and were paid for by individual, nor government, checks. ..." Mickelson also regularly sent the CIA an internal CBS newsletter, according to the report.
Salant's investigation led him to conclude that Frank Kearns, a CBS‑TV reporter from 1958 to 1971, "was a CIA guy who got on the payroll somehow through a CIA contact with somebody at CBS." Kearns and Austin Goodrich, a CBS stringer, were undercover CIA employees, hired under arrangements approved by Paley.
Last year a spokesman for Paley denied a report by former CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr that Mickelson and he had discussed Goodrich's CIA status during a meeting with two Agency representatives in 1954. The spokesman claimed Paley had no knowledge that Goodrich had worked for the CIA. "When I moved into the job I was told by Paley that there was an ongoing relationship with the CIA," Mickelson said in a recent interview. "He introduced me to two agents who he said would keep in touch. We all discussed the Goodrich situation and film arrangements. I assumed this was a normal relationship at the time. This was at the height of the Cold War and I assumed the communications media were cooperating—though the Goodrich matter was compromising.
At the headquarters of CBS News in New York, Paley's cooperation with the CIA is taken for granted by many news executives and reporters, despite tile denials. Paley, 76, was not interviewed by Salant's investigators. "It wouldn't do any good," said one CBS executive. "It is the single subject about which his memory has failed."
Salant discussed his own contacts with the CIA, and the fact he continued many of his predecessor's practices, in an interview with this reporter last year. The contacts, he said, began in February 1961, "when I got a phone call from a CIA man who said he had a working relationship with Sig Mickelson. The man said, 'Your bosses know all about it.'" According to Salant, the CIA representative asked that CBS continue to supply the Agency with unedited newstapes and make its correspondents available for debriefingby Agency officials. Said Salant: "I said no on talking to the reporters, and let them see broadcast tapes, but no outtakes. This went on for a number of years—into the early Seventies."
In 1964 and 1965, Salant served on a super-secret CIA task force which explored methods of beaming American propaganda broadcasts to the People's Republic of China. The other members of the four‑man study team were Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University; William Griffith, then professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology., and John Haves, then vice‑president of the Washington Post Company for radio‑TV5. The principal government officials associated with the project were Cord Meyer of the CIA; McGeorge Bundy, then special assistant to the president for national security; Leonard Marks, then director of the USIA; and Bill Moyers, then special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson and now a CBS correspondent.
Salant's involvement in the project began with a call from Leonard Marks, "who told me the White House wanted to form a committee of four people to make a study of U.S. overseas broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain." When Salant arrived in Washington for the first meeting he was told that the project was CIA sponsored. "Its purpose," he said, "was to determine how best to set up shortwave broadcasts into Red China." Accompanied by a CIA officer named Paul Henzie, the committee of four subsequently traveled around the world inspecting facilities run by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty both CIA‑run operations at the time), the Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio. After more than a year of study, they submitted a report to Moyers recommending that the government establish a broadcast service, run by the Voice of America, to be beamed at the People's Republic of China. Salant has served two tours as head of CBS News, from 1961‑64 and 1966‑present. At the time of the China project he was a CBS corporate executive.)
Notes:
(3) From the CIA point of view, access to newsfilm outtakes and photo libraries is a matter of extreme importance. The Agency's photo archive is probably the greatest on earth; its graphic sources include satellites, photoreconnaissance, planes, miniature cameras ... and the American press. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Agency obtained carte‑blanche borrowing privileges in the photo libraries of literally dozens of American newspapers, magazines and television, outlets. For obvious reasons, the CIA also assigned high priority to the recruitment of photojournalists, particularly foreign‑based members of network camera crews.
(4) On April 3rd, 1961, Koop left the Washington bureau to become head of CBS, Inc.’s Government Relations Department — a position he held until his retirement on March 31st, 1972. Koop, who worked as a deputy in the Censorship Office in World War II, continued to deal with the CIA in his new position, according to CBS sources.
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John F Kennedy: 'We all breathe the same air'
In June 1963, JFK made a speech that changed the outcome of the cold war. Fifty years on, modern politicians should follow his example of leading, not following, public opinion
By Jeffrey Sachs
The Guardian, Saturday Review, 1 June 2013, 19-20
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/31/jfk-to-move-the-world
President Obama's address to young people in Jerusalem in March was meant to be an uplifting call for peace. Yet there was one remarkably dispiriting line. "Speaking as a politician," said Obama, "I can promise you this: political leaders will not take risks if the people do not demand that they do. You must create the change that you want to see."
Obama was appealing to Israel's young people to rally for peace. That's fine. But he was also expressing the sad truth of our time – political leaders are followers. Politicians are governed by focus groups and opinion surveys. They will "lead" only when the outcry becomes loud enough, and sometimes not even then. And when the public is confused and divided, the politicians cower in their platitudes.
It is fitting, therefore, to remember other times in history, when democratic politicians led, by cajoling, inspiring, and enlightening the public to follow a necessary yet courageous course. At those moments of history, grand rhetoric spurred action, even dazzling and inspiring action. We are at an anniversary of one such moment of democratic leadership, an act of leadership and statesmanship so large that it helped to save humanity.
Fifty years ago, on 10 June 1963, President John F Kennedy changed the course of the cold war. Like Obama, he spoke of peace. Yet, unlike Obama, JFK took risks in the cause of peace. His British counterpart of the day, Harold Macmillan, and the UK ambassador to Washington, David Ormsby-Gore, deserve significant credit for bolstering his resolve at critical moments.
But JFK had a towering role model for his political bravery. No 20th-century democratic politician did more to harness words to courageous action than Winston Churchill. His determination, soaring rhetoric, and decisive action in 1939 and 1940 saved Britain in the war with Nazi Germany.
As a young college student, JFK watched Churchill's rise to wartime leader while visiting his father Joseph Kennedy, America's ambassador to the Court of St. James. Churchill's courage no doubt made a powerful impression on JFK in contrast with his own father's notorious pessimism about Britain's wartime prospects.
From this time onward, JFK's yardstick of leadership was political courage, the readiness to lead public opinion rather than to follow it. As a US senator, he and Ted Sorensen, his trusted adviser and speechwriter, crafted Profiles in Courage, a selection of historical examples from the Senate where a politician risked career and reputation to stand for higher principles. Soon enough, Kennedy would face the test of political courage at another hinge of history.
He arrived at the presidency with little experience – the youngest elected president in US history. His first two years were bumpy, far from the ideals of leadership to which he aspired and held himself accountable. Yet it was in his third year, a true annus mirabilis of presidential leadership, that JFK joined the pantheon of greatness.
Kennedy became president after 15 years of cold war, and at a moment when the prospects of a US-Soviet thaw were rapidly fading. Stalin's death in 1953 had raised widespread hopes that solutions to the cold war could be found. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor, championed the cause of "peaceful coexistence" of the superpowers. Yet years of US-Soviet negotiations on arms control had failed to make headway: the distrust on both sides was too great.
Worse still, tensions intensified in the months between JFK's election victory in November 1960 and his assumption of office on 20 January 1961. A long-awaited Khrushchev-Eisenhower summit failed when a CIA spy‑plane was shot down in Soviet airspace just weeks before the scheduled meeting. This was par for the course: no agency did more damage more consistently to the cause of peace than the malign and bungling CIA. But Eisenhower compounded the CIA's damage by brazenly denying the spy mission, only to have the Soviets produce both the plane's wreckage and the captured US pilot for a global audience.
Kennedy came into office in 1961 hoping to reach a series of arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union, specifically a ban on nuclear arms testing to be followed by a nuclear non‑proliferation treaty. Yet as an initially inexperienced leader, JFK drifted with events instead of leading them. The CIA reprised its spy plane bungling in a far larger and more dangerous debacle, by staging an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles. When the attempt immediately collapsed on the beach of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy repeated Eisenhower's blunder by brazenly (and ridiculously) lying to Khrushchev about the US role in the attempted invasion.
To say that matters quickly spiralled out of control is an understatement. Kennedy increased defence spending; completed the placement of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Turkey, practically on Russia's doorstep; and generally stepped up the cold war rhetoric. Khrushchev, too, dramatically raised the stakes, declaring that the Soviet Union would soon take unilateral action in divided Berlin to deny western access to the western portion of the city. And then came the coup de grace, Khrushchev's impetuous decision in early 1962 to place intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Cuba to give the US a taste of its own medicine, a tit-for-tat response to the Bay of Pigs and the missiles in Turkey.
JFK's greatness began in the famous 13 days of the Cuban missile crisis. While demanding the removal of the Soviet missiles, he bought time through a naval quarantine of Soviet ships to Cuba, and kept open communication channels with Khrushchev. He repeatedly imagined himself in Khrushchev's position, in order to assess his motivations and to induce him to withdraw the missiles without humiliating the Soviet Union. One crucial part of that strategy was Kennedy's secret commitment to Khrushchev, that the US would remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
As Kennedy would say eight months later in the "Peace" speech: "And above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy – or of a collective death-wish for the world."
Many historians have misjudged the importance of Kennedy's secret quid pro quo on the missiles in Turkey. When it was revealed, 25 years after the event, it was first assumed that this trade must have played a decisive role in Khrushchev's own decision to withdraw the Cuban missiles. But once the timing of JFK's commitment was re-examined, in light of new evidence from Soviet archives, it was clear that Khrushchev had decided to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba even before learning of Kennedy's pledge on the Jupiter missiles. Some historians then swung the other way, deciding that Kennedy's pledge had played no role in the ultimate outcome of the crisis.
Yet Kennedy's decision, an act of statesmanship and wisdom, played a powerful role. Khrushchev appreciated Kennedy's gesture. It established a bond of mutual trust and common understanding that would serve them well in the test ban negotiations.
The Cuban missile crisis changed Kennedy and Khrushchev, and thereby changed the world. Despite JFK's long-standing fear that nuclear war could occur through miscalculation or accident, he himself had almost presided over the ultimate Armageddon. Had he listened to his generals, advocating a surprise military strike, this surely would have been the outcome. Khrushchev was no less shocked. His ill-considered plan for a quick political advantage had brought the world to the brink of annihilation. As he recounted later: "Any man who could stare at the reality of nuclear war without sober thoughts was an irresponsible fool … Of course I was scared. It would have been insane not to have been scared. I was frightened about what could happen to my country – or your country and all the other countries that would be devastated by a nuclear war."
The crisis was therefore a catharsis for the leaders of the two superpowers, a break of the fever of the self-feeding escalation of arms and conflict of the preceding two years. Most importantly, for JFK it was a wake-up call. If the world was to be saved, if nuclear war was to be avoided, the president would have to lead. War and peace could not be left to the generals, the CIA, or a confused and fearful public. Obama told the Israeli young people to "create the change you want to see". JFK instead decided that as president he must lead that change.
What followed, between October 1962 and September 1963, was one of the greatest sustained acts of leadership and statesmanship in modern times. Kennedy's eloquence was key; but it was just one weapon in his political arsenal. JFK built his campaign for peace on a combination of vision and pragmatic actions, focusing first on a treaty to end nuclear tests.
The notion of a test-ban treaty might seem rather obvious today, yet at the time it was as likely as a substantive US-Iran or Israel-Palestine treaty would be today. Making peace with the Soviet Union was hardly high on the political to-do list in the spring of 1963, and very few were even arguing it should be tried. Soviet perfidy, or so it seemed to many Americans, had brought the world to the brink of destruction. The US public was deeply sceptical that any peace could be possible. Hardliners on both sides firmly believed that any treaty would be tantamount to unilateral surrender, as it would be followed by secret aggression – even a nuclear first strike – by the other side. But after staring into the nuclear abyss in the missile crisis, Kennedy was determined to pull back from the brink. There could be no better start for his peace campaign than the American University on commencement day.
Any speech, of course, has many listeners and audiences, but this one was more complicated than most. It had to satisfy three tough audiences: the American public, who would in turn influence the Senate debate over treaty ratification; Soviet leaders; and key European allies. Strong and vocal opposition by West Germany, for example, could undermine the negotiations. And such vocal opposition was quite possible. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer repeatedly ridiculed the possibility of a cold war thaw, arguing instead for a US-backed German nuclear arsenal as the key to the west's defence.
Kennedy's rhetorical strategy was brilliant. Instead of using the speech to list a set of demands on the Soviet Union, as earlier presidents had done, JFK called on Americans to "re‑examine our own attitudes, for ours are as important as theirs". Kennedy's basic point was simple, powerful, direct, and shocking: both sides of the cold war are human, and both sides want peace.
Kennedy did not speak of Russian perfidy. Instead he spoke of Russian valour. "No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage." He noted that America and the Soviet Union shared a mutual abhorrence of war, and that "[a]lmost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other".
The humanisation of the foe, the emphasis that both sides are rational and desirous of peace, not only formed the bulwark of JFK's core vision, but also greatest lyricism of the speech, in soaring phrases with the capacity to inspire across generations:
"So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal." Towards the end of the speech, Kennedy made the important announcement that he, Prime Minister Macmillan, and Chairman Khrushchev would resume talks on a test ban treaty.
We may read the speech for inspiration, but should judge it in history as a political act. Kennedy above all warned against fantasies and fanatics. He was a politician, and had his eye firmly on the outcome. Could a treaty be signed and ratified? And would the treaty help to create the conditions for peace?
The answers are of course now clear. Khrushchev regarded Kennedy's speech as the greatest by an American president since Franklin D Roosevelt. It spurred him to clear away many long-standing obstacles to the test ban treaty, which was signed in Moscow just seven weeks after the Peace speech. Only one major compromise was made – to limit the test ban to air, space, and underwater, excluding tests underground – so as to sidestep the vexing scientific and political question of how to differentiate between secret underground nuclear tests and earthquakes. Kennedy also reassured Khrushchev that the US would not arm West Germany with nuclear weapons, a policy that Eisenhower had begun to explore, to the great alarm of the Soviet Union.
The American public rallied as well. They did reconsider their own attitudes, and agreed with Kennedy that peace was possible. Yet Kennedy also made a series of shrewd agreements with the military top brass and with key Senators, to ensure that no sticking points would hinder ratification. Kennedy had all the reason to keep his feet on the ground, even as he let his rhetoric soar. Any agreement with the Soviet Union would have to pass the Senate by a two-thirds majority. There was no use signing an agreement that the Senate would not ratify. Through arduous and detailed work over many weeks, Kennedy produced a landslide victory in the Senate, with ratification won by a margin of 81 to 17.
The test ban treaty certainly did not end the cold war, but it did end atmospheric nuclear testing. Just as important, it provided the proof that negotiation and agreement was possible, and thus laid the groundwork for future treaties, most importantly the nuclear non-proliferation treaty of 1968. The myth of implacable hostility between the superpowers was disproved, decisively and irreversibly. It is also notable that the most recent careful epidemiological research has also found that nuclear fallout from the atmospheric testing until 1963 was even more dangerous than supposed at the time.
Yet the impact of JFK's courageous leadership in the final year of his life extends even beyond his role in putting the cold war on to a safer path, for his lessons in leadership extend beyond nuclear diplomacy and great power politics. I would draw several lessons for our own time, indeed for any time.
First, our foes are human, and our common human bonds can overcome seemingly unbridgeable divides. One of Kennedy's most important messages that summer was that "history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbours." This lesson remains largely unlearned by many in the US and Europe today.
Second, empathetic steps can beget empathetic steps in return. Kennedy removed the missiles from Turkey, and respected legitimate Soviet concerns over potential West German nuclear arms. He and the US were repaid with the trust to clear away a decade's worth of hurdles to a durable test ban treaty.
Third, Kennedy was guided by a soaring vision of peace, but kept both feet on the ground. "World peace," he declared, "like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbour, it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement." The test ban treaty, he said, was but the first step on a journey of a thousand miles. He did not oversell the treaty, and won the public's trust in his honest appraisal of what it could and could not do.
Fourth, while a great speech is a powerful tool of leadership, it must be combined with pragmatic follow-through, something evidently lacking in Obama's diplomacy. The essence of leadership, said JFK, is to make the vision seem achievable by laying out the pragmatic steps to implement it. "By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly towards it."
Finally, leadership counts. Courage does not arise by committee. And vision is not the common denominator of a focus group. Kennedy made peace not because he was advised to do so. He made peace because he chose his own counsel, tuning down – if not out – the cacophony of advice from the generals, politicians and pundits.
These are lessons for our time, whether to end the roiling wars in the Middle East or finally to face the challenges of human-induced environmental destruction. We live in an age where the media rules and the politicians follow. That age is becoming dangerous indeed, an echo‑chamber of sound bites and politics as the art of the trivial. We need better politics than that, and can draw hope from a moment of history 50 years ago, when courage, leadership and vision moved the world.
• To Move the World: JFK's Quest for Peace by Jeffrey Sachs is published by Bodley Head
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How the United States keeps British journalists "on-side", method the first:
http://www.colorado.edu/cwa/news/2011Hoggart.html
Simon Hoggart has been a familiar face at the CWA for over 20 years. As the political sketch-writer for The Guardian, Hoggart’s insights into the British Parliament and fluid mix of humor and politics have been a valued addition to the annual Conference.
This past fall, Hoggart released his memoir, A Long Lunch. He devotes a section of the book to his travels across North America, including his yearly trek to Boulder. The book has received rave reviews by the British media, including the Spectator, Sunday Telegraph and he Times. The New Statesman called it, “…the best journalistic memoir since the late Alan Watkins A Short Walk Down Fleet Street of a decade ago.”
Hoggart's fascination with Boulder and the CWA has not waned since first coming here in 1988. He says, "The joy of the conference is that you meet people in fields you would never encounter anywhere else." And as for Boulder, "I doubt if there is more beautiful scenery on earth."
Not quite a bung, you understand, more a case of flying the lucky recipient, all expenses paid, to a bucolic jamboree, and there flattering the journo's self-importance. Mr. Hoggart is, it almost goes without remarking, a world-renowned expert on patriotism:
Conference on World Affairs
University of Colorado, Boulder
2701 Patriotism: Fashion or Fear
3:30pm-5:00pm on Tuesday April 9, 2002
UMC Center Ballroom
Panelists:
Jay Harris
Simon Hoggart
Ellen McGirt
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Simon Hoggart's week: time to admit we're living in a kleptocracy?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2013/may/31/simon-hoggart-time-living-kleptocracy
It appears our wilder press has always been much the same. I've been enjoying The Annals of Unsolved Crime by the (very serious and sensible) journalist Edward Jay Epstein. He analyses the Jack the Ripper case, and it turns out that the letter signed with the famous soubriquet was almost certainly forged by a deputy editor at the Central News Agency, which had been making a fortune reporting the murder of prostitutes in the Victorian East End of London. So Epstein says there was no single ripper, just a murder or two, plus some copycat killings, certainly not committed by a member of the royal family or any famous artist.
Suggested title: Bonkers Angletonian conspiracy theorist praised by ageing British presstitute.
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Posted by Tracy Riddle at the DPF - very interesting it is, too:
The CIA at CBS (Daniel Schorr 1977)
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisb.../Item%2001.pdf -
So to the text of Rather’s first televised description of the Zapruder film. It occurred sometime between 3:45pm and 4:15pm (EST), occupied just under 6 minutes of air-time, and comprised a tad over 700 words:
Walter Cronkite: Let’s go to Dallas now for developments there today.
Dan Rather: We have just returned from seeing a complete motion picture of the moments preceding, and the moments of, President Kennedy’s assassination and the shooting of Texas Governor John Connally. Here is what the motion picture shows.
The automobile, the black Lincoln convertible, with the top down - carrying, in the front seat, two secret service agents; in the middle, or jump seat, the Governor and Mrs. Connally; and, in the rear seat, President and Mrs. Kennedy – made a turn off of Houston Street, on to Elm Street. This was a left turn and was made right in front of the building from which the assassin’s bullet was fired.
After making the turn, and going about 35 yards from the corner of the building – six stories up in which the assassin had a window open – and keep in mind here that President Kennedy and Governor Connally are seated on, both on the same side of the car, on the side facing the building: Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Connally are on the side of the car away from the assassin.
About 35 yards from the base of the building, President Kennedy, in the film, put his hand up to the right side of his face, the side facing the assassin. He seemingly wanted to brush back his hair, or perhaps rub his eyebrow. Mrs. Kennedy at this moment was looking away, or looking straight ahead. She was not looking at her husband.
At that moment, when the President had his right hand up to this side of his face (gestures), he lurched just a bit forward. It was obvious that the shot had hit him. Mrs. Kennedy was not looking at him, nor did she appear to know at that instant that her husband had been hit.
Governor Connally, in the seat immediately in front of the President, apparently either heard the shot or sensed that something was wrong because, Governor Connally, with his coat open, his button was undone, turned in this manner (turns back to his right with right arm extended), his hand outstretched, back toward the President; and the Governor had a look on his face that would indicate he perhaps was saying “What’s wrong?” or “What happened?” or “Can I help?” or something. But as Governor Connally was turned this way, his white shirt front exposed well to the view of the assassin, the Governor was obviously hit by a bullet, and he fell over to the side.
Governor Connally’s wife, immediately, seemingly instantaneously, placed herself over her husband in a protective position, it appeared; and as Governor Connally fell back, President Kennedy was still leaned over. At that moment another bullet obviously hit the head of the President. The President’s head went forward, violently, in this manner (gestures). Mrs. Kennedy, at that instant, seemed to be looking right-square at her husband. She stood up. The President slumped over to the side and, I believe, brushed against Mrs. Kennedy’s dress.
Mrs. Kennedy immediately turned and flung herself on the trunk of the automobile, face-down on the trunk, almost on all-fours. The First Lady appeared to be either frantically trying to get the secret service man who was riding on the bumper of the car - the single secret service man riding on that bumper - to come into the car or to tell him what had happened; or perhaps, from the picture, it appeared she might have been trying to get out of the car some way.
The car never stopped. The secret service man in the front seat had a telephone in his hand. The car…its acceleration increased rapidly and it disappeared under an underpass. Three shots - the first one hitting President Kennedy, the second one hitting Governor Connally, the third one hitting the President – consume, possibly, five seconds. Not much more than that, if any.
That is the scene shown in about twenty seconds of film that the FBI has in its possession. The film was taken by an amateur photographer who was in a very advantageous position, and who had his camera trained on the President’s car from the time it made the turn in front of the assassin until it disappeared on its way to the hospital.
This is Dan Rather in Dallas.
Walter Cronkite: A most remarkable story.
So to Rather’s second take, offered, as noted above, a full less-than-nine-minutes later. This was a superficially pithier affair, markedly so in time (5 minutes 20 seconds, give or take), less so in word-count (688). The shift in emphasis is most obvious at the end. Repeat after me: the limousine never stopped...
So what on earth was going on here? Why the manifestly hasty and crass second attempt?Walter Cronkite: Let’s go Back now to Dallas and Dan Rather.
Dan Rather: We have just returned from seeing a complete motion picture of the moments immediately preceding, and the moments of, President Kennedy’s assassination.
The motion picture shows the limousine carrying: in the front seat, two secret service men; in the middle, or jump seat, Governor and Mrs. Connally; and, in the rear seat, President and Mrs. Kennedy; a single secret service man standing on the back bumper; the top of the black Lincoln convertible down.
The car made a turn, a left turn, off of Houston Street, on to Elm Street, on the fringe of Dallas’ down-town area; that turn made directly below the sixth floor window from which the assassin’s bullets came.
After the left turn was completed, the automobile, with only one car in front of it - a secret service car immediately in front – the President’s car proceeded about 35 yards from the base of the building in which the assassin was.
President Kennedy and Governor Connally were seated on the same side of the open car, the side facing the building: Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Connally on the side of the car opposite the assassin.
President Kennedy is clearly shown to put his right hand up to the side of his face as if to either brush back his hair, or perhaps rub his eyebrow. Mrs. Kennedy at that instant is looking away, and is not looking at the President.
At almost that instant, when the President has his hand up to this side of his face (gestures), he lurches forward something in this manner (gestures): The first shot had hit him. Mrs. Kennedy appeared not to notice. Governor Connally, in the seat right in front of the President – by the way, the Governor had his suit coat open, his suit was not buttoned – perhaps either heard the shot or somehow he knew something was wrong because the picture shows just after that first shot hit the President, the Governor turned in something this manner, with his right arm stretched back toward the President, as if to say “What’s wrong?” or “What happened?” or say something. It exposed the entire white front shirt of the Governor to the full view of the assassin’s window; and as the Governor was in this position, and President Kennedy behind him was slumped slightly over, a shot clearly hit the front of Governor Connally; and the Governor fell back over towards his wife.
Mrs. Connally immediately put herself over her husband in a protective position, and as she did so, in the back seat, this time with Mrs. Kennedy’s eyes apparently right on her husband, the second shot – the third shot in all – the second shot hit the President’s head. His head went forward, in a violent motion, pushing it down like this (leans forward, lowering his head as he does so). Mrs. Kennedy was on her feet immediately. The President fell over in this direction (leans to his left). It appeared his head probably brushed or hit against Mrs. Kennedy’s legs.
The First Lady almost immediately tried to crawl on – did crawl on - to the trunk of the car, face-down, her whole body almost was on that trunk, in something of an all-fours position. She appeared to be either trying to desperately get the attention of the secret service man on the back bumper, or perhaps she was stretching out toward him to grab him to try get him in. Perhaps even trying to get herself out of the car.
The car was moving all the time, the car never stopped.
The secret service man on the back bumper leaned way over and put his hands on Mrs. Kennedy’s shoulders – she appeared to be in some danger of falling or rolling off that trunk lid. He pushed her back into the back seat of the car.
In the front seat, a secret service man with a phone in his hand.
The car speeded up and sped away. It never stopped, the car never paused.
That’s what the film of the assassination showed. The film was taken by an amateur photographer who had placed himself in an advantageous position: eight millimeter color film.
This is Dan Rather in Dallas.
Walter Cronkite: Throughout Texas there were memorial services today…
Craig Lamson posted the following interview with Rather, recorded in 2005*. within the thread Ask the Experts #52 :
How accurate was Rather's recollection? Above, the text of Rather's first two televised descriptions of the Zapruder film, from which it is clear that Rather did NOT eliminate from the second all mention of Jackie Kennedy's movements post-shooting.
So what about his third televised description of the day - did that skip any mention of the same feature? Not a bit of it:
In offering this demonstrably untrue explanation of why the second description of the Z-fake followed so hard on the heels of the first, Rather sought to obscure the real reasons for it.
*Dan Rather was interviewed for nearly eight hours (in two sessions) in New York, NY. He talks at length about growing up in Houston, Texas and his early years as a radio and television journalist in the local market. He describes in detail his work at KHOU-TV, where his dramatic continuous coverage of "Hurricane Carla" garnered national recognition and brought him to the attention of CBS News. In addition, he explains the challenges and lessons he learned from covering monumental moments in the Civil Rights Movement and the assassination of President Kennedy, and why CBS News, due to logistics, did not broadcast live television's first on-air murder -- that of Lee Harvey Oswald. He concludes with recollections on covering the war in Vietnam, the Nixon White House, and 9/11, and also speaks of his work on 60 Minutes and on succeeding Walter Cronkite as anchor of CBS Evening News. The two-part interview was conducted by Don Carleton on April 7 and November 7, 2005.
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Itches scratched simultaneously by the Bay of Pigs:
- Lanced boil of Guatemalan-style paramilitary counter-revolution
- Entrenched Fidel Castro in power
- Opened way to Red Army penetration of the island
- Discredited Kennedy (“soft” on Communism)
- Misdirected attention (real move against De Gaulle)
- Transformed the Dulles succession (Bissell’s chances of succeeding to Directorship of Central Intelligence ended)
Richard Cumings. The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (NY: Grove Press, 1985), 159
Richard Bissell, the CIA’s chief of Clandestine Services, who had, at one point, favoured using covert agency operatives in support of the anti-Communist Left and the ‘progressive political forces.’
Michael Holzman. James Jesus Angleton, The CIA, & the Craft of Counterintelligence (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 186-187
When Angleton returned to Washington in the spring of 1961 he had found the new Administration preoccupied with what would become known as the Bay of Pigs...an adventure which President Kennedy only half-heartedly supported...The CIA was split on the Cuban invasion scheme. Richard Bissell...had been made head of Clandestine Services after Frank Wisner’s collapse. He allied himself with Wisner’s old group of covert warriors, including Tracy Barnes and Desmond Fitzgerald...The intelligence collection specialists, who looked to Richard Helms, now chief of operations for the Clandestine Service under Bissell, were once again more sceptical, Helms famously withdrawing from conversations about Cuba (when not already excluded from those discussions by Bissell)...The OSS group around Helms not only quietly withheld their support from Bissell; they made sure that those seconded to the Cuban effort were not the most capable members of their staffs…The suppressed CIA inspector general’s report on the Bay of Pigs noted this simultaneous passive opposition by one group…and specifically listed lack of active involvement of the Counterintelligence Staff as a significant factor…
We know that Bissell met with Jacques Soustelle in Washington in December 1960. All together less well-known is the location of James Angleton in the summer of 1960. Confined to a sanitarium due to a “tubercular ailment,” the FBI reported: climbing mountains in the Languedoc region – in between excursions to Cathar ruins, it was claimed - of France, postcarded his wife, Cicely. As Holzman remarked, with quite admirable restraint, “It does seem remarkable he was able to go mountain climbing…so soon after leaving the hospital.”
Who made sure Bissell was fingered early (and accurately)? One of Angleton’s most important press assets of the period: Wallace Carroll of the NYT
It was only one final step when on April 21, with the whole operation in a shambles, Times correspondents James Reston and Wallace Carroll pinned it clearly on the CIA. Within hours, newspapers were calling the CIA for photographs of Richard M. Bissell, Jr., who, according to Carroll, had managed the project.
Douglas Cater & Charles L. Bartlett, “Is All the News Fit to Print?” The Reporter, 11 May 1961, 24
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Blair and I aren't exactly buddies but he is asking a legitimate question. AFAIK the only people with technical qualifications relevant
to the assassination are:
Shelly Fiester (sp?) - blood splatter
Craig - photography
Evan Marshall - homicide investigation
Greg Burnham - dignitary protection
Sorry to see you go, Len, but I do admire your consistency...
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Hi Bob, Feeling fine. Good to hear from you again. Herb Blenner has posted an interesting comment on Duncan's site.
"Mr. SPECTER. I have just one other question, Governor. With respect to the films and the slides which you have viewed this morning, had you ever seen those pictures before this morning?
Governor CONNALLY. I had seen what purported to be a copy of the film when I was in the hospital in Dallas. I had not seen the slides.
Mr. SPECTER. And when do you think you were hit on those slides, Governor, or in what range of slides?
Governor CONNALLY. We took - you are talking about the number of the slides?
Mr. SPECTER. Yes.
Governor CONNALLY. As we looked at them this morning, and as you related the numbers to me, it appeared to me that I was hit in the range between 130 or 131, I don't remember precisely, up to 134, in that bracket.
Mr. SPECTER. May I suggest to you that it was 231?
Governor CONNALLY. Well, 231 and 234, then.
Mr. SPECTER. The series under our numbering system starts with a higher number when the car comes around the turn, so when you come out of the sign, which was -
Governor CONNALLY. It was just after we came out of the sign, for whatever that sequence of numbers was, and if it was 200, I correct my testimony. It was 231 to about 234. It was within that range.
Governor Connally set a clever trap when he identified frames of the 130's as showing when he was shot. Specter took the bait and suggested 231 as showing the shot. Apparently shaken by his mistake, Specter mindlessly acknowledged that the numbering system starts when the car comes around the turn before leading Connally to relate the time of his wounding to emergence from behind the sign. This turn of the car is not seen in our copy of the Zapruder film. "
What happened to the hundred frames?
Worth keeping handy:
Was Muchmore’s film shown on WNEW-TV, New York, on November 26, 1963? (# 230)
Posted 20 December 2009 - 03:54 PM
Features in Zapruder public version 1 (Zpv1) absent from or different to Zapruder public version 2 (Zpv2):
1) Presidential limousine turning left from Houston onto Elm
2) No street sign interposed between camera and President at moment of impact of first bullet
3) Shooting took place further up Elm St towards Overpass, either opposite (or “abreast” of) Zapruder, or beginning at the steps leading up to the grassy knoll
4) Connolly’s white shirt visibly covered in blood following impact of shot
5) JFK’s head went forward in response to impact of head shot
Elements of Zpv1 (1) to (5) described in following:
1) Presidential limousine filmed turning left from Houston onto Elm:
• Abraham Zapruder on WFAA-TV, at 2:10pm CST, November 22, 1963: transcript: http://www.jfk-info.com/wfaa-tv.htm
• Dan Rather, CBS radio & TV, 251163: http://www.i-accuse....dd_Hotelet.html
• UPI (New York), “Film Showing Assassination Is Released,” The Valley Independent, (Monessen, Pennsylvania), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 5 (description of film shown on WNEW-TV, NY, at 00:46hrs, November 26, 1963)
• Arthur J. Snider (Chicago Daily News Service), “Movies Reconstruct Tragedy,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, (Evening edition), November 27, 1963, section 2, p.1
• Warren Report (U.S. Government Printing Office (1964), p.98
• Roy Kellerman, 090364 (2WCH91): http://jfkassassinat...ny/kellerma.htm
• Mark Lane. Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966), p.66, footnote 2
2) No street sign interposed between camera and President at moment of impact of first bullet:
• Dallas Morning News, “Photographer Sells Pictures of Assassination for $25,000,” November 24, 1963
• Dan Rather, CBS radio & TV, 251163 (Richard Trask. Pictures of the Pain, p.87): http://www.i-accuse....dd_Hotelet.html
• Associated Press (Dallas), "Movie Film Depicts Shooting of Kennedy,” Milwaukee Journal, November 26, 1963, part 1, p.3
• UPI (New York), “Film Showing Assassination Is Released,” The Valley Independent, (Monessen, Pennsylvania), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 5 (description of film shown on WNEW-TV, NY, at 00:46hrs, November 26, 1963)
• UPI (Dallas), “Movie Film Shows Murder of President,” Philadelphia Daily News, Tuesday, 26 November 1963, p.3 (4 star edition)
• Express Staff Reporter (New York, Monday), “The Man Who Got the Historic Pictures,” Daily Express, Tuesday, 26 November 1963, p.10
• John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” New York Times, November 27, 1963, p.20
• Arthur J. Snider (Chicago Daily News Service), “Movies Reconstruct Tragedy,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, (Evening edition), November 27, 1963, section 2, p.1
• “The Man Who Killed Kennedy,” Time, December 6, 1963, p.29
• Abraham Zapruder (7WCH571): http://www.jfk-info.com/wc-zapr.htm
• William Manchester, Look magazine, 040467; Death of a President (London: Pan, paperback, 1968), p.234
3) Shooting took place further up Elm St towards Overpass, either opposite (or “abreast” of) Zapruder, or beginning at the steps leading up to the grassy knoll:
• Associated Press (Dallas), "Movie Film Depicts Shooting of Kennedy,” Milwaukee Journal, November 26, 1963, part 1, p.3
• John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” New York Times, November 27, 1963, p.20
• Abraham Zapruder, 7WCH571: http://www.jfk-info.com/wc-zapr.htm
• Harold Feldman, “Fifty-one witnesses: The Grassy Knoll,” The Minority of One, March 1965, p.17
• John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” New York Times, November 27, 1963, p.20
4) Connolly’s white shirt visibly covered in blood following impact of shot:
• Dan Rather, CBS, Radio & TV, 251163: http://www.etcfilmun...om/iaccuse.html
5) JFK’s head went forward in response to impact of head shot:
• Dan Rather, CBS, Radio & TV, 251163 (Richard Trask, Pictures of the Pain (Danvers, Mass.: Yeoman Press, 1994, p.87):http://www.etcfilmun...om/iaccuse.html
• Associated Press (Dallas), "Movie Film Depicts Shooting of Kennedy,” Milwaukee Journal, November 26, 1963, part 1, p.3
• UPI (Dallas), “Movie Film Shows Murder of President,” Philadelphia Daily News, Tuesday, 26 November 1963, p.3 (4 star edition)
• John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” New York Times, November 27, 1963, p.20
• Cartha DeLoach, Hoover’s FBI: The Inside Story by Hoover’s Trusted Lieutenant (1995), p.139: http://www.kenrahn.c...Alteration.html
Most of the newspaper articles cited above can be found in the thread Eleven early print descriptions of the Zapruder film:http://educationforu...?showtopic=8953
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Official Story Has Odd Wrinkles: A Pack Of Questions About The Boston Bombing Backpacks
by Dave Lindorff, May 20, 2013
What could have been in them for them to be hanging so lightly on the two suspects’ backs? And if it wasn’t two explosive-laden pressure cookers—if—then who put those bombs at the finish line?
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CIA Troublemaking in Caucasus
By Wayne Madsen, Monday, May 20, 2013
http://orientalreview.org/2013/05/20/cia-troublemaking-in-caucasus/
It is clear that Russia’s arrest and expulsion of two CIA agents who were trying to recruit members of the Russian intelligence service fighting against Salafist separatists in the Caucasus is part of a Russian mopping-up operation directed at the CIA’s decades-long covert support for terrorists operating in the Northern and Southern Caucasus. Russia’s Federal Security Bureau (FSB) recently arrested Ryan Christopher Fogle, a CIA «official cover» U.S. embassy Third Secretary, who was trying to recruit an FSB counter-terrorism officer for the CIA. A Russian phone intercept of Fogle’s conversation with the targeted counter-terrorism officer revealed the following offer by the CIA agent: “You can earn up to $1 million per year and I’ll give you $100,000 up front, but only if we meet right now. Yes or no?» Earlier this year, the FSB nabbed another CIA agent, yet unnamed, and quietly deported him.
The list of key U.S. Foreign Service officers, dated April 1, 2013, does not contain Fogle’s name on the list of key U.S. diplomats assigned to the Moscow embassy. Traditionally, the CIA prefers to operate under the official cover of “Political Officer” at large embassies like Moscow. In smaller embassies, the CIA presence can often be found in the deputy chief of mission. The Political Officer in Moscow is Michael Klecheski, formerly with the CIA-connected RAND Corporation and the National Security Council, who was assigned to the Moscow embassy during Soviet times. There is a good chance that Klecheski was Fogle’s local supervisor. The FSB revealed publicly that the CIA station chief for the embassy in Stephen Holmes. Another embassy Third Secretary, Benjamin Dillon, was expelled in January for activities similar to those of Fogle.
According to Turkish sources, the Jamestown Foundation’s operations in the Caucasus are tied in directly with those of the CIA. Accused Boston Marathion bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, according to documents from the Georgian Interior Ministry, attended training sessions in Tbilisi, Georgia last eyar sponsored by Jamestown. The foundation was set up as an anti-Soviet organization by CIA director William Casey in the early 1980s. Its board of directors have included the author Tom Clancy who gained fame by penning thrillers that pitted the United States against the Soviet Union in Cold War skirmishes.
Jamestown president Glen E. Howard is fluent in Turkish and Azerbaijani. Tamerlan’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni (aka Tsarnaev) had been a business associate of former CIA Turkish specialist Graham Fuller, who has participated in a number of Jamestown events.
Jamestown has two major missions on behalf of the CIA: 1) to ensure the flow of energy, including oil and natural gas, from the Caspian through pipelines in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey and 2) prop up or topple governments in the region to ensure U.S. predominance. The latter is accomplished through organizing the political opposition, setting up conferences, and gaining influence in universities through non-governmental organizations established to veil the CIA’s financing of the operations. The NGOs ensure the CIA has a cadre of academics, politicians, former bureaucrats and diplomats, and intelligence agents to support its efforts through participation in «joint studies,» many of which are conducted by Jamestown. In return, the CIA provides its interlocutors with secret cash payments through the electronic transfer of funds to their bank accounts.
Howard has publicly revealed the U.S. bases of operations are in West Azerbaijan and Georgia and the target is the South and North Caucasus. Turkish sources also report that the key Jamestown interlocutor between the organization and the Caucasus Emirate of Salafist guerrillas, among whom Tamerlan Tsarnaev made contact, is Fatima Tlisova, a former Russian national of Circassian ethnicity and a journalist. Granted political asylum by the United States, Tlisova reportedly met, shortly before his death, the head of the Salafist Caucasus Emirate branch in Kabardino-Balkaria, Anzor Astemirov, aka «Emir Sayfullah,» who was killed in a shootout with police on March 24, 2010 in Nalchik, the Kabardino-Balkaria capital. Tlisova now travels on a U.S. passport, according to Turkish sources. Astemirov was on record stating that he did not support a global jihad against countries such as the United States and had asked the United States for assistance in the Islamic Emirate’s war against Russia. The Caucasus Emirate is known to receive substantial financial support from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
A Circassian Russian named Ali Berzeg also operates under Jamestown’s umbrella, according to Turkish sources and he is active in the «No Sochi» campaign to boycott the Sochi Winter Olympics next year. Berzeq participated in the November 19-21, 2010 Jamestown conference in Tbilisi on Circassian nationalism in the Adygea and Karachay-Cherkessia autonomous republics of Russia. He also spoke of support for Jamestown’s Circassian adventurism by the governments of Estonia and Lithuania, particularly that offered by Estonian Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Indrek Tarand. Berzeg also revealed in Tbilisi that the Circassians were supported by diaspora communities based in New York, Istanbul, Antalya, Munich, and Haifa.
Jamestown, through its links with Fuller, and through, him, with Tsarni, had two Chechen organizations circling its orbit: the Congress of Chechen International Organizations, located at Fuller’s home in Maryland, and the United States-Chechen Republic Alliance Inc., located at the home of Alavi Tsarnaev, Ruslan Tsarni’s brother. Jamestown is also linked, according to Turkish sources, with the Cerkes Society of New Jersey, the New Jersey Circassian Association, and the Circassian Cultural Institute (CCI), all, like their Chechen counterparts, taking full advantage of the Internal Revenue Service’s 501 © 3 tax-exempt provisions.
Jamestown was instrumental in founding the Circassian Cultural Center of the Republic of Georgia, authorized by a special decree of President Mikhail Saakashvili on October 12, 2011. Jamestown uses Ilia State University in Tbilisi to hold many of its Caucasus secessionist conferences. The group also supports the activities of Iyad Youghar, the head of the International Circassian Council. Youghar spoke at a Ilia-Jamestown seminar at the school’s campus on May 24, 2012, during the time Tamerlan Tsarnaev was said to be at Jamestown training in Tbilisi. One of the conference speakers was Walter Richmond, author of The Northwest Caucasus: Past, Present, Future a professor at Occidental College, a prime recruiting ground for the CIA and Barack Obama’s old alma mater.
Jamestown’s Howard was also in attendance., as was, more interestingly, Professor Brian Glyn Williams, professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. Williams said he received an email from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in May 2011, asking about Chechnya and that he helped him with a high school paper on his home country. Turkish sources reports that Williams has consulted for the CIA and Scotland Yard and is an expert on Turkish Volunteers in Chechnya and «Al-Qaeda Turka.» The Chechen-Ichkeria Republic separatist flag was on clear display at the Ilia-Jamestown seminar in Tbilisi on May 24, 2012.
Jamestown has rightly been referred to by the Russian Foreign Ministry as “singing the services of supporters of terrorists and pseudo-experts.” The ministry charged that Jamestown seminar speakers were “given carte blanche to spread extremist propaganda, incite ethnic and inter-religious discord.” Based on the circumstantial but important links between the organization and Fuller, Uncle Ruslan Tsarni and Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Jamestown has always skirted the edges of aiding and abetting terrorists, from its “Chechen Project” and its liaison with Chechen guerrillas from the Pankisi Gorge who would later turn up fighting American and NATO troops in Afghanistan and Iraq to Caucasus Emirate terrorists who constantly commit attacks on Russian military, police, and civilian personnel.
It is clear that the CIA requires reforming if not outright abolishment. It was the sincere wish of the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to see the CIA abolished with its analysis division rolled into the U.S. State Department. Since that will not happen anytime soon, reforming the CIA could start with cutting out its fringes, such as the Jamestown Foundation and similar tax-exempt groups that carry out covert operations while fleecing the American taxpayers.
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I still wonder about this it seems too odd to be true. It's a bit of a contradiction to believe the same CIA can carry out these elaborate plots would have fitted out Fogle with such a goofy wig, and why would he be carrying around a compass? And worst of all why a letter spelling out the offer? Can anyone following this thread point to confirmed cases of the CIA using such recruitment letters.
Ah, Mr Fogle, we've been expecting you: The case of the hapless wig-wearing American diplomat expelled from Moscow is not as simple as it first seemed
By David Randall, SUNDAY 19 MAY 2013
In the long and sinuous history of international espionage, the one thing you can absolutely rely on is that very little is as it first appears. And so it is with Ryan Christopher Fogle, third secretary in the political department of the US Embassy in Moscow, comedy wig owner, and, apparently, a man who thinks it wise to hang around near park entrances at midnight with €100,000 (£85,000) in cash about his person.
Caught in the act of trying to subvert a Russian intelligence agent, he is then marched off to the sort of bare office where once the KGB went about their business, and is filmed looking forlorn as a Russian official berates him for his stupidity. Beside him is laid out the almost childish equipment he took with him on his mission. Later, a letter from him offering his target $100,000 now and $1m a year thereafter is released to the Moscow media. The Russians have a field day, the US State Department stays resolutely shtum. Not a word of protest, denial or explanation. Fogle, it appears, is the world's dumbest spy and the Russians have got him bang to rights.
But kick the tyres, poke the evidence a bit, and not everything is quite as straightforward as that. This weekend, further reasons to count your change on this story were emerging. It now seems Fogle might not be quite as big a noodle as he first appeared, and the Russians not quite as smart. The following, as far as we can ascertain, is the most likely interpretation of what was going on.
Fogle came to work at the embassy in Moscow in April 2011. He was young, about 26, no doubt eager, and, from the Russian point of view, had a bit of form. Raised in Missouri, a graduate of Colgate University in New York State, and a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, he was, according to its winter 2010 newsletter, then living in Virginia, which also accommodates the headquarters of the CIA, at Langley, Fairfax County. Now Virginia's a big place, and not every resident works for the CIA, but Fogle's late 2011 email address has been identified as that of a subscriber to briefings from the intelligence firm Stratfor. It's the kind of thing that gets you on the radar of a country's intelligence services when you're posted there.
And that, according to the Russians (and their claim fits the facts), is exactly what happened. The former frat boy from Colgate was clocked the moment he arrived in Moscow, and, the Russians confidently claim, was monitored as he went about his probably low-level extra-curricular duties. And so, his life of semi-subter- fuge went on until this year, when two things happened.
One was the Boston bombing by the Tsarnaev brothers, native Chechens, and one a recent long-term visitor to Dagestan, something of a haven for Islamist terrorists. Washington and Moscow made cooing noises about intelligence-sharing on the subject, but, in all likelihood, beneath the surface there was intense competition for any scrap of information about extremism in the Caucasus. And Russian sensitivities were made all the more tender by the unpublicised expulsion in January of a what the Russians described as a "CIA operative".
It was in this context that, last week, Fogle's career took a most public turn. The means to contact a Russian intelligence agent who specialises in the Caucasus had, says the FSB, Russia's domestic security agency, come his way (or been dangled before him), and he rose to the bait, like a not very bright trout gulping for flies on a balmy May evening.
The following is the Russian account of what happened next (the Americans have not challenged or commented on this version in any way): Fogle was driven by a colleague to a point where the pair were convinced any surveillance had been shaken off. As midnight approached, he made his way to what seems to have been a pre-arranged meet at Vorontsovsky Park, calling his target twice on the way. A convenient recording has him saying, in accented Russian: "Hello. I am a representative of a Western country …. e have been watching you for a long time and we think that your work is very impressive. I, today, have for you $100,000 …. Are you interested?" Then, as he walked on the nearby Ulitsa Akademika Pilyugina sporting his blond wig, he was nabbed, and taken into custody.
This all makes some sort of sense, or is at least plausible. Fogle seems almost certainly to be CIA (indeed, the US State Department referred some press inquiries to CIA HQ). And, unless he had been abducted, drugged, had a wig plopped on his head, and been taken to near the park for an arrest to be staged, it looks as if he might actually have been trying to recruit a Russian agent.
But it is hard to resist the idea that the Russians, keen to make mischief and play to the domestic television audience, then rather over-egged the evidential pudding. As the hapless Fogle sat in the FSB office waiting for three colleagues to come and collect him, the supposed contents of his kit bag were displayed. On a table were: a compass; a pepper gas canister; an extra wig (brunette); an ancient Nokia mobile phone; a city map book (for a man who'd lived in Moscow for two years and was going to a large and easy-to-find landmark); a torch; sunglasses; and other paraphernalia. All that was missing, from this Junior Amateur Spy Outfit, was a secret code-book and bottle of invisible ink.
And then there was the letter Fogle was allegedly carrying to give to his "recruit". It outlined terms, instructions on how to use Google Mail, and read like one of those emails from an overseas attorney telling you Hiram J Finkelstein has died leaving you sole beneficiary of his $4.4m estate, and all you have to do is send personal details and a $10,000 administration fee, and the loot's all yours.
The letter went: "Dear Friend, This is an advance from someone who is very impressed by your professionalism … We are prepared to offer you $100,000 … and your payment might be far greater if you are prepared to answer some specific questions. Additionally, for long-term co-operation we offer up to $1,000,000 a year with the promise of additional bonuses … Thank you for reading this … Your friends."
The letter referred to dollars, as did the supposed phone call, and yet there on the table were euros, apparently 100,000 of them, which, by our reckoning, comes to about $129,000. Generosity indeed – or, perhaps, a case of the FSB man writing the letter not liaising with the one supplying the props. Either way, that and the million per, are way above the going rate for a little modest traitoring.
All this was not done for the FSB's private amusement. The night's events and the table of evidence were captured on film, which was about to get its premiere. On Tuesday at 2.30pm local time, at the very moment that the US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, was starting a public Twitter Q&A, the state-financed TV channel, RT, broadcast the story and its accompanying footage. It then went global, with many news outlets taking the more rococo details at face value.
Since then, the US has declined to offer comment or enlightenment – a comment in itself, really. They have even refused to say if Fogle has returned home. We tried to put a series of questions to them, but answers came there none. There's no great diplomatic fall-out, no charges, no trial, no lasting effects. Just a little intelligence game that got all dressed up in a wig one night, and then got rather out of hand.
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Russia's CIA spy bust 'was linked to Boston Bombing': U.S diplomat was trying to recruit Dagestan expert who travelled to terrorist’s home town when he was arrested
U.S. diplomat named as Ryan Christopher Fogle was arrested on Monday
Russia claim he was attempting to recruit a Russian secret services official
Letter allegedly found on him offers agents $1million per year to defect
U.S. ambassador summoned to Russian foreign ministry to explain today
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
PUBLISHED: 12:44, 15 May 2013
The arrest of a US diplomat accused of being a CIA spy was linked to the Boston bombing, sources revealed today. Russian security officials reported on Tuesday that they had briefly detained Ryan Fogle in Moscow for allegedly trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer. Today sources revealed the man Mr Fogle was trying to ‘recruit’ was an FSB agent who specialised in Islamic extremism in Russia and may even have travelled to the region where the bombing suspects came from.
Sources today said that Ryan Fogle was seeking to lure into treachery an FSB agent who had knowledge of Russian intelligence operations on suspected Boston terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev, left
It is thought that he was part of a team who went to Dagestan and provided intelligence to the United States about an extremist threat in 2011.
Fogle, a third secretary at the U.S. Embassy, who was carrying special technical equipment, disguises, written instructions and a large sum of money. Fogle was later handed over to U.S. Embassy officials. This morning the Russian foreign ministry today issued a formal protest to American ambassador Michael McFaul who was summoned to explain the alleged espionage mission of one of his diplomats. As he left after the brief session with Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, the envoy waved to reporters but refused to comment.
The Ministry hit out at 'provocative acts in the spirit of the Cold War' and has ordered the expulsion of Fogle, arrested wearing a blond wig under his baseball cap. 'This does not contribute to the further process of building mutual trust between Russia and the United States and bringing our relations to a qualitatively new level,' warned Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian president Vladimir Putin.
But it was becoming clearer today that the US was seeking to lure into treachery an FSB agent who had knowledge of Russian intelligence operations on suspected Boston terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who lived in America but had travelled to Dagastan where he was believed to have met Islamic extremists.
The FSB had earlier warned the FBI about his potential extremist links. In material released by the FSB, it is clear the Americans had phone numbers for one or more Russian intelligence agents involved in anti-terrorism work in the Caucasus. They obtained these during trip involving FBI agents to Dagestan in search of intelligence on Tamerlan's trip. 'After the first call he refused to meet, but this man called again and insisted on a meeting,' said a recording of a FSB officer addressing three US diplomats who came to collect the alleged CIA agent from FSB headquarters. 'At first we did not believe it was happening, because recently the FSB has been actively helping to investigate the Boston blasts, and was also providing some other information about threats to US national security'.
Today Kommersant newspaper said: 'It is likely that during the trip in April the US side obtained the phone numbers of Federal Security Service (FSB) agents.' 'Clearly, they then decided to use it to have personal contacts with anti-terror agents, given that the exchange of information in the form of question and answers between special services is not always quick and smooth,' it said.
Russia has not named the target of the US co-operation, and it is not known whether the agent has faced any problems or even arrest over the US interest in him. Fogle apparently hinted at an initial payment of $100,000 followed up a salary of up to $1 million a year plus bonuses if the Russian intelligence official handed over secrets to the CIA. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he had opted not to bring up the case at talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday in Sweden. 'I decided that talking about it would be superfluous, since it is already made public and everyone already understands everything,' he said.
Fogle was caught in Vorontsovski Park, an area in south-east Moscow, the FSB said. A letter in Russian which Fogle carried suggests – if genuine – that the CIA hoped to reel in a big fish. Addressed ‘Dear friend’, it states: ‘We are ready to offer you $100,000 [£65,000] and discuss your experience, expertise and co-operation, and the payment may go much higher if you are ready to answer certain questions. ‘For long-term co-operation we offer $1million [£650,000] per year.’ The recruit is instructed to use an internet cafe to ‘create a new Gmail mailbox which you will use only for staying in touch with us’.
The incident is the biggest spy scandal since the arrest of glamorous agent Anna Chapman and nine other Russians in the US in 2010. The FSB stated: ‘Recently, the US intelligence community has made repeated attempts to recruit employees of Russia’s law-enforcement bodies and special agencies.’
Many details remained shrouded in mystery last night. It is not known whether the target was part of the sting operation or if they have been arrested. Russia’s haste to make the news public could mean either that the attempt was so audacious that it shocked leaders, or that hardliners have seized on it to stop a move towards detente with the US. Yesterday Patty Fogle, the diplomat’s mother, refused to comment at her home in St Louis, Missouri.
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Was the real purpose of the abortive CIA recruitment to rewrite the Boston patsies' histories through an FSB agent-in-place?
http://aangirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/mysterious-ryan-fogle.html
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Boston Bombing Suspects: FBI, Homeland Security withheld Information from Local, State Police, Congressional hearing confirms
By Barry Grey
Global Research, May 11, 2013
World Socialist Web Site
The Boston police commissioner and a top Massachusetts Homeland Security official told Congress Thursday that the local and state police were never informed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Department of Homeland Security of multiple warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar are the only suspects to date in the twin bombings at the downtown Boston finish line of the race, which killed three people and wounded more than 160 others. Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police on April 19. Dzhokhar is under arrest at a prison medical facility outside of Boston.
Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said his department had been unaware that the Russian government contacted the FBI in 2011 to warn of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s radical jihadist sympathies and his plans to travel to the northern Caucasus and link up with Islamist separatist and terrorist elements from Dagestan and Chechnya. Nor had he been told, he said, that the FBI had questioned the elder Tsarnaev brother and his family, or that Tamerlan subsequently, in 2012, spent six months in the volatile region of southern Russia.
The FBI has acknowledged receiving the warning from Moscow and launching a probe of Tsarnaev, including an interrogation, but claims it found no “derogatory” information and closed the case. The Central Intelligence Agency has also acknowledged receiving a similar warning from Russia later in 2011. The government has also reported that it placed Tamerlan Tsarnaev on at least two anti-terror databases.
It has been widely reported that following his return from Russia, Tsarnaev posted jihadist videos on the Internet and was ejected from his mosque for making provocative anti-American statements.
There are also reports that the Russian internal security service gave the FBI a case file on Tsarnaev in November of 2012, after Tsarnaev’s return from Russia, outlining multiple contacts between the ethnic Chechen US resident and known members of the Islamist underground in Dagestan, which borders Chechnya.
On May 1, moreover, the British Daily Mail reported that Saudi Arabian officials sent a written report in 2012 to top US Homeland Security Department officials detailing their concerns about Tsarnaev and warning that he might be planning a terror attack.
Also testifying before the House committee on Thursday was Massachusetts Undersecretary for Homeland Security Kurt Schwartz, who said, “My understanding is that at no time prior to the bombings did any member of the Massachusetts State Police or the Fusion Center have any information or knowledge about the Tsarnaev brothers.”
The fusion center to which Schwartz referred was the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, one of 70 centers set up nationally in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to bring together federal, state and local law enforcement officials for the ostensible purpose of sharing and coordinating counterterrorism intelligence.
The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, which is funded in part by the federal Department of Homeland Security, issued an 18-page report five days before the Boston bombing warning the Boston police that the finish line of the Marathon was an “area of increased vulnerability” and that “homegrown extremists” could use “small-scale bombings” to attack spectators and runners.
At the same time, the report said that “The FBI has not identified any specific lone offender or extremist group who pose a threat to the Boston Marathon.”
Local and state police are also included on the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston, but there as well, they were not told of the multiple warnings about the Tsarnaevs or the federal government’s contact with the family. In his testimony, Police Commissioner Davis said that an officer of US Customs and Border Protection, a unit of the Homeland Security Department, who served on the task force and had knowledge of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s travels did not notify any of the four Boston police officers assigned to the group.
These statements by top local and state police officials rip to shreds the official attempts to explain away the failure of US police and intelligence agencies to prevent the April 15 bombings as yet another case of “failing to connect the dots” or “failing to communicate.” The identical lame phrases that were used after the 9/11 attacks to cover up the extensive advance warnings of a terror attack and the fact that both the FBI and CIA had been tracking many of the hijack-bombers are being employed once again.
There is no innocent explanation for a decision by the FBI, the CIA and the Homeland Security Department to conceal from the state and local police, in advance of a major public event, the presence of area residents widely suspected of having terrorist connections. To even suggest that such a decision would be made by these agencies out of civil liberties concerns is preposterous.
In an attempt to deflect blame, the FBI in Boston issued a statement Thursday evening declaring that state and local members of Joint Terrorism Task Forces “are responsible for maintaining awareness of possible threats to their respective jurisdictions.” The FBI office added that all task force members have access to Guardian, a system that collects information about alleged threats and suspicious activity.
The hearing itself, the first held by Congress on the bombings, was a transparent exercise in cover-up and damage control. Neither the Republican and Democratic congressmen nor the officials who testified evinced any desire to seriously investigate the role of intelligence and police agencies in the bombings.
There was no suggestion that the withholding of information could involve anything more sinister than incompetence or inattention. There was no questioning of the massive buildup of domestic spying and police powers since 9/11, supposedly to “protect” the American population and pursue a “war on terror,” nor any attempt to explain how, despite the panoply of Anti-Terror Task Forces and fusion centers, an evident terror threat could “drop below the radar.”
Nor was there any demand that those responsible for the supposed failures be named, fired or otherwise held accountable.
Police Commissioner Davis himself was the most open in expressing the general sentiments of those at the hearing. “I’m just very happy that we can move on to other things,” Davis said. “I’d personally like it if we never had to mention these names again.”
The committee chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul (Republican of Texas), set the tone in his opening remarks, declaring, “We learned over a decade ago the danger of failing to connect the dots.”
Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking Democrat on the committee, hinted that more extensive and integrated domestic spying was needed, stating, “We must develop a way to fix and integrate these various databases.”
Joseph Lieberman, the former Democratic senator and the party’s 2000 vice presidential candidate, was more direct in seeking to utilize the Boston bombings as a pretext for intensifying the assault on democratic rights. He suggested that Justice Department guidelines were handcuffing the FBI in conducting investigations, and that the guidelines should be loosened to give the FBI more leeway.
The official story—that the police and intelligence agencies once again “failed to connect the dots” and share what they knew about the alleged bombers—lacks any credibility. More plausible is the likelihood that US intelligence agencies were using, or planned to use, Tamerlan Tsarnaev to further their machinations with Islamist separatist forces in Chechnya and Dagestan, with whom they have been working for many years.
The US has worked with such elements to pursue their geo-political aims in the region against Russia, as well as mobilizing them to participate in US-backed wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and more recently in Libya and Syria. US proxy forces from the Caucasus include those that are linked to Al Qaeda.
The bipartisan cover-up reflected at the hearing was not only about state conspiracies and intrigues against democratic rights at home, but also about their connection to US aggression and subversion abroad. The most immediate task was to conceal the de facto alliance of the US and Al Qaeda-associated terrorist forces, including those originating in Chechnya and neighboring Muslim-majority Russian Republics. The reality of this political and military alignment explodes the myth of a so-called “war on terror” being fought to defeat Al Qaeda.
Thus, McCaul declared: “Many Chechen rebels have forged a bond with the Al Qaeda jihadist movement. These lethal warriors have fought side-by-side with Al Qaeda and the Taliban against US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
He conveniently neglected to mention that these same forces have been armed and supported by the US in Libya and Syria.
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The Tsarnaevs and the CIA–Part 2: Who is Brian Glyn Williams?
Traces of Reality
By Guillermo Jimenez, May 10, 2013
http://tracesofreality.com/2013/05/10/the-tsarnaevs-and-the-cia-part-2-who-is-brian-glyn-williams/
I’LL SEE YOUR GRAHAM FULLER AND RAISE YOU A BRIAN GLYN WILLIAMS
The Tsarnaev family connections to the world of spooks and suits are becoming increasingly difficult to either ignore or dismiss as mere “coincidences.” When I wrote the first article on The Tsarnaevs and the CIA, detailing the connections between the Tsarnaev family (namely “Uncle Ruslan” Tsarni and Tamerlan Tsarnaev) to the intelligence world (Graham Fuller, Fethulla Gulen), I did not expect for it to become a multi-part series. Although, the way things are headed, there may indeed be a need for continuous entries within this journal.
A bit of old information has been made new again thanks to the keen eye of writer Mark Ames at NSFWCORP with a piece titled “I Hope I Didn’t Contribute To it,” which includes a detail that, as he correctly pointed out, has been completely overlooked.
THE PROJECT
Two years ago, while Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was still a senior in high school, Dzhokhar was tasked with a project assignment by his English teacher, Steve Matteo. The project consisted of each student in the class researching their past, their history and ethnicity, and to write about their findings. Dzhokhar’s teacher, Steve Matteo, decided to help him along in his research by introducing him to his friend, Brian Glyn Williams, considered to be a “top expert” on Chechnya.
Williams, by all accounts, is indeed an expert on the subject, having majored in Russian Studies while an undergraduate, receiving dual Masters Degrees in Russian and East European History and Central Eurasian Studies, and a Doctorate Degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Central Asian History.
Furthermore, the breadth of knowledge he would have been able to bestow upon the younger of the two Tsarnaev brothers and accused Boston Bomber was not limited to simply that of scholarly research. Brian Glyn Williams is not just an academic with a pension for Russian studies and the Chechen struggle—he’s also a spook.
A CROSS BETWEEN JAMES BOND AND INDIANA JONES
Brian Glyn Williams’ history with The Central Intelligence Agency is not as well publicized as Spymaster Graham’s, indicating that perhaps he was not as involved with the CIA as Graham Fuller, who himself was a high level operative.
On the other hand, the flip side of that coin is also equally possible.
His book’s publisher confirms that Williams did indeed work for the CIA in at least some capacity:
“Having traveled extensively in the Pashtun tribal areas while working for the U.S. military and the CIA, Williams explores in detail of the new technology of airborne assassinations” [emphasis added].
His bio on the Huffington Post is a little more subtle:
“Brian Glyn Williams is a Professor of Islamic Studies at Univ of Mass. Dartmouth formerly of Univ. of London. He has spent four summers in Afghanistan researching terrorism and is the author of the forthcoming book Predators: The CIA’s Drone War on Al Qaeda based on his field work in Pakistan”.
“I’ve had a little criticism for providing him with information on Chechnya,” Williams says. “But that’s like criticizing someone for giving information to an Irish person about Ireland for fear that they might join the IRA. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Indeed, criticism for providing information on Chechnya to a young student working on a “special project” would not make any sense at all. What would make sense, however, would be criticism for not disclosing information as to the extent of his work with the league of extraordinary spies and assassins in the CIA—and for that matter, criticism of the mainstream press and the various writers and reporters who have been in touch with Williams in the last 3 weeks and never bothered to ask the question.
Williams says he never met Dzhokhar and only communicated with him briefly via email. As the HuffPo subscriber and former student mentioned above expressed, that idea is “surprising,” “shocking”—frankly, just plain hard to believe.
Brian Glyn Williams boasts that he is the only person in America, perhaps even the world, who teaches a course on the “obscure land” of Chechnya. He’s devoted the last nine years of his life to relaying his knowledge on the subject to students at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a young man of Chechen descent, keen on “rediscovering his identity,” as Williams says, transferred to UMASS-Dartmouth in the Fall of 2011, within months of the two exchanging emails.
But they never met? Dzhokhar made no further attempt to contact Williams even after establishing a rapport via email and now a student at the same University with the “only man in the world” who teaches a class on Chechnya?
Once again, just plain hard to believe. That being said, what reason do we have to suspect Williams would intentionally misrepresent their relationship—other than at some point in his life having worked for an agency many associate with professional liars and murderers?
That may not be much, I would concede—but then there’s that darn Jamestown Foundation again.
WORKSHOP FOR SPOOKS
Brian Glyn Williams not only performed work for the CIA, he is also an analyst for The Jamestown Foundation, an organization that has been described in the past as a CIA-front. If not a direct cover for the covert actions of the CIA, the Jamestown Foundation is certainly a place where spooks and suits like to hang out—give lectures, run workshops, influence an opinion here or there, destabilize a region of the world—the usual.
Williams’ association with the Jamestown Foundation is relevant for two principle reasons: First, it provides further insight as to the level of involvement Williams has had with the agency and, as a whole, the world of intelligence, think tanks and influence. Second, this isn’t the first time the Jamestown Foundation has come up with respect to the Boston Marathon Bombing and the Tsarnaevs.
Although the source is manifestly suspect, Russian state newspaper Izvestia has reported that the Counterintelligence Department of the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs released information affirming Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended a workshop while visiting Dagestan in 2012 sponsored by the Caucuses Fund and the Jamestown Foundation.
A workshop of this sort, the Izvestia report proposes, would have been used as a tool by US intelligence (through their proxy in the Jamestown Foundation) to recruit residents of the Northern Caucuses (including Dagestan, home of the Tsarnaev family) to work in their interests. The implication, of course, being that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, having attended this workshop and fitting the recruitment profile, would have then been enlisted as an asset by the CIA.
DO THE MATH, SHOW YOUR WORK
The connection between Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the self-professed “world’s expert” in Chechen studies, agent of the CIA, and part-time analyst for the Jamestown Foundation is an unexpected one. Up to this point there has been very little to suggest Dzhokhar was as involved in the planning or execution of the bombing as his older brother Tamerlan (and to be fair, there has been no concrete evidence yet made available to the public that incriminates either one as the definitive culprit).
For curious journalists wanting additional information about Dzhokhar’s potentially more than merely “brief relationship” with Williams or his academic history in general at UMASS-Dartmouth through his education records: you’re out of luck, at least for the time being. His records have been sealed and both the University and The US Department of Education have denied requests to release them.
Within this context, the question of why Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was allowed to remain enrolled at UMASS-Dartmouth despite an “unusually” high unpaid balance of $20,000 becomes a bit more intriguing.
That being said, and as I’ve previously noted, the association between Dzhokhar and Brian Glyn Williams, as curious as it may be, would be easy enough to shake off as its own stand-alone piece of information.
Perhaps the same could even be said for any of other links in the Tsarnaev-CIA chain—in and of themselves.
Ruslan Tsarni (Tsarnaev), “Uncle Ruslan,” marrying the daughter of the former Deputy Director of the CIA’s National Council on Intelligence, Graham (RAND Corporation-Iran-Contra-Fethulla Gulen-Let’s use Islam to destabilize what remains of Russian power) Fuller.
Ruslan Tsarni contracted for work by, CIA front group, USAID between 1994 and 1996 (the same time of his marriage to Spymaster Graham’s daughter) and again in 2008.
Ruslan Tsarni founding the Congress of Chechen International Organizations, a group who “provided material support” to the Chechen rebels, out of Graham Fuller’s home.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev having reportedly attended a Jamestown Foundation-CIA sponsored workshop and potentially recruited as an asset.
Tamerlan’s widow, Katherine Russell, being the granddaughter of Richard Warren Russell, a graduate of Yale, likely member of the ultra-exclusive secret society Skull and Bones, and former U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence.
In and of themselves, these individual links may not mean much at all, but when placed in their proper context and summed up, the math cannot be denied—even if you don’t like the answers.
The Tsarnaevs are a “connected” family. That much has become abundantly clear. Exactly how they are connected, where their loyalties lie, to what extent, if any, were they actually involved in the planning or execution of the Boston Marathon Bombing, and for what ends—these are the larger questions whose answers may lead us to the truth behind the Tsarnaevs and the CIA.
Traces of Reality: Brian Glyn Williams - Another Link in the Tsarnaev-CIA Chain
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Uncle Ruslan Tsarni’s Organization May Have Funded Terrorists
by Joe Giambrone
May 3, 2013
Why isn’t the Boston bombing suspects’ uncle Ruslan Tsarnaev/Tsarni considered a “person of interest” by the FBI? Or, heavens forbid, a “suspect” in the Boston Marathon bombing plot?
Is it because of his work with State Department and CIA connected USAID around the Caucasus region? Is it because he was formerly married to the daughter of a very high-ranking CIA official? Is it because this high-ranking CIA official, Graham E. Fuller, was deeply involved in “Islamic extremism,” for which he is a noted author and strategist? Or that Graham Fuller was CIA station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan? Could it be because his former father-in-law, Graham Fuller, “served 20 years in the Foreign Service, mostly the Muslim World, working in Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, North Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong. In 1982 he was appointed the National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia at CIA, and in 1986 Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at CIA, with overall responsibility for all national level strategic forecasting.”
Could it be related to Fuller’s paper that launched the Iran/Contra activities? Or could it simply be Graham Fuller’s role in “strategic forecasting” both then and now?
Whatever the reasons, the Federal Bureau of Investigation should surely be interested in a little organization that Mr. Ruslan Tsarni set up in 1995 called the “Congress of Chechen International Organization.”
Why should FBI care about an old “Congress” of Chechen organizations? There are several reasons known so far, perhaps many more, to look into this group and its activities.
America’s Rottweiler, Daniel Hopsicker, has sunk his fangs into Ruslan Tsarnaev’s history, and he doesn’t appear to be letting go any time soon. Uncle Ruslan became the darling of the US press by immediately denouncing the two brothers as “losers” and even claiming that their brains were “stolen” by some radical Islamic cleric whom he had never met or spoken to.
But Uncle Ruslan Tsarni/Tsarnaev’s work for USAID and his close connections to one of the top CIA strategists and a boastful expert on “Islamic extremism,” should cause us to take a very close look at his own actions. A quick search of USAID’s longtime ties to the CIA turns up this gem of a document, which once was “top secret,” but now declassified tells us:
Memorandum For: Deputy Director of Operations
Subject: Joint CIA/USAID Terrorist (Technical) Investigations Course #7 (English Language)…
1. This effort is a joint CIA/USAID training program for foreign police/security personnel…
This was dated March 7th of 1973 and is hosted right on the USAID website (at least at the time of writing).
Bloomberg told us that Ruslan Tsarni “was a legal consultant to a U.S. company contracted under USAID in a program of economic assistance for Kysrgyzstan.” Hopsicker exposed that Uncle Ruslan Tsarni is also a Halliburton connected oil man who profited generously from Kazakhstan’s oil fields.
Well, don’t the coincidences just keep piling up around this guy? Are we in the trillions to one range yet?
Two students from Kazakhstan were charged Wednesday morning for “destroying” evidence related to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, including fireworks without the gunpowder. Destroying evidence? Or planting? They don’t seem to have “destroyed” it very well.
What would motivate some “friends” to go and tamper with evidence on the biggest terrorism case since 9/11? This seems out of the ordinary activity, to say the least. A third man is also facing criminal charges in this evidence tampering and Obstruction of Justice.
Be that as it may, the US media has gone dark on Mr. Graham Fuller and his undeniable relationship with Mr. Ruslan Tsarni/Tsarnaev. Not one corporate news outlet has covered this Hopsicker initiated piece despite it being incontrovertible. Fuller wrote about Ruslan in his memoir, Three Truths and a Lie. Not only does Mr. Fuller’s name link directly, by marriage, to the Tsarnaev clan, his home address links directly to a Chechen front organization used to funnel funds to named terrorists.
Here is where the plot coagulates. Hopsicker was not satisfied with a failed marriage. He went deeper. The Congress of Chechen International Organization assisted one Shaikh Fathi in 1996 by using a “charity” called Benevolence International to get “aid” to the Chechen freedom fighters. All fine and well, except for a couple of years later we have 9/11, and then American prosecutors like Patrick Fitzgerald begin turning over stones.
One of those slimy, moss covered stones leads to Shaikh Fathi. The Fitzgerald indictment reads: “Sheikh Fathi was a major conduit for providing material support to the Chechen rebels.” The indictment was against Benevolence International. That “charity” was shut down after the US Treasury Department determined that they were “financiers of terrorism.”
The document that Hopsicker acquired, on Congress of Chechen International Organization letterhead, is potentially the Achilles Heel of the entire covert war in Chechnya against the Russians. Beyond the Boston bombing, this exposes a Chechen front group created by the son in law of a top CIA official that used this same CIA official’s home address on the official application when Ruslan set up the front! This may be considered “poor tradecraft.” A bad decision in 1995 may have just exposed the entire CIA connected terrorism nexus to the world. And not one US “news” outlet will say one word about it.
Dozens of reporters gave open microphones to Ruslan Tsarni/Tsarnaev when he denounced his two nephews as “losers” and that he wished they had “never existed.” But what a contrast in news coverage now that this man Ruslan Tsarni himself is found to be very close to the Central Intelligence Agency, since 1995.
It seems as though the name “Graham Fuller” cannot be published in connection to this case, in any corporate media organization in the United States, nor in Europe. This is essentially Orwellian manipulation of the public, and should be considered the top censored news story of the year, and perhaps of the decade.
Another international terrorist threat warning concerned Tamerlan Tsarnaev, this time in 2012 from Saudi Arabia. A Saudi official told Daily Mail UK about a letter to US intelligence and that they wouldn’t even allow Tamerlan Tsarnaev to enter Saudi Arabia last December, 2012, for his desired pilgrimage to Mecca. The Saudi intelligence did not just repeat what Russia had said, and instead the warning was “based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen.” Apparently the Saudi Foreign Minister and National Security Chief then met with Barack Obama in the Oval Office to discuss it early in 2013. Denied, denied, denied.
The usually reliable Israeli intelligence website DebkaFile suggested two things about this Boston Marathon bombing case that were not readily apparent at the time. These were 1) that the brothers (or older brother) were recruited by US intelligence, and that 2) they turned on their recruiters as double agents for Jihad.
The second part is speculative. But the first part suggests more detailed knowledge of the Tsarnaevs and of covert activities in the Caucasus. Most of the data concerning Uncle Ruslan were public and accessible, just waiting for someone like Hopsicker to piece it together. The freakish response of the FBI to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, despite international terrorist threat warnings, suggests something odd about this case. While double-agents are not unique and this has precedents, such as Ali Mohamad, we still have no proof that the brothers actually committed the bombings. They are being tried in the media, piece by piece, without legal recourse to challenge the accusations or the so-called evidence against them.
Russian news outlet Izvestia provides another piece of the puzzle, and it supports the Israeli claim that the brothers were recruited by US intelligence. On Tamerlan’s trip to Russia in 2012 (Jan. to July), there is a report by Georgian intelligence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended “training” at the Jamestown Foundation, connected with the Caucasus Fund. All have ties to CIA. As for Jamestown Foundation, guess who gave a keynote speech in 2008 there called “Turkey & the Caucasus after Georgia”?
Only your favorite “strategist,” the man whose name US media dare not speaketh. What a little tiny world we’ve inherited.
[Editor's note: A previous version of this article said that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had entered Georgian territory and attended "training" at the Jamestown Foundation; however, Izvestia article from which this was sourced didn't say he entered Georgia, only that Georgian intelligence was aware of the training. The error has been corrected.]
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Hopelessly politically-incorrect: I enjoyed it immensely, and regard the entire satire as genuinely sage advice:
Don't be CIA's Next Patsy - 10 Preventative Steps
by Henry Makow, Ph.D.
http://henrymakow.com/2013/05/How-to-avoid-becoming-a-patsy.html
May 5, 2013
An increasingly common pitfall in modern life is finding that you have been blamed for a CIA false flag. These practical steps will help avoid this perilous predicament.
Modern life presents some unique challenges. STD's. Student loans. Banks seizing your accounts, etc. None is greater than the danger of becoming a patsy. This short article will help you avoid becoming the object of a massive, televised manhunt, and being butchered in the process.
You see, being a patsy means you cannot be arrested and tried in a Court of Law. You cannot be allowed to speak publicly. That would defeat the whole purpose of blaming you for something they did. They will pretend you died resisting arrest. That's when they will take a meat cleaver to your chest. (I should not be flippant here. Tamerlan was arrested alive and subsequently murdered by the police.)
Step Number One: Do not under any circumstances agree to participate in a "drill" designed to test precautions against "a terror attack."
No matter how much money they offer, or how much they appeal to your patriotic instincts, this is a "sorry, no-can-do." Also, wherever this "drill" is, make sure you are a hundred miles away.
Step Number Two: Convert to Judaism.
Patsies are never Jews. Your local synagogue will provide information on Talmud Torah classes.
Step Number Three: Patsies can be teenagers.
If you are a teenager, or even a child, do not assume you are safe. Babies can rest easy, for now.
Step Number Four: Question your gender.
Homosexuality also confers immunity against becoming a patsy. If you are still in school, join a "gay-straight alliance." They will help you with the conversion process.
Step Number Five: If you cannot become a Jew or homosexual, at least establish your liberal bona fides.
Let slip that you voted for Barack Obama, love Diane Feinstein, read the New York Times, and watch Jon Stewart and SNL religiously. Put a PBS bumpersticker on your car. Patsies are never liberals.
Step Number Six: Prepare a plan to follow in case they still make you the terrorist.
When the bullets are flying, saying "I'm a patsy" won't cut it. You will need a hideout that is better than a boat parked in the backyard.
Step Number Seven: There are cosmetic products that will help you lighten your complexion.
Avoid suntans. You should not be mistaken for a Muslim. Your life depends on it.
Step Number Eight: Make burial arrangements in advance.
When the public has been incited to believe you are the incarnation of evil, funeral directors will have a hard time accepting your business.
Step Number Nine - Study the lives of some of the great patsies in modern history.
Lee Harvey Oswald. Timothy McVeigh. Osama Bin Laden. James Holmes. Adam Lanza. What mistakes did they make that you can avoid? Certainly, one is getting involved with a CIA-FBI front group.
Step Number Ten- Avoid friendly strangers with deep pockets who offer to arrange foreign travel and adventure for you and your friends.
I welcome other suggestions from readers for sidestepping this common hazard. Anyone who believes the mass media accounts of these "terror attacks" is also a patsy, as are people who support the West's NWO-inspired aggression. Don't be one.
Related :
Are you a Terrorist? Take the Quiz!
10 Steps to Ensure Your Activist Group Has Not been Infiltrated
- See more at: http://henrymakow.com/2013/05/How-to-avoid-becoming-a-patsy.html#sthash.BFcBPm4g.dpuf
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The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the “Arc of Crisis”
Andrew Gavin MARSHALL , 06.09.2010
As the 9th anniversary of 9/11 nears, and the war on terror continues to be waged and grows in ferocity and geography, it seems all the more imperative to return to the events of that fateful September morning and re-examine the reasons for war and the nature of the stated culprit, Al-Qaeda.
The events of 9/11 pervade the American and indeed the world imagination as an historical myth. The events of that day and those leading up to it remain largely unknown and little understood by the general public, apart from the disturbing images repeated ad nauseam in the media. The facts and troubled truths of that day are lost in the folklore of the 9/11 myth: that the largest attack carried out on American ground was orchestrated by 19 Muslims armed with box cutters and urged on by religious fundamentalism, all under the direction of Osama bin Laden, the leader of a global terrorist network called al-Qaeda, based out of a cave in Afghanistan.
The myth sweeps aside the facts and complex nature of terror, al-Qaeda, the American empire and literally defies the laws of physics. As John F. Kennedy once said, “The greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic.”
This three-part series on “The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda” examines the geopolitical historical origins and nature of what we today know as al-Qaeda, which is in fact an Anglo-American intelligence network of terrorist assets used to advance American and NATO imperial objectives in various regions around the world.
Part 1 examines the origins of the intelligence network known as the Safari Club, which financed and organized an international conglomerate of terrorists, the CIA’s role in the global drug trade, the emergence of the Taliban and the origins of al-Qaeda.
The Safari Club
Following Nixon’s resignation as President, Gerald Ford became the new US President in 1974. Henry Kissinger remained as Secretary of State and Ford brought into his administration two names that would come to play important roles in the future of the American Empire: Donald Rumsfeld as Ford’s Chief of Staff, and Dick Cheney, as Deputy Assistant to the President. The Vice President was Nelson Rockefeller, David Rockefeller’s brother. When Donald Rumsfeld was promoted to Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney was promoted to Chief of Staff. Ford had also appointed a man named George H.W. Bush as CIA Director.
In 1976, a coalition of intelligence agencies was formed, which was called the Safari Club. This marked the discreet and highly covert coordination among various intelligence agencies, which would last for decades. It formed at a time when the CIA was embroiled in domestic scrutiny over the Watergate scandal and a Congressional investigation into covert CIA activities, forcing the CIA to become more covert in its activities.
In 2002, the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal gave a speech in which he stated that in response to the CIA’s need for more discretion, “a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran [under the Shah].”[1] However, “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations. With the official blessing of George H.W. Bush as the head of the CIA,” Saudi intelligence chief, Kamal Adham, “transformed a small Pakistani merchant bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a world-wide money-laundering machine, buying banks around the world to create the biggest clandestine money network in history.”[2]
As CIA director, George H.W. Bush “cemented strong relations with the intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King Faisal and an early BCCI insider.” Adham had previously acted as a “channel between [Henry] Kissinger and [Egyptian President] Anwar Sadat” in 1972. In 1976, Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia formed the Safari Club “to conduct through their own intelligence agencies operations that were now difficult for the CIA,” which was largely organized by the head of French intelligence, Alexandre de Marenches.[3]
The “Arc of Crisis” and the Iranian Revolution
When Jimmy Carter became President in 1977, he appointed over two-dozen members of the Trilateral Commission to his administration, which was an international think tank formed by Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller in 1973. Brzezinski had invited Carter to join the Trilateral Commission, and when Carter became President, Brzezinski became National Security Adviser; Cyrus Vance, also a member of the Commission, became Secretary of State; and Samuel Huntington, another Commission member, became Coordinator of National Security and Deputy to Brzezinski. Author and researcher Peter Dale Scott deserves much credit for his comprehensive analysis of the events leading up to and during the Iranian Revolution in his book, “The Road to 9/11”,* which provides much of the information below.
Samuel Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski were to determine the US policy position in the Cold War, and the US-Soviet policy they created was termed, “Cooperation and Competition,” in which Brzezinski would press for “Cooperation” when talking to the press, yet, privately push for “competition.” So, while Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was pursuing détente with the Soviet Union, Brzezinski was pushing for American supremacy over the Soviet Union. Brzezinski and Vance would come to disagree on almost every issue.[4]
In 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski gave a speech in which he stated, “An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries.” The Arc of Crisis stretched from Indochina to southern Africa, although, more specifically, the particular area of focus was “the nations that stretch across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey, and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa.” Further, the “center of gravity of this arc is Iran, the world's fourth largest oil producer and for more than two decades a citadel of U.S. military and economic strength in the Middle East. Now it appears that the 37-year reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi is almost over, ended by months of rising civil unrest and revolution.”[5]
With rising discontent in the region, “There was this idea that the Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets. It was a Brzezinski concept.”[6] A month prior to Brzezinski’s speech, in November of 1978, “President Carter named the Bilderberg group’s George Ball, another member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special White House Iran task force under the National Security Council’s Brzezinski.” Further, “Ball recommended that Washington drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the fundamentalist Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini.”[7] George Ball’s visit to Iran was a secret mission.[8]
Throughout 1978, the Shah was under the impression that “the Carter administration was plotting to topple his regime.” In 1978, the Queen and Shah’s wife, told Manouchehr Ganji, a minister in the Shah’s government, that, “I wanted to tell you that the Americans are maneuvering to bring down the Shah,” and she continued saying that she believed “they even want to topple the regime.”[9] The US Ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, thought that the revolution would succeed, and told this to Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General under the Johnson administration, as well as professor Richard Falk, when they were visiting Sullivan in Iran in 1978. Clark and Falk then went from Iran to Paris, to visit Khomeini, who was there in exile. James Bill, a Carter adviser, felt that, “a religious movement brought about with the United States’ assistance would be a natural friend of the United States.”[10]
Also interesting is the fact that the British BBC broadcast pro-Khomeini Persian-language programs daily in Iran, as a subtle form of propaganda, which “gave credibility to the perception of United States and British support of Khomeini.”[11] The BBC refused to give the Shah a platform to respond, and “[r]epeated personal appeals from the Shah to the BBC yielded no result.”[12]
In the May 1979 meeting of the Bilderberg Group, Bernard Lewis, a British historian of great influence (hence, the Bilderberg membership), presented a British-American strategy which, “endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini, in order to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azerbaijani Turks, and so forth. The chaos would spread in what he termed an ‘Arc of Crisis,’ which would spill over into the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union.”[13] Further, it would prevent Soviet influence from entering the Middle East, as the Soviet Union was viewed as an empire of atheism and godlessness: essentially a secular and immoral empire, which would seek to impose secularism across Muslim countries. So supporting radical Islamic groups would mean that the Soviet Union would be less likely to have any influence or relations with Middle Eastern countries, making the US a more acceptable candidate for developing relations.
A 1979 article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, described the Arc of Crisis, saying that, “The Middle East constitutes its central core. Its strategic position is unequalled: it is the last major region of the Free World directly adjacent to the Soviet Union, it holds in its subsoil about three-fourths of the proven and estimated world oil reserves, and it is the locus of one of the most intractable conflicts of the twentieth century: that of Zionism versus Arab nationalism.” It went on to explain that post-war US policy in the region was focused on “containment” of the Soviet Union, as well as access to the regions oil.[14] The article continued, explaining that the most “obvious division” within the Middle East is, “that which separates the Northern Tier (Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan) from the Arab core,” and that, “After World War II, Turkey and Iran were the two countries most immediately threatened by Soviet territorial expansionism and political subversion.”[15] Ultimately, “the Northern Tier was assured of a serious and sustained American commitment to save it from sharing the fate of Eastern Europe.”[16]
While Khomeini was in Paris prior to the Revolution, a representative of the French President organized a meeting between Khomeini and “current world powers,” in which Khomeini made certain demands, such as, “the shah's removal from Iran and help in avoiding a coup d'état by the Iranian Army.” The Western powers, however, “were worried about the Soviet Union's empowerment and penetration and a disruption in Iran's oil supply to the west. Khomeini gave the necessary guarantees. These meetings and contacts were taking place in January of 1979, just a few days before the Islamic Revolution in February 1979.”[17] In February of 1979, Khomeini was flown out of Paris on an Air France flight, to return to Iran, “with the blessing of Jimmy Carter.”[18] Ayatollah Khomeini named Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government on February 4, 1979. As Khomeini had demanded during his Paris meeting in January 1979, that western powers must help in avoiding a coup by the Iranian Army; in that same month, the Carter administration, under the direction of Brzezinski, had begun planning a military coup.[19]
Could this have been planned in the event that Khomeini was overthrown, the US would quickly reinstate order, perhaps even place Khomeini back in power? Interestingly, in January of 1979, “as the Shah was about to leave the country, the American Deputy Commander in NATO, General Huyser, arrived and over a period of a month conferred constantly with Iranian military leaders. His influence may have been substantial on the military's decision not to attempt a coup and eventually to yield to the Khomeini forces, especially if press reports are accurate that he or others threatened to withhold military supplies if a coup were attempted.”[20] No coup was subsequently undertaken, and Khomeini came to power as the Ayatollah of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
As tensions increased among the population within Iran, the US sent “security advisers” to Iran to pressure the Shah’s SAVAK (secret police) to implement “a policy of ever more brutal repression, in a manner calculated to maximize popular antipathy to the Shah.” The Carter administration also began publicly criticizing the Shah’s human rights abuses.[21] On September 6, 1978, the Shah banned demonstrations, and the following day, between 700 and 2000 demonstrators were gunned down, following “advice from Brzezinski to be firm.”[22]
The US Ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, a Trilateral Commission member, said that, “Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint,” and the US Ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, said, “Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure,” while Carter’s adviser, James Bill, said that Khomeini was a man of “impeccable integrity and honesty.”[23]
The Shah was also very sick in late 1978 and early 1979. So the Shah fled Iran in January of 1979 to the Bahamas, allowing for the revolution to take place. It is especially interesting to understand the relationship between David Rockefeller and the Shah of Iran. David Rockefeller’s personal assistant, Joseph V. Reed, had been “assigned to handle the shah’s finances and his personal needs;” Robert Armao, who worked for Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, was sent to “act as the shah’s public relations agent and lobbyist;” and Benjamin H. Kean, “a longtime associate of Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockefeller,” and David Rockefeller’s “personal physician,” who was sent to Mexico when the shah was there, and advised that he “be treated at an American hospital.”[24]
It is important to note that Rockefeller interests “had directed U.S. policy in Iran since the CIA coup of 1953.”[25] Following the Shah’s flight from Iran, there were increased pressures within the United States by a handful of powerful people to have the Shah admitted to the United States. These individuals were Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, John J. McCloy, former statesman and senior member of the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, who was also a lawyer for Chase Manhattan, and of course, David Rockefeller.[26]
Chase Manhattan Bank had more interests in Iran than any other US bank. In fact, the Shah had “ordered that all his government’s major operating accounts be held at Chase and that letters of credit for the purchase of oil be handled exclusively through Chase. The bank also became the agent and lead manager for many of the loans to Iran. In short, Iran became the crown jewel of Chase’s international banking portfolio.”[27]
The Iranian interim government, headed by Prime Minister Bazargan, collapsed in November of 1979, when Iranian hostages seized the US Embassy in Teheran. However, there is much more to this event than meets the eye. During the time of the interim government (February, 1979 to November, 1979), several actions were undertaken which threatened some very powerful interests who had helped the Ayatollah into power.
Chase Manhattan Bank faced a liquidity crisis as there had been billions in questionable loans to Iran funneled through Chase.[28] Several of Chase’s loans were “possibly illegal under the Iranian constitution.”[29] Further, in February of 1979, once the interim government was put in power, it began to take “steps to market its oil independently of the Western oil majors.” Also, the interim government “wanted Chase Manhattan to return Iranian assets, which Rockefeller put at more than $1 billion in 1978, although some estimates ran much higher,” which could have “created a liquidity crisis for the bank which already was coping with financial troubles.”[30]
With the seizure of the American Embassy in Iran, President Carter took moves to freeze Iranian financial assets. As David Rockefeller wrote in his book, “Carter’s ‘freeze’ of official Iranian assets protected our [Chase Manhattan’s] position, but no one at Chase played a role in convincing the administration to institute it.”[31]
In February of 1979, Iran had been taking “steps to market its oil independently of the Western oil majors. In 1979, as in 1953, a freeze of Iranian assets made this action more difficult.”[32] This was significant for Chase Manhattan not simply because of the close interlocking of the board with those of oil companies, not to mention Rockefeller himself, who is patriarch of the family whose name is synonymous with oil, but also because Chase exclusively handled all the letters of credit for the purchase of Iranian oil.[33]
The Shah being accepted into the United States, under public pressure from Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller, precipitated the hostage crisis, which occurred on November 4. Ten days later, Carter froze all Iranian assets in US banks, on the advice of his Treasury Secretary, William Miller. Miller just happened to have ties to Chase Manhattan Bank.[34]
Although Chase Manhattan directly benefited from the seizure of Iranian assets, the reasoning behind the seizure as well as the events leading up to it, such as a hidden role for the Anglo-Americans behind the Iranian Revolution, bringing the Shah to America, which precipitated the hostage crisis, cannot simply be relegated to personal benefit for Chase. There were larger designs behind this crisis. So the 1979 crises in Iran cannot simply be pawned off as a spur of the moment undertaking, but rather should be seen as quick actions taken upon a perceived opportunity. The opportunity was the rising discontent within Iran at the Shah; the quick actions were in covertly pushing the country into Revolution.
In 1979, “effectively restricting the access of Iran to the global oil market, the Iranian assets freeze became a major factor in the huge oil price increases of 1979 and 1981.”[35] Added to this, in 1979, British Petroleum cancelled major oil contracts for oil supply, which along with cancellations taken by Royal Dutch Shell, drove the price of oil up higher.[36] With the first major oil price rises in 1973 (urged on by US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger), the Third World was forced to borrow heavily from US and European banks to finance development. With the second oil price shocks of 1979, the US Federal Reserve, with Paul Volcker as its new Chairman, (himself having served a career under David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan), dramatically raised interest rates from 2% in the late 70s to 18% in the early 80s. Developing nations could not afford to pay such interest on their loans, and thus the 1980s debt crisis spread throughout the Third World, with the IMF and World Bank coming to the “rescue” with their Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), which ensured western control over the developing world’s economies.[37]
Covertly, the United States helped a radical Islamist government come to power in Iran, “the center of the Arc of Crisis,” and then immediately stirred up conflict and war in the region. Five months before Iraq invaded Iran, in April of 1980, Zbigniew Brzezinski openly declared the willingness of the US to work closely with Iraq. Two months before the war, Brzezinski met with Saddam Hussein in Jordan, where he gave support for the destabilization of Iran.[38] While Saddam was in Jordan, he also met with three senior CIA agents, which was arranged by King Hussein of Jordan. He then went to meet with King Fahd in Saudi Arabia, informing him of his plans to invade Iran, and then met with the King of Kuwait to inform him of the same thing. He gained support from America, and financial and arms support from the Arab oil producing countries. Arms to Iraq were funneled through Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.[39] The war lasted until 1988 and resulted in over a million deaths.
This was the emergence of the “strategy of tension” in the “Arc of Crisis,” in particular, the covert support (whether in arming, training, or financing) of radical Islamic elements to foment violence and conflict in a region. It was the old imperial tactic of ‘divide and conquer’: pit the people against each other so that they cannot join forces against the imperial power. This violence and radical Islamism would further provide the pretext for which the US and its imperial allies could then engage in war and occupation within the region, all the while securing its vast economic and strategic interests.
The “Arc of Crisis” in Afghanistan: The Safari Club in Action
In 1978, the progressive Taraki government in Afghanistan managed to incur the anger of the United States due to “its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies.”[40] The Afghan government was widely portrayed in the West as “Communist” and thus, a threat to US national security. The government, did, however, undertake friendly policies and engagement with the Soviet Union, but was not a Communist government.
In 1978, as the new government came to power, almost immediately the US began covertly funding rebel groups through the CIA.[41] In 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski worked closely with his aid from the CIA, Robert Gates (who is currently Secretary of Defense), in shifting President Carter’s Islamic policy. As Brzezinski said in a 1998 interview with a French publication:
According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.[42]
Brzezinski elaborated, saying he “Knowingly increased the probability that [the Soviets] would invade,” and he recalled writing to Carter on the day of the Soviet invasion that, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.” When asked about the repercussions for such support in fostering the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, Brzezinski responded, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”[43]
As author Peter Dale Scott pointed out in, The Road to 9/11:*
For generations in both Afghanistan and the Soviet Muslim Republics the dominant form of Islam had been local and largely Sufi. The decision to work with the Saudi and Pakistani secret services meant that billions of CIA and Saudi dollars would ultimately be spent in programs that would help enhance the globalistic and Wahhabistic jihadism that are associated today with al Qaeda.[44]
Hafizullah Amin, a top official in Taraki’s government, who many believed to be a CIA asset, orchestrated a coup in September of 1979, and “executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.”[45] The Soviets also intervened in order to replace Amin, who was seen as “unpredictable and extremist” with “the more moderate Barbak Karmal.”[46]
The Soviet invasion thus prompted the US national security establishment to undertake the largest covert operation in history. When Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter in 1981, the covert assistance to the Afghan Mujahideen not only continued on the path set by Brzezinski but it rapidly accelerated, as did the overall strategy in the “Arc of Crisis.” When Reagan became President, his Vice President became George H.W. Bush, who, as CIA director during the Ford administration, had helped establish the Safari Club intelligence network and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in Pakistan. In the “campaign to aid the Afghan rebels ... BCCI clearly emerged as a U.S. intelligence asset,” and CIA Director “Casey began to use the outside – the Saudis, the Pakistanis, BCCI – to run what they couldn’t get through Congress. [bCCI president] Abedi had the money to help,” and the CIA director had “met repeatedly” with the president of BCCI.[47]
Thus, in 1981, Director Casey of the CIA worked with Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal who ran the Saudi intelligence agency GID, and the Pakistani ISI “to create a foreign legion of jihadi Muslims or so-called Arab Afghans.” This idea had “originated in the elite Safari Club that had been created by French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches.”[48]
In 1986, the CIA backed a plan by the Pakistani ISI “to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad.” Subsequently:
More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by CIA and MI6, with the SAS [british Special Forces] training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.[49]
CIA funding for the operations “was funneled through General Zia and the ISI in Pakistan.”[50] Interestingly, Robert Gates, who previously served as assistant to Brzezinski in the National Security Council, stayed on in the Reagan-Bush administration as executive assistant to CIA director Casey, and who is currently Secretary of Defense.
The Global Drug Trade and the CIA
As a central facet of the covert financing and training of the Afghan Mujahideen, the role of the drug trade became invaluable. The global drug trade has long been used by empires for fuelling and financing conflict with the aim of facilitating imperial domination.
In 1773, the British colonial governor in Bengal “established a colonial monopoly on the sale of opium.” As Alfred W. McCoy explained in his masterful book, The Politics of Heroin:
As the East India Company expanded production, opium became India’s main export. [. . . ] Over the next 130 years, Britain actively promoted the export of Indian opium to China, defying Chinese drug laws and fighting two wars to open China’s opium market for its merchants. Using its military and mercantile power, Britain played a central role in making China a vast drug market and in accelerating opium cultivation throughout China. By 1900 China had 13.5 million addicts consuming 39,000 tons of opium.[51]
In Indochina in the 1940s and 50s, the French intelligence services “enabled the opium trade to survive government suppression efforts,” and subsequently, “CIA activities in Burma helped transform the Shan states from a relatively minor poppy-cultivating area into the largest opium-growing region in the world.”[52] The CIA did this by supporting the Kuomintang (KMT) army in Burma for an invasion of China, and facilitated its monopolization and expansion of the opium trade, allowing the KMT to remain in Burma until a coup in 1961, when they were driven into Laos and Thailand.[53] The CIA subsequently played a very large role in the facilitation of the drugs trade in Laos and Vietnam throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s.[54]
It was during the 1980s that “the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan transformed Central Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market,” as:
Until the late 1970s, tribal farmers in the highlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan grew limited quantities of opium and sold it to merchant caravans bound west for Iran and east to India. In its decade of covert warfare against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA’s operations provided the political protection and logistics linkages that joined Afghanistan’s poppy fields to heroin markets in Europe and America.[55]
In 1977, General Zia Ul Haq in Pakistan launched a military coup, “imposed a harsh martial-law regime,” and executed former President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (father to Benazir Bhutto). When Zia came to power, the Pakistani ISI was a “minor military intelligence unit,” but, under the “advice and assistance of the CIA,” General Zia transformed the ISI “into a powerful covert unit and made it the strong arm of his martial-law regime.”[56]
The CIA and Saudi money flowed not only to weapons and training for the Mujahideen, but also into the drug trade. Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq appointed General Fazle Haq as the military governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), who would “consult with Brzezinski on developing an Afghan resistance program,” and who became a CIA asset. When CIA Director Casey or Vice President George H.W. Bush reviewed the CIA Afghan operation, they went to see Haq; who by 1982, was considered by Interpol to be an international narcotics trafficker. Haq moved much of the narcotics money through the BCCI.[57]
In May of 1979, prior to the December invasion of the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, a CIA envoy met with Afghan resistance leaders in a meeting organized by the ISI. The ISI “offered the CIA envoy an alliance with its own Afghan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” who led a small guerilla group. The CIA accepted, and over the following decade, half of the CIA’s aid went to Hekmatyar’s guerillas.[58] Hekmatyar became Afghanistan’s leading mujahideen drug lord, and developed a “complex of six heroin labs in an ISI-controlled area of Baluchistan (Pakistan).”[59]
The US subsequently, through the 1980s, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia, gave Hekmatyar more than $1 billion in armaments. Immediately, heroin began flowing from Afghanistan to America. By 1980, drug-related deaths in New York City rose 77% since 1979.[60] By 1981, the drug lords in Pakistan and Afghanistan supplied 60% of America’s heroin. Trucks going into Afghanistan with CIA arms from Pakistan would return with heroin “protected by ISI papers from police search.”[61]
Haq, the CIA asset in Pakistan, “was also running the drug trade,” of which the bank BCCI “was completely involved.” In the 1980s, the CIA insisted that the ISI create “a special cell for the use of heroin for covert actions.” Elaborating:
This cell promoted the cultivation of opium and the extraction of heroin in Pakistani territory as well as in the Afghan territory under Mujahideen control for being smuggled into Soviet controlled areas in order to make the Soviet troops heroin addicts.[62]
This plan apparently originated at the suggestion of French intelligence chief and founder of the Safari Club, Alexandre de Marenches, who recommended it to CIA Director Casey.[63]
In the 1980s, one program undertaken by the United States was to finance Mujahideen propaganda in textbooks for Afghan schools. The US gave the Mujahideen $43 million in “non-lethal” aid for the textbook project alone, which was given by USAID: “The U.S. Agency for International Development, [uSAID] coordinated its work with the CIA, which ran the weapons program,” and “The U.S. government told the AID to let the Afghan war chiefs decide the school curriculum and the content of the textbooks.”[64]
The textbooks were “filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings,” and “were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines.” Even since the covert war of the 1980s, the textbooks “have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books.” The books were developed through a USAID grant to the “University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies,” and when the books were smuggled into Afghanistan through regional military leaders, “Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines.” USAID stopped this funding in 1994.[65]
The Rise of the Taliban
When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the fighting continued between the Afghan government backed by the USSR and the Mujahideen backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, so too did its aid to the Afghan government, which itself was overthrown in 1992. However, fighting almost immediately broke out between rival factions vying for power, including Hekmatyar.
In the early 1990s, an obscure group of “Pashtun country folk” had become a powerful military and political force in Afghanistan, known as the Taliban.[66] The Taliban “surfaced as a small militia force operating near Kandahar city during the spring and summer of 1994, carrying out vigilante attacks against minor warlords.” As growing discontent with the warlords grew, so too did the reputation of the Taliban.[67]
The Taliban acquired an alliance with the ISI in 1994, and throughout 1995, the relationship between the Taliban and the ISI accelerated and “became more and more of a direct military alliance.” The Taliban ultimately became “an asset of the ISI” and “a client of the Pakistan army.”[68] Further, “Between 1994 and 1996, the USA supported the Taliban politically through its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, essentially because Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-Iranian, anti-Shia, and pro-Western.”[69]
Selig Harrison, a scholar with the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars and “a leading US expert on South Asia,” said at a conference in India that the CIA worked with Pakistan to create the Taliban. Harrison has “extensive contact” with the CIA, as “he had meetings with CIA leaders at the time when Islamic forces were being strengthened in Afghanistan,” while he was a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As he further revealed in 2001, “The CIA still has close links with the ISI.”[70] By 1996, the Taliban had control of Kandahar, but still fighting and instability continued in the country.
Osama and Al-Qaeda
Between 1980 and 1989, roughly $600 million was passed through Osama bin Laden’s charity front organizations, specifically the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), also known as Al-Kifah. The money mostly originated with wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and other areas in the Persian Gulf, and was funneled through his charity fronts to arm and fund the mujahideen in Afghanistan.[71]
In the 1980s, the British Special Forces (SAS) were training mujahideen in Afghanistan, as well as in secret camps in Scotland, and the SAS is largely taking orders from the CIA. The CIA also indirectly begins to arm Osama bin Laden.[72] Osama bin Laden’s front charity, the MAK, “was nurtured” by the Pakistani ISI.[73]
Osama bin Laden was reported to have been personally recruited by the CIA in 1979 in Istanbul. He had the close support of Prince Turki bin Faisal, his friend and head of Saudi intelligence, and also developed ties with Hekmatyar in Afghanistan,[74] both of whom were pivotal figures in the CIA-Safari Club network. General Akhtar Abdul Rahman, the head of the Pakistani ISI from 1980 to 1987, would meet regularly with Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, and they formed a partnership in demanding a tax on the opium trade from warlords so that by 1985, bin Laden and the ISI were splitting the profits of over $100 million per year.[75] In 1985, Osama bin Laden’s brother, Salem, stated that Osama was “the liaison between the US, the Saudi government, and the Afghan rebels.”[76]
In 1988, Bin Laden discussed “the establishment of a new military group,” which would come to be known as Al-Qaeda.[77] Osama bin Laden’s charity front, the MAK, (eventually to form Al-Qaeda) founded the al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, New York, to recruit Muslims for the jihad against the Soviets. The al-Kifah Center was founded in the late 1980s with the support of the U.S. government, which provided visas for known terrorists associated with the organization, including Ali Mohamed, the “blind sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman and possibly the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta.[78]
This coincided with the creation of Al-Qaeda, of which the al-Kifah Center was a recruiting front. Foot soldiers for Al-Qaeda were “admitted to the United States for training under a special visa program.” The FBI had been surveilling the training of terrorists, however, “it terminated this surveillance in the fall of 1989.” In 1990, the CIA granted Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman a visa to come run the al-Kifah Center, who was considered an “untouchable” as he was “being protected by no fewer than three agencies,” including the State Department, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA.[79]
Robin Cook, a former British MP and Minister of Foreign Affairs wrote that Al-Qaeda, “literally ‘the database’, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.”[80] Thus, “Al-Qaeda” was born as an instrument of western intelligence agencies. This account of al-Qaeda was further corroborated by a former French military intelligence agent, who stated that, “In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database,” and that it remained as such into the 1990s. He contended that, “Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's personal property,” and further:
The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money.[81]
The creation of Al-Qaeda was thus facilitated by the CIA and allied intelligence networks, the purpose of which was to maintain this “database” of Mujahideen to be used as intelligence assets to achieve US foreign policy objectives, throughout both the Cold War, and into the post-Cold War era of the ‘new world order’.
Part 2 of “The Imperial Anatomy of al-Qaeda” takes the reader through an examination of the new imperial strategy laid out by American geopolitical strategists at the end of the Cold War, designed for America to maintain control over the world’s resources and prevent the rise of competitive powers. Covertly, the “database” (al-Qaeda) became central to this process, being used to advance imperial aims in various regions, such as in the dismantling of Yugoslavia. Part 2 further examines the exact nature of ‘al-Qaeda’, its origins, terms, training, arming, financing, and expansion. In particular, the roles of western intelligence agencies in the evolution and expansion of al-Qaeda is a central focus. Finally, an analysis of the preparations for the war in Afghanistan is undertaken to shed light on the geopolitical ambitions behind the conflict that has now been waging for nearly nine years.
* [Note on the research: For a comprehensive analysis of the history, origins and nature of al-Qaeda, see: Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America, which provided much of the research in the above article.]
Andrew Gavin Marshall is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is co-editor, with Michel Chossudovsky, of the recent book, "The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century," available to order at Globalresearch.ca.
Notes
[1] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 62
[2] Ibid, page 63
[3] Ibid, page 62.
[4] Ibid, pages 66-67.
[5] HP-Time, The Crescent of Crisis. Time Magazine: January 15, 1979:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,919995-1,00.html
[6] Peter Dale Scott, op. cit., page 67.
[7] F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004: page 171
[8] Manouchehr Ganji, Defying the Iranian Revolution: From a Minister to the Shah to a Leader of Resistance. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002: page 41
[9] Ibid, page 39.
[10] Ibid, page 41.
[11] Ibid.
[12] F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004: page 172
[13] Ibid, page 171.
[14] George Lenczowski, The Arc of Crisis: It’s Central Sector. Foreign Affairs: Summer, 1979: page 796
[15] Ibid, page 797.
[16] Ibid, page 798.
[17] IPS, Q&A: Iran's Islamic Revolution Had Western Blessing. Inter-Press Service: July 26, 2008:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43328
[18] Michael D. Evans, Father of the Iranian revolution. The Jerusalem Post: June 20, 2007:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813077590&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
[19] Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 89.
[20] George Lenczowski, The Arc of Crisis: It’s Central Sector. Foreign Affairs: Summer, 1979: page 810
[21] F. William Engdahl, op cit., page 172.
[22] Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 81.
[23] Michael D. Evans, Father of the Iranian revolution. The Jerusalem Post: June 20, 2007:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813077590&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
[24] Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 83.
[25] Ibid, page 84.
[26] Ibid, page 81.
[27] Ibid, pages 85-86.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid, page 87.
[30] Ibid, pages 88-89.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid, pages 87-88.
[33] Ibid, page 85.
[34] Ibid, page 86.
[35] Ibid, page 88.
[36] F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004: page 173
[37] Andrew Gavin Marshall, Controlling the Global Economy: Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve. Global Research: August 3, 2009:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14614
[38] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 89
[39] PBS, Secrets of His Life and Leadership: An Interview with Said K. Aburish. PBS Frontline:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/aburish.html
[40] Michael Parenti, Afghanistan, Another Untold Story. Global Research: December 4, 2008:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279
[41] Oleg Kalugin, How We Invaded Afghanistan. Foreign Policy: December 11, 2009:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/12/11/how_we_invaded_afghanistan
[42] ‘'Le Nouvel Observateur' (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76: http://www.ucc.ie/acad/appsoc/tmp_store/mia/Library/history/afghanistan/archive/brzezinski/1998/interview.htm
[43] Ibid.
[44] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 73
[45] Michael Parenti, Afghanistan, Another Untold Story. Global Research: December 4, 2008:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279
[46] Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 78.
[47] Ibid, page 116.
[48] Ibid, page 122.
[49] Ibid, page 123.
[50] Ibid,.
[51] Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. (Lawrence Hill Books: Chicago, 2003), pag.80
[52] Ibid, page 162.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Ibid, pages 283-386.
[55] Ibid, page 466.
[56] Ibid, page 474.
[57] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 73
[58] Alfred W. McCoy, op cit., page 475.
[59] Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 74.
[60] Ibid, pages 75-76.
[61] Ibid, page 124.
[62] Ibid, pages 75-76.
[63] Ibid, page 124.
[64] Carol Off, Back to school in Afghanistan. CBC: May 6, 2002:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/afghanistan/schools.html
[65] Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway, From U.S., the ABC's of Jihad. The Washington Post: March 23, 2002:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5339-2002Mar22?language=printer
[66] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Penguin Books, New York, 2004: Page 328
[67] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 11, 2001. (London: Penguin, 2005), page 285
[68] Steve Coll, “Steve Coll” Interview with PBS Frontline. PBS Frontline: October 3, 2006:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/taliban/interviews/coll.html
[69] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), page 326
[70] ToI, “CIA worked in tandem with Pak to create Taliban”. The Times of India: March 7, 2001:
http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/taliban.htm
[71] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), pages 279-280
[72] Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism. (London: André Deutsch Ltd, 1999), page 168
[73] Michael Moran, Bin Laden comes home to roost. MSNBC: August 24, 1998:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101/
[74] Veronique Maurus and Marc Rock, The Most Dreaded Man of the United States, Controlled a Long Time by the CIA. Le Monde Diplomatique: September 14, 2001: http://www.wanttoknow.info/010914lemonde
[75] Gerald Posner, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. (New York: Random House, 2003), page 29
[76] Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens. (New York: Penguin, 2008), pages 7-9
[77] AP, Al Qaeda Financing Documents Turn Up in Bosnia Raid. Fox News: February 19, 2003:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,78937,00.html
[78] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: pages 140-141
[79] Ibid, page 141.
[80] Robin Cook, The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means. The Guardian: July 8, 2005:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jul/08/july7.development
[81] Pierre-Henri Bunel, Al Qaeda -- the Database. Global Research: November 20, 2005:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BUN20051120&articleId=1291
globalresearch.ca
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Terror Acts in US: Who Gains? (I)
Olga SHEDROVA, Strategic Culture Foundation, 03.05.2013
http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2013/05/03/terror-acts-in-us-who-gains-i.html
If the terrorist acts had not taken place, they should have been invented. Since a long time the weakening of US global clout has been an issue in focus. The Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World report says the US economic and military leadership is going to become a thing of the past pretty soon. Instigating anti-terror campaign invariably serves US interests. First: it facilitates solution of internal problems. Second, the vanishing empire has no chances to preserve global hegemony. So, it is absolutely important to prevent global competitors from getting hold of and dividing the heritage.
What has really happened?
According to official version, the Tsarnaev brothers, the Chechens by origin, are the perpetrators of crime. It means a Russian trace is found from the very start, something to inevitably affect the US-Russian relations. Now, it is expected that Russia will be accused of not doing enough to fight «Islamic terrorism», something to be followed by demands to allow US military presence on Russian, Central Asia and Caucasus soil.
The Boston tragedy is not the only terrorist act on US soil taking place in a short period of time. The explosions in Texas and Atlanta, the ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Senators Roger Wicker and Carl Levin, all these actions are instigating panic in the country. But it strikes an eye that in other cases the perpetrators are not given so much attention to, if any. Perhaps it’s not so easy to create an enemy image that would be convincing enough to be imposed on the world. And a lot of things are really peculiar here…
First, the terrorist acts had very different patterns and wild geography to be committed by one organization. Second, no group has claimed responsibility so far, though publicity is something terrorists want normally. Third, there are too many inconsistencies.
The Boston bombs are reported to be made from ordinary pressure cookers. Like if planned by scenario, the information popped up right in time to make remember that an English language media outlet published an article describing the way to make a pressure cooker bomb in 2010. So, it’s hard to imagine Arab speaking terrorists discuss the bomb making process in native tongue keeping away from other people who could hear them. As one can see, it was enough just to post the information in a common accessible-for-all internet outlet in the language the US anti-terrorist agencies could understand. And it would sure get the attention of interested audience and be used in the right place when the time comes.
The second inconsistency is the Boston marathon pictures with Navy SEALs around. The uniform and detonators are to easily distinguishable for people and cameras, installed in great number in US cities after the 9/11.
Third - an egregious blunder. The Facebook page devoted to Boston explosion victims had appeared a few hours before the event actually took place. The posting time was 7.37. The explosion time was around 1500. Neither terrorists, nor US special services ever gave a reason to be suspected of mental retardation. So the action had been planned in advance to strike the attention of amateur-conspirologists.
Special services practice cover-up operations, things like stuffing open sources with information destined to divert attention from real deeds and plans. The presence of uniformed SEALS on pictures and visible slip-up related to the Facebook page look like disguised cover-up. The home-grown conspirologists will reveal the «scoop», while readers will be satisfied spreading open secrets around.
Real goals and the people behind the Boston tragedy are not known and there is a little chance it will ever come in the open. But the question who benefits from intensification of «fight against terrorism» is easier to answer.
After the Twin Towers were destroyed on September 11, 2001, $800 billion have been spent to upgrade US security. As a result of fiscal cliff, the US faces $85 billion cuts this year, including $46 billion for the military. The cuts to government agencies total $1.2 trillion over 10 years. 800,000 civilian employees are facing furloughs, the Navy is to ground four air wings, and the Air Force will reduce training flights. The United States has already cancelled the plans to deploy advanced versions of missile defense systems in Poland and Romania. Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon increased,
At the same time the Obama policy evokes angry reaction from Republican hawks. For instance, the decision to suspend the fourth phase of missile defense plans in Europe made them accuse the President of collusion with Moscow. The reluctance to launch military intervention in Syria and Iran, the «betrayal» of Israel and military cuts also pour gasoline into the fire.
The Financial Times says tense debates on US security issues are to start in a few days. Influential German Die Welt points out the Boston act investigation means a lot for Obama. The Americans may question his credibility concerning security matters.
The cookers explosions, allegedly an open secret since 2010, and the Facebook dumb move - it all illustrated the Obama’s inability to tackle the issues related to national security. It’s a bit more complicated with SEALs; the President will have hard time proving that he never ordered the Special Forces to start man hunting their own citizens. Obviously, the temptation is high to accuse the Democrats of failing to properly control the special services.
Whatever, the new wave of terror across the United States will certainly spur the increase of expenditure for military and fight against terror purposes. Just exactly what the military lobby wants.
«New world order» and Jihad alliance
The 9/11 tragedy entailed the «global fight against terror» declared by then President Bush Jr. In reality it resulted in Al Qaeda branches coming to power in many countries of Middle East and boosting US presence in Eurasia. It seems to be surprising at first glance. But the United States launched the practice of using terrorism to its advantage as far back as the middle of the XX century. The best example is Irangate under Ronald Reagan. Then the Central Intelligence Agency sold arms to Iranian terrorists to use the money for funding Nicaraguan contras.
The United States played the main part in provoking the rise of «Islamic terrorism». Back in January 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski promulgated the long-term «strategy of tension» in the region; being employed to ultimately divide and conquer the Middle East and Central Asia. The aim was the destabilization of the region’s countries in the name of preserving the West’s hegemony over the «Arc of Crisis.» According to him, thought threatening for the West, it was the best weapon against the Soviet Union.
The Global Research has published the article by Professor Peter Dale Scott called The US-Al Qaeda Alliance: Bosnia, Kosovo and Now Libya. Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists. The article says «Brzezinski did not hesitate to play the terrorist card against the Soviet Union: he reinforced the efforts of the SAVAK (the Shah of Iran’s intelligence service) to work with the Islamist antecedents of al-Qaeda to destabilize Afghanistan, in a way which soon led to a Soviet invasion of that country.8 At the time, as he later boasted, Brzezinski told Carter, «We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War». CIA Director William Casey continued this strategy of using terrorists against the USSR in Afghanistan. At first the CIA channeled aid through the Pakistani ISI (Interservices Intelligence Service) to their client Afghan extremists like Osama Bin Laden to help him in efforts to create the Arab-Afghan Foreign Legion (would-be Al Qaeda). According to Scott, Al Qaeda has been a chief US ally in all wars since 1989. For instance, the US supported Islamists in Bosnia and Kosovo; in 1993 the formations of Al Qaeda were used to topple the President of Azerbaijan. Al Qaeda provoked interventions in Afghanistan and Sudan, Islamic terrorists are used by the US to boost its presence in Central Asia and separate the Caucasus from Russia.
The extremists are sparring partners of the US fighting the «axis of evil», creating pretexts for accusing the US adversaries of involvement into terrorist activities. In January-February 2012, the United States and the European Union adopted «crippling sanctions» to make Iranian economy go down. Other countries were reluctant to join, as well as some US and European businessmen. Like if on order, an explosion took place near the Israeli embassy in Delhi, at the very same time it was reported an explosive device was found near the embassy of Israel in Tbilisi. Iran was to blame, the sanctions were approved. The Iranian trace appears to be leading to the Mujahidin-e-Khalq Organization, which is extremely hostile to the incumbent Iranian government. The United States planned to delete it from the terrorist list. World media shied away from highlighting the issue.
Today the US longtime allies from the ranks of Muslim Brothers and Al Qaeda have surfaced the wave of the Arab Spring to come to power in some countries of Maghreb and the Middle East, Washington has supported extremists fighting legitimate governments in Libya and Syria.
(To be concluded)
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We appear to be in the company, er, of CIA aristocracy:
Tsarnaev wife Skull and Bones, CIA family connections
BY 21WIRE, MAY 4, 2013
21st Century Wire says… Another incredible coincidence?
http://21stcenturywire.com/2013/05/04/tsarnaev-wife-skull-and-bones-cia-family-connections/
As more insights into the life and death of dead Boston Bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev continues to unfold, based on the available evidence – it’s becoming more and more obvious that he was either an FBI and/or CIA informant (or both), who was chosen to be set up as a fall guy, or patsy for the Boston Bombings. In this instance, he would also have needed a “handler” – someone who could help to steer and influence his day-to-day decision making. That person could be someone was very close to him.
Compare and contrast with the bio presented by the CIA’s paper of record, the NYT:
Path From ‘Social Butterfly’ to Boston Suspect’s Widow
By MICHAEL COOPER, SERGE F. KOVALESKI, RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and JOHN ELIGON
May 3, 2013
When Katherine Russell arrived as a freshman at Suffolk University just over five years ago, she seemed to bond so well with her new roommates in their lively dorm opposite Boston Common that one classmate likened them to sitcom characters. “They reminded me of the show ‘Sex and the City,’ ” he recalled. “Two of them were free-spirited, one was materialistic and Katherine was the social butterfly.”
Then Ms. Russell began dating Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a boxer from Cambridge, Mass., known for his flashy clothes, and her life began to change. As he became a steadily more religious Muslim, Ms. Russell converted to Islam. She started to cover her head with a hijab in public, startling some classmates. She dropped out of college in 2010, the year they got married and had a daughter.
She moved into his family’s run-down apartment in Cambridge, trading her old life of New England comfort and privilege — her father and grandfather both went to Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale — for the struggles of an immigrant family, with money so tight that they were on public assistance at times.
Now Ms. Russell, 24, is known around the world as the widow of the man suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon with his brother before he was killed April 19 after a shootout with the police. And she has attracted the interest of the F.B.I., which is trying to determine whether she knew about the bombings or helped the two brothers in any way, knowingly or unknowingly, before or after the attacks.
The surviving bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, has told investigators that he and his brother built their bombs in the Cambridge apartment where Ms. Russell lived with Tamerlan, 26, and their daughter, Zahira, a toddler, according to two law enforcement officials. Other officials raised the possibility that the bombs may have been assembled elsewhere.
Investigators are also interested in a text message Ms. Russell sent to her husband after the F.B.I. released photographs of him and his brother a few days after the bombings, two other law enforcement officials said. (This week, the F.B.I. took samples of Ms. Russell’s DNA, and determined that her fingerprints and DNA did not match samples found on some bomb fragments, the officials said.)
Ms. Russell’s lawyers issued a statement saying that the marathon bombings had “caused profound distress and sorrow to Katie and her family” and adding that “the reports of involvement by her husband and brother-in-law came as an absolute shock to them all.”
The recent turn of events has stunned Ms. Russell’s friends, relatives, former classmates and neighbors. In North Kingstown, R.I., where she grew up, a newspaper, The Standard-Times, summed up local sentiment in a front-page headline. “NK native widow of Boston bombing suspect,” it read. “Former high school classmate calls situation ‘odd.’ ”
Ms. Russell grew up in a comfortable home on a leafy street there, the daughter of a doctor. Stephen Constantine, 23, who, like Ms. Russell, played alto saxophone in a middle school band, recalled her as popular and a good musician. “She could play more complex music than I could and learn it faster, and her sound was warmer and fuller bodied,” he said. In high school, she won an award for her drawing of a cat menacing a mouse. “It was a large colored-pencil drawing of a black cat with its paw raised and a gray mouse scooching out of the way,” her art teacher, Amos Trout Paine, recalled. She quoted a David Bowie song, “Quicksand,” in her high school yearbook.
Shortly after graduating, she had a brush with the law: she was arrested and charged with shoplifting five items worth $67 from an Old Navy at the Warwick Mall, according to a police report. She performed community service and paid money toward a general restitution fund that benefits crime victims, and the case was dismissed. The lawyer who represented her, J. Patrick O’Neill, who serves in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, said he could not recall details of the case or much about Ms. Russell.
In 2007, she moved to Boston to major in communications at Suffolk. It was there that friends introduced her to Mr. Tsarnaev, who had gone to a nearby community college. They dated on and off, people who knew them said, and eventually Ms. Russell converted to Islam.
She seemed to embrace her new religion willingly and enthusiastically, said someone who occasionally attended Russell family gatherings, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to betray the family’s confidence. “She was infatuated with this guy, and she adopted that religion,” the person said, recalling a dinner in Boston when she announced that she had decided to start wearing a head scarf as part of her faith. “It was a big surprise.”
Mr. Tsarnaev had a rough side: a domestic violence complaint was lodged against him in 2009 by another girlfriend, officials said. His father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said last month that he had “hit her lightly.”
But things seemed promising for the young couple in 2010, said Julian Pollard, 31, a boxer who recounted a conversation with Mr. Tsarnaev that year at a Golden Gloves tournament in Lowell, Mass. “He said the training was going great, that he was happy with his faith and that he had just met a girl and he was very happy about that,” he said. “He told me that he was engaged to her, or was about to propose.”
They married on June 21, 2010, in a 15-minute ceremony in an office on the third floor of the Masjid Al Quran, on a quiet residential street in Dorchester. Imam Taalib Mahdee said that he had not met the couple before the ceremony, and that she was the one who had called and asked to be married there. “They were a happy couple,” he said. Their marriage certificate listed his occupation as driver, hers as student.
But Ms. Russell did not go back to college that fall. Mr. Tsarnaev, who had given up boxing after being barred from national Golden Gloves tournaments because he was not a United States citizen, was growing increasingly religious, neighbors said. Money was scarce: the family’s income was supplemented by public assistance and food stamps from September 2011 to November 2012, state officials said. And last year, Mr. Tsarnaev left his wife and daughter behind in Cambridge for six months while he traveled to Dagestan to see his father, and to visit Chechnya.
Her mother-in-law, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, said in an interview that Mr. Tsarnaev had wanted Ms. Russell and their child to move to Dagestan with him, and that she had been thinking of it. “She herself agreed; she said she wanted to study a different culture, language,” Ms. Tsarnaeva said.
At times Ms. Russell supported the family by working as a home health aide — “working long hours, caring for people in their homes who are unable to care for themselves,” her lawyers said in the statement.
One neighbor said that Ms. Russell often seemed shy and quiet in the presence of her husband, but warmer and friendlier when he was not around. Another neighbor recalled hearing yells coming from the apartment.
A relative said that Ms. Russell attended family gatherings less frequently, and withdrew a little from her old social life. “I think she believes in Islam,” said the relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and who said that she had seemed happy with her husband. “I don’t think she was coerced. I think she’s faithful to the religion.”
On April 19, as the news spread that the Tsarnaev brothers were believed to have committed the marathon bombings and had gone on a nightlong crime spree that involved the fatal shooting of a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a carjacking and a gunfight with the police in which Tamerlan was killed, a neighbor knocked at the door of their third-floor apartment in Cambridge, where Ms. Russell had apparently just heard the news from a relative. “She was in utter shock,” the neighbor said. “Utter shock.”
Then law enforcement officers arrived and ordered them all out. Their downstairs neighbor Albrect Ammon, 18, said that Ms. Russell, who was dressed all in black, tried to borrow a cellphone from another woman, but an officer snatched it away, saying she was the suspect’s wife.
Reporting was contributed by William K. Rashbaum and Jennifer Preston from New York, Deborah Sontag from Boston and Ellen Barry from Moscow. Research was contributed by Sheelagh McNeill, Susan Beachy, Kitty Bennett and Jack Styczynski.
CIA and the Internet
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
Snowden and the war between the CIA and the Pentagon
http://xymphora.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/snowden-and-war-between-cia-and-pentagon.html
FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 2013
"Did someone help Ed Snowden punch a hole in the NSA?" by Jon Rappoport:
"Snowden worked for the CIA. He was pushed up the ranks quickly, from an IT position in the US to a posting in Geneva, under diplomatic cover, to run security on the CIA’s computer systems there.
Then, Snowden quit the CIA and eventually ended up at Booz Allen, a private contractor. He was assigned to NSA, where he stole the secrets and exposed the NSA.
The CIA and NSA have a long contentious relationship. The major issue is, who is king of US intelligence? We’re talking about an internal war.
Snowden could have been the CIA’s man at NSA, where certain CIA players helped him access files he wouldn’t have been able to tap otherwise."
"NSA leaker: are there serious cracks in Ed Snowden’s story?" by Jon Rappoport
"Did the CIA give the NSA documents to Ed Snowden?" by Jon Rappoport
The two big oddities in the Snowden story are his remarkable employment history and his remarkable access to high-level secrets for somebody who was a relatively low-level employee of an outside contractor. Snowden was recruited as a CIA asset at an early age, probably is still a CIA asset today, and could very easily have been manipulated by the CIA into a position where he could plausibly pose as a whistleblower against the NSA. This does not impugn his personal credibility or the credibility of his information, but answers some big mysteries about how he came to be the face of all the secrets.
Barry just replaced the #2 at the CIA with an outsider: "President Obama's pick for the CIA's second-in-command once held erotica nights at her Baltimore bookstore" She replaces a career CIA guy who retired, in the words of John Brennan, "to spend more time with his family and to pursue other professional opportunities". Standard firing words. A thirty-three year CIA veteran replaced by Barry with an erotica expert.
Ever since 9/11, the CIA has been losing power and influence to the Pentagon. Most recently, Barry is moving the current jewel of American might, the drone program, from the CIA to the Pentagon. The NSA is part of the Pentagon (something that is seldom mentioned). The way things are going, erotica may be all the CIA has left.