At the start of June, Admiral Robert Bauer, head of NATO’s military committee, announced that the military alliance had finalised plans to recognise state-backed cyberattacks on its members as a dedicated pretext for activating Article 5. Reportedly “a joint decision of all allies,” from now on, foreign hacking blitzes can be countered with a collective NATO response, up to and including military measures. Bauer’s disclosure passed the media by entirely – but this is a seismic development, heralding a modern, digital form of ‘false flag’.
Article 5, which provides for collective defence in the event a NATO member is attacked, was a core component of the military alliance’s founding treaty. While it has been invoked just once – by the US, in the wake of 9/11, to invade Afghanistan – there have been efforts to spark it before and since. Most recently, in November 2022, the government of Ukraine falsely declared a missile fired by Kiev that struck Poland, killing two people, was Russian in origin.
The purpose of this deceit was undoubtedly to embroil NATO formally and directly in the proxy war. Wise to the ruse, US officials harshly rebuked President Volodmoyr Zelensky publicly for the World War-threatening fraud. Such incidents amply underline Article 5’s susceptibility to abuse. Yet apparently, military alliance chiefs – and the bloc’s members – are keen to ever-expand its terms, well-beyond its initial remit. Adding cyberattacks to the roster of grounds for collective response is a long-standing objective.
In August 2019, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg authored a bombastic op-ed declaring the military alliance would “guard its cyber domain and invoke collective defence if required.” A “serious cyberattack” on one member state could be “treated as an attack against us all,” he wrote, triggering Article 5 in the process. Fast forward two years, and Keith Alexander, US National Security Agency director 2005 – 2014, called on the ‘Five Eyes’ global spying network to construct a global unified cyberattack “radar”:
“Imagine if we built a radar picture for cyber that covered not only what impacts Australia, but what impacts other countries, and we could share, in real time, threats that are hitting our countries… What we can do is share information and work together… Cyber is going to be hugely important for our future. It’s the one area where adversaries can attack Australia and the US without trying to cross the oceans… We have this anomaly: how are you gonna defend that which you can’t see?”
Alexander, who lied brazenly to the public about his agency’s spying capabilities – including while while testifying under oath to Congress – during his time as NSA chief, suggested this worldwide dragnet would contribute significantly to collective defence, in the obvious spirit of NATO’s Article 5. Given “proposals” for Orwellian, futuristic resources from Western politicians and military and intelligence officials almost invariably presage their real-world rollout, we can only assume in light of Bauer’s announcement such a “radar” is incoming.
‘Security Failures’
This interpretation is reinforced by Bauer observing how invoking Article 5 could only happen once it was confirmed a cyberattack was carried out by a state actor, not a private person or structure. “In that case, it would not be clear who to go to war with,” he added. It’s certainly a source of some relief that NATO is committed to securing clarity on “who to go to war with”, before launching a military “response” to a cyberattack.
However, these comments illuminate a very obvious, grave problem with adding cyberattacks to Article 5’s ambit. Identifying who or what is responsible for them to an absolute certainty is extremely difficult. This task is further complicated by a frequent lack of certainty over whether hackers operating from a particular state are doing so at the behest of authorities. For example, much has been made in Britain recently of Russian hacking group Qilin, which supposedly infiltrated NHS servers.
Mainstream media reports have universally framed Qilin as a malign instrument of the Kremlin, although whether Russian officials command the group, let alone even know of its existence, is far from clear. A representative iNews article refers to Qilin as “a syndicate made up of more than 100 groups…not believed to be under the direct control [emphasis added] of the Russian government.” Instead, Qilin is claimed to be “a useful tool of global disruption the Kremlin is happy to turn a blind eye to.”
Further muddying the picture, it has been confirmed that Western intelligence services can falsely attribute cyberattacks, with devastating effect. In 2017, CIA files published by WikiLeaks revealed how the Agency masks its hacking exploits, to make it appear another state actor was responsible. Dubbed ‘Marble Framework’, among other things the resource inserts foreign-language text into malware source codes to misdirect security analysts. The Framework can obfuscate in this manner via Arabic, Chinese, English, Farsi, Korean, and Russian.
Excerpt from leaked Marble Framework files
Moreover, CIA hackers employ crafty tricks and double bluffs to reinforce these bogus attributions, such as creating the appearance of attempts to conceal foreign-language text. Thus, forensic investigators are successfully conned into concluding even more strongly that the country framed by Langley is responsible. Unbelievably, this seismic disclosure prompted no Western journalist to reappraise the widely received narrative that Moscow’s GRU was responsible for the hack and leak of damaging Democratic National Committee emails in 2016.
That conclusion, universally reinforced by the Western media, was initially peddled by Matt Tait, a former GCHQ spy. He didn’t base his conclusions on anything technical, but “basic operational security failures” he detected on the part of the individual(s) who released the communications, including their computer username referencing the founder of the Soviet Union’s secret police, and “ham-fisted” attempts to pose as Romanian. Which is, of course, precisely how the CIA would cover its own tracks via Marble Framework.
‘Irrevocable Proof’
There has similarly been no mainstream discussion of why the Agency would seek to acquire and maintain this capability in the first place. Now that NATO considers cyberattacks an Article 5 matter, this question has never been a more urgent question, given the CIA’s extensive and deplorable history of false-flag operations to overthrow governments, and kickstart conflicts.
For example, in April 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched a welter of covert actions to undermine Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, in order to lay the foundations of his ouster. One key tactic in which the pair engaged was bombing mosques, and homes of prominent Muslim figures by operatives posing as members of Tehran’s Communist Party. A subsequent internal review of the coup noted that this incendiary activity mobilised Mullahs to take action against Mosaddegh.
These efforts were judged to have contributed to the “positive outcome” of the wider coup effort. Such a glowing appraisal of these false flag manoeuvres may have informed the dimensions of Operation Northwoods, a daring set of proposals under which the CIA would stage and commit acts of terrorism against US military and civilian targets. These could then be blamed on the government of Fidel Castro, precipitating all-out war with Cuba.
Potential false-flag actions outlined in extraordinary declassified documents include assassinating of Cuban immigrants on US soil, sinking boats ferrying Cuban refugees to Florida, shooting down US civilian airlines, blowing up US ships, and more. One specific element of Operation Northwoods is particularly relevant to consider in light of alleged state cyberattacks becoming Article 5 worthy. If the 1962 Mercury launch – the first US orbital spaceflight – went awry, Castro would be blamed by concocting:
“Irrevocable proof… the fault lies with the Communists… this to be accomplished by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”
While Northwoods was ultimately rejected by President John F. Kennedy, the US military and intelligence community continued constructing false-flag blueprints thereafter. In 1963, a Pentagon policy paper advocated making it appear that Cuba had attacked a member of the Organization of American States (OAS), justifying US retaliation:
“A contrived ‘Cuban’ attack on an OAS member could be set up, and the attacked state could be urged to take measures of self-defense and request assistance from the US and OAS.”
Langley’s cyberattack connivances have surely only grown more sophisticated, and more complex to unravel, in the years since Marble Framework was publicly exposed. Pinning blame on a foreign country for a cyberattack it didn’t actually commit is no doubt even easier and more effective today. Resultantly, a false flag tripwire for Beijing, Moscow, or any other Washington-mandated ‘enemy’ state to unwittingly and unwillingly stumble over, triggering the outbreak of global war, has now been forged by NATO.
In corporate America, hostile takeovers are commonplace. They occur when an aggressor—a larger corporation or rich individuals—seizes control of a smaller corporation without asking permission.
What few recognize is that the United States itself has been subjected to a hostile takeover. Since the aggressor, the illegitimate settler colony known as “Israel,” is much smaller than the US, the takeover has necessarily been surreptitious.
As of June, 2024, Israel’s gradual takeover of the US has become obvious and undeniable—a proverbial “elephant in the living room.” In this election year, all three major presidential candidates compete for Israel’s favor, even as the whole world recoils from the zionist genocide of Gaza. The Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, supplies the butcher Netanyahu with all the weapons he needs to massacre tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children, uttering only occasional peeps of pro forma protest in a lame attempt to mollify his base.
Biden’s Republican challenger, Donald Trump, openly supports the genocide and calls on Israel to “finish the job” (of massacring Palestinians). Most bizarrely of all, the independent challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who offers a refreshing alternative to mainstream approaches on other issues, has staked out the most pro-genocide position of the three.
Kennedy’s position is puzzling for many reasons. As the “alternative” candidate, he might be expected to take an alternative position on Palestine, especially since it would markedly enhance his slim chances of becoming president. Young Americans oppose genocide and side with Palestine, as the ongoing campus protests demonstrate. If RFK Jr. harnessed that youthful energy by reversing course and announcing his support for Palestine, he would immediately gain tens or even hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic youthful volunteers who would start ringing doorbells and promoting his candidacy, just as anti-Vietnam-war students did for his father in 1968.
Since polls show that most Democratic voters oppose Biden’s pro-Israel stance, and that American public opinion overall is following world public opinion in the direction of ever-stronger support for Palestine, RFK Jr. could conceivably win a plurality of votes, and the presidency, by leading that shift. Instead, he has chosen to doom his candidacy by echoing the ultra-genocidal ravings of his handler, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach.
Though Kennedy decries the corrupt forces that have taken over America, and denounces the coups d’état that killed his father (1968) and uncle (1963), he seemingly fails to recognize who was behind the takeover and the killings. Kennedy knows and openly states that his father was not killed by the hypnotized Palestinian patsy Sirhan Sirhan. He acknowledges Sirhan’s innocence and has worked to free him from prison. But the significance of the fact that the perpetrators chose a Palestinian to falsely take the blame apparently escapes him.
In his blockbuster book, Brothers, David Talbot presents convincing evidence that Robert F. Kennedy was murdered because he was about to become president—and use the power of his office to bring to justice the killers of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. So, who were those killers? Michael Collins Piper’s Final Judgment makes a strong case that David Ben Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister who resigned under pressure from JFK, and Israel’s CIA mole James Jesus Angleton, were the ringleaders. The motive: Prevent JFK from shutting down Israel’s nuclear program, and insert Israel’s asset Lyndon B. Johnson into office to oversee the 1967 land-grab war.
Anyone who doubts that Johnson was an Israeli asset needs to read Peter Hounam’s Operation Cyanide: How the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III. Hounem discovered evidence that then-President Johnson scrambled US nuclear bombers on highest-level alert more than one hour before the USS Liberty was attacked by Israel on June 8, 1967. Then when the ship miraculously stayed afloat, radioed for help, and identified its attackers as Israelis, the President of the United States issued a treasonous order: “I want that goddamn ship going to the bottom. No help. Recall the wings.”
Most Americans have no idea that Israel attempted to sink the unarmed US spy ship USS Liberty and murder its crew of 293 sailors so the attack could be falsely blamed on Egypt. Nor do they realize that the zionists succeeded in killing 34 sailors and wounding 171. Even less do they know that the sitting US president was complicit and yearned for the death of every one of those 293 American servicemen.
Why don’t more Americans know about the USS Liberty massacre? A draconian cover-up, in which surviving sailors were told to keep quiet or bad things would happen to their families, persisted for decades. Simultaneously the mainstream media published a smattering of ludicrous assertions that the Israelis had attacked the ship by accident. Those were rare exceptions to a general blackout on the topic.
Why would the media cover up such a sensational story? That question raises an even more basic one: Who controls the media? The president who followed Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, knew, but was afraid to talk about it in public. Privately, he discussed the matter with friends and advisors like the Rev. Billy Graham, who told Nixon that powerful Jews “are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.” “You must not let them know,” Nixon replied.
“This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain” Graham continued. Nixon: “Do you believe that?” Graham: “Yes, sir.” Nixon: “Oh boy. So do I. I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.”
Today, as we approach the 57th anniversary of Israel’s massacre of American sailors aboard the USS Liberty, the United States of America has gone even further down the drain than it was in 1972, when Nixon’s conversation with Graham took place. Today, anyone who mentions the extraordinary power of America’s 2% Jewish minority, specifically its organized lobby groups and sway over media, finance, politics and organized crime (which are not mutually exclusive categories) will be viciously smeared, their careers and reputations ruined by a group so powerful that it has prohibited any mention of its power.
Some try to avoid the smears by speaking of the “zionist lobby” rather than the “Jewish lobby.” But the distinction is largely semantic. Virtually all of the power of organized Jewry supports zionism, including every one of the 50 groups represented at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Since the zionist entity defines itself as the “Jewish state” and its presumptive citizens as all Jews on Earth, regardless of where they live, calling its American contingent “the Jewish lobby” is reasonable and accurate—just as Irish-Americans who lobby for Ireland, albeit without the power of their Jewish counterparts, are an “Irish lobby.”
Others prefer the term “zionist” because it includes so-called Christian zionists like Billy Graham. But as the tapes of his conversations with Nixon show, Graham’s professed zionism was insincere. The only reason Graham pretended to support Israel was the same reason Nixon pretended to support Israel: Both men were terrified by the power of the Jews. And while there are, no doubt, some sincere Christian zionists, they are mere useful idiots in the quintessentially Jewish project of building an ever-expanding, ever-more-powerful Jewish state representing not just Israel’s Jewish citizens, but all the Jews of the world.
Looking back on the 1967 war and its context, including the USS Liberty massacre, one is struck by the Jewish state’s willingness to engage in risky and reckless behavior. Normally, if a small nation of just a few million people murdered a sitting US president, as Israel did in 1963, it might expect to be scrubbed from the face of the Earth. “Oy vey, if we get caught!” Israeli leader Golda Meir was reported to have said shortly after the JFK assassination. Meir also said, on two occasions, that Israel would destroy the world with nuclear weapons rather than accept military defeat. (The source for both statements was Meir’s personal friend, former lead Mideast BBC correspondent Alan Hart.)
Today, the zionist entity is still taking enormous risks—and pushing the world toward nuclear Armageddon. Its genocide of Gaza has cast it as the enemy of all humanity. Its repeated attacks on regional countries, and its assassinations of Iran’s top generals and suspected assassination of the Iranian president and foreign minister, have brought the Muslim East, and the world, to the proverbial precipice. And its complete death grip on power in America has destroyed the American republic and is driving the now-fascist US empire to destruction.
Like the brave soldiers on the wounded USS Liberty, who cobbled together makeshift communications equipment after the zionists had bombed their antenna, and managed to broadcast a message revealing the identity of their attackers, we need to piece together what is left of our Enlightenment-era free communications network and use it to inform the world who the enemy really is.
Being a college town, Palo Alto once offered a multitude of excellent new and used bookstores, perhaps as many as a dozen or so. But the rise of Amazon produced a great extinction in that business sector, and I think only two now survive, probably still more than for most towns of comparable size.
Amazon and its rivals have obviously become hugely beneficial book-buying resources that I frequently use, but they fail to offer the benefit of randomly browsing shelves and occasionally stumbling across something serendipitous. So I regularly stop by the monthly used book sale put on by Friends of the Palo Alto Library, whose offerings are also very attractively priced, with good quality paperbacks often going for as little as a quarter.
While browsing that sale a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a hardcover copy of Newsroom Confidential, a short 2022 insider account of mainstream journalism by Margaret Sullivan, who had spent four years as the Public Editor of the New York Times. I’d occasionally read her columns in that paper and had seen one or two favorable reviews of the book, so despite its pricey cost—a full $3—I bought and read it, hoping to get a sense of what she’d observed during her term as the designated reader-advocate at our national newspaper of record.
As she told her story, prior to joining the Times she had spent her entire career at the far smaller Buffalo News of her native city, eventually rising to become its editor. Although she’d been happy in that position, after eight years she decided to apply for an opening at the Times, and jumped at the offer when she received it.
Based upon her narrative, Sullivan seems very much a moderate liberal in her views, not too different from most others in her journalistic profession despite being raised in a family of more conservative blue-collar Catholics in Upstate New York. She opened the Prologue of her book by denouncing Donald Trump’s infamous “Stop the Steal” DC rally of early 2021 and she described the invasion of our Capitol by outraged Trumpists as “one of the most appalling moments in all of American history,” sentiments probably shared by at least 90% of her mainstream colleagues.
Born in 1957, Sullivan explained that as a first grader she and everyone else in her community had been horrified by the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, our first Catholic president. Less than a decade later, she was transfixed by the Watergate Scandal and the subsequent Senate hearings that led to the fall of President Richard Nixon. Like so many others of her generation, she had idolized Woodward and Bernstein, the crusading young reporters who broke the case and brought down a crooked president, especially admiring their portrayal by movie stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the film version of All the President’s Men. Along with many other idealistic young Americans, Sullivan decided to embark upon a journalistic career as a consequence.
As far as I can tell, Sullivan seems to have been a committed and honest professional during the decades that followed, describing some of her mundane minor conflicts with colleagues but generally trying to tell their side of the story as well. As a lateral hire from a smallish Upstate newspaper, she had moved rather cautiously after joining the illustrious Times, and although she sometimes took a bit of pride in a few of her columns that attracted considerable readership or were widely Tweeted out, none of these much stuck in my mind.
As the end of her four year tenure approached, the Times tried to persuade her to extend it, but she preferred to move over to the Washington Post and become one of their media columnists.
The various tidbits of gossip she reported from those newspapers were hardly earth-shattering. She’d had a private dinner with top Times editor Jill Abramson one evening only to be shocked the next morning when the latter was summarily fired by the publisher, so she passed along the speculation about what combination of factors might have been responsible for that sudden purge. Abramson had been the first woman to serve as executive editor of the Times, and she was replaced by her deputy Dean Baquet, who became the first black to hold that post. Sullivan explained that the two had long had a contentious relationship, and many members of the newsroom speculated that Baquet had demanded that the Times leadership choose between the two of them. Apparently Abramson had a difficult personality while Baquet was much more charming, so even though he sometimes threw “temper tantrums” he was able to get away with such behavior, and he came out on top.
Although Sullivan never broke a major story nor won any important journalistic prize, she seemed very much a solid team-player rather than a prima donna and got along well with her professional colleagues. Therefore, I was hardly surprised that she was chosen to join the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2011 and eventually became executive director of a Columbia University center for journalist ethics.
Her book was a rather short one, so although I didn’t really get much out of it, it also hardly absorbed too many hours of my time. But what struck me in reading it was how a longtime editor and media columnist could have lived through some of the most shocking and dramatic events of the last sixty years without ever seeming to seriously question any of them. The Kennedy Assassinations of the 1960s, the 9/11 Attacks and the long War on Terror, the 2016 Russian election interference that put Donald Trump in the White House, the global Covid epidemic beginning in early 2020 and the massive social upheaval following the police murder of George Floyd later that same year—all those seminal incidents were discussed in her text yet she never seemed to entertain the slightest doubts about those standard narratives.
At one point she noted the striking collapse of public confidence in the honesty and reliability of American journalism, which had plummeted from around 72% soon after Watergate to just 36% these days. But she never asked herself whether the public might have a sound basis for such rapidly growing distrust of our media.
In reading Sullivan’s account of her journalistic career, two names from Shakespeare’s Hamlet came to mind: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Those two Danish courtiers had remained totally oblivious to the enormous events taking place around them and suffered a dire fate as a consequence, though they later became the protagonists of Tom Stoppard’s absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Although fifteen or twenty years ago, I might have shared Sullivan’s tendency to ignore any deeper realities of modern American history, her book was published in 2022 and I wondered whether she had ever seriously explored the full range of information available on the Internet during the decades she had spent as an editor and a media columnist.
As she casually described some of the watershed events of her lifetime, always seeming to take them entirely at face value, I smiled a bit since over the years I had carefully analyzed most of them in my own American Pravda series and usually come to very different conclusions. But what jumped out at me was her discussion of a much smaller incident from near the end of her tenure at the Times. Although that story has been almost totally forgotten, it filled nearly four pages of her short book, occupying almost as much space as Watergate and far more than the 9/11 Attacks.
In December 2015, terrorist gunmen had attacked the public employees of San Bernardino, California at their offices, killing fourteen and wounding more than twenty, the worst mass shooting in America since Sandy Hook three years earlier. Within hours, a massive local police mobilization had located, shot, and killed the Islamic fanatics responsible and all the details of the case are provided in a very comprehensive Wikipedia article that runs more than 19,000 words.
Sullivan became involved in a controversy over whether the pro-jihadi social media posts left by one of the killers had been correctly described by an anonymous government source, whose information was the basis of a provocative front page Times story that became an important element in the political debate. Her critical column made waves and even drew the involvement of her newspaper’s top editor before the matter was ultimately settled to her complete satisfaction.
At the time of that mass shooting, I was heavily focused upon the final stages of preparing my ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the Harvard Board of Overseers, but certain elements of that incident stuck in my mind, and although Sullivan never seemed to have questioned any of its strange details, I certainly did.
During the previous few years I’d grown increasingly suspicious of many of the watershed events of our country’s modern history, but I hadn’t yet launched my American Pravda series nor even published a single article outlining any of my conspiratorial views. However, certain elements of this mass shooting raised red flags in my mind, and I soon republished a short column by longtime libertarian writer Gary North highlighting some of those issues.
On December 2nd, public employees of San Bernardino County were holding a day-long training exercise and holiday party at their offices when a deadly attack suddenly began. According to all the eyewitnesses, three large white men, wearing ski masks and dressed head-to-toe in military-style commando-outfits suddenly burst into the gathering and began raking the terrified victims with gunfire from their assault-rifles, killing fourteen and wounding more than twenty others. Although after nine years many of the YouTube videos providing the statements of survivors are no longer available, the CBS Evening News phone interview with a seemingly very credible eyewitness is still on the Internet and worth viewing.
Some 300 local law enforcement officers were quickly mobilized and although they arrived too late to catch the perpetrators, they began patrolling the vicinity, hoping to find the killers before they struck again. Their efforts were soon rewarded and four hours later they located the black SUV driving less than two miles away, and after a massive gun-battle with hundreds of rounds fired, they shot the terrorists to death. Yet oddly enough, the slain culprits turned out to be a young Pakistani Muslim married couple living nearby, Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, whose six-month-old baby girl had fortunately been left at the home of her grandmother when the parents said they needed to drive to a doctor’s appointment.
Government officials and their media allies all soon declared the case closed, explaining that the Pakistani couple had apparently self-radicalized themselves by reading Islamicist tracts on the Internet and becoming followers of the dread ISIS terrorist movement. ISIS had been much in the news during 2015, allegedly responsible for staging numerous attacks all across Western countries.
But the total divergence between the two descriptions of the suspects seemed quite remarkable, especially once the news media revealed that Malik was a very short woman, standing barely five feet tall. In conversations and later posted comments, I joked that America’s ISIS foes were formidable indeed if they possessed the magical power to transform themselves from one very short woman into two large men and then back again.
Eyewitness testimony at horrific events is notoriously unreliable and although the shooters had been described as white based upon visible portions of their skin, the commando-outfits they were wearing would have concealed most of that, so such identification might have easily been mistaken. Perhaps many of the County employees were relatively short individuals from a Hispanic, Asian, or Middle Eastern immigrant background and they merely assumed that someone large and tall was more likely to be of white European ancestry. But a tiny woman looks very different from a large man and it’s hard to confuse two shooters with three. Even after the official narrative had congealed into its final form, the eyewitness interviewed by CBS News stuck to her story when later questioned by ABC News, saying “I know what I saw.”
The background of the terrorist couple also seemed quite odd. According to news accounts, Farouk had spent the previous five years working as a County food inspector, generally known as someone who got along well with others, with baffled co-workers saying that the young couple were “living the American dream.” Meanwhile, although she’d originally trained as a pharmacist, Malik had become a stay-at-home mom, apparently still nursing her six-month-old baby girl. While I suppose it’s possible that a young, nursing mother has sometimes gone on a wild terrorist rampage, I’d never previously heard of such a case.
A few years earlier I’d become friendly with a prominent mainstream academic and had been shocked to discover that for decades he had become a strong if silent believer in all sorts of “conspiracy theories.” Later that month I happened to have lunch with him and learned that he was also very skeptical of the official story of that terrorist massacre. He’d come of age during the Vietnam War era and served in the ROTC while a student at Harvard, training on weapons during those years. So he explained that a tiny woman such as Malik would have had a very hard time handling a powerful assault-rifle such as an AR-15, revealing another major hole in the official story.
We were also told that after staging their brutal massacre, the two married terrorists had behaved in a strange way. Instead of either fleeing the area or committing other attacks, they had apparently changed back into their civilian clothes and were later caught by the swarming law enforcement officers while slowly driving their vehicle a mile and a half from the crime scene. According to the media accounts, the Bonnie and Clyde terrorist couple had gone out in a blaze of glory, killed after engaging in a huge shootout with the pursuing police. But the photos seemed to show that the windows of their bullet-riddled SUV were tightly closed, and surely they would have rolled them down if they were firing their weapons at the officers chasing them.
Given these severe inconsistences, some conspiratorially-minded individuals naturally suggested that the two Pakistani Muslims had been selected as patsies for a terrorist false-flag attack organized by our government or its allies. But that hypothesis also seemed to make little sense to me. Why would the government stage a false-flag massacre involving three large gunmen and then try to pin the blame on a Pakistani immigrant and his very short wife?
Nine years have now passed and much of the video evidence has disappeared, so determining exactly what happened seems quite difficult. But at the time I believed that a completely unrelated shooting incident in the Los Angeles area a couple of years earlier provided some important insights for this case and I still think the same today.
During February 2013, a black former LAPD officer named Charles Dorner became outraged over what he regarded as his unfair treatment and he began an assassination campaign against other police officers and their families, eventually killing four victims and wounding three more before he was finally trapped in a huge manhunt and committed suicide. During the ten days of his rampage, police departments across much of Southern California were in a state of extremely high alert, mobilizing officers for guard duty outside the homes of those officials and their families that they believed might be among his next targets. But their trigger-happy fears of that deadly cop-killer led to some unfortunate accidents.
Very early one morning, the seven police officers guarding the home of an LAPD official noticed a nearby pickup truck driving in a suspicious manner. So mistakenly believing that it matched the description of Dorner’s vehicle, they fired without warning and riddled it with more than 100 bullets. But instead of Dorner, the occupants turned out to be an elderly Hispanic woman and her middle-aged daughter, who were out delivering the Los Angeles Times in that neighborhood as they did every morning. Less than a half-hour later, other police officers opened fire on another misidentified vehicle, injuring a white surfer who had been on his way to the beach. Fortunately, the victims of those mistaken police shootings all survived and they eventually received multi-million-dollar settlements from their lawsuits.
I think we should at least consider the possibility that Farook and Malik died for similar reasons. Their fatal mistake may have been that they were driving a black SUV that closely resembled the getaway vehicle of the attackers and doing so in an area filled with hundreds of fearful officers on the lookout for terrorist commandoes armed with assault weapons. The limited visual evidence seems to show their SUV was proceeding quietly along the road at normal speed before being attacked and perforated by hundreds of bullets from the police vehicles tailing them.
Obviously, this reconstruction is quite speculative, and Wikipedia summarizes the long list of media reports providing a cornucopia of highly-incriminating evidence. These describe the enormous arsenal of weapons and home-made bombs that the young immigrant couple had allegedly amassed in preparation for their terrorist rampage. So interested readers should weigh that supposed evidence against the seemingly contrary facts that I have described above.
However, consider that the massacre prompted President Barack Obama to broadcast a rare Oval Office address, his first in five years. Given our ongoing international war against the terroristic ISIS movement of the Middle East, any admission that our police had mistakenly shot and killed a young Pakistani couple with an infant daughter might have been hugely damaging to American national security. The alternate choice of fabricating a case against two already dead foreigners would hardly have been the worst crime ever committed by a government desperate to hide its severe embarrassment.
The number of victims in the San Bernardino attack had not been that large, but wider fears of international Islamicist terror attacks had probably been responsible for Obama’s national address on the incident. Indeed, 2015 produced a bumper-crop of such terrorist assaults, with the Wikipedia page devoted to the topic showing nearly 100 such incidents, far more than for any other year. Moreover, many of these attacks occurred in the West, stoking the enormous fears of domestic terrorism that may have helped explain the massive, trigger-happy local police response in San Bernardino.
Probably the highest-profile 2015 attack had taken place in early January at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine. That Jewish-dominated publication had long directed the crudest and most vicious insults against the deep religious beliefs of Christians and Muslims, and although the former took those barbs in stride, threats from the latter had been so numerous that the government stationed a police guard outside the premises. But when the attack finally came on January 7th, he proved helpless against the two assailants, clad in commando-outfits and heavily armed with assault-rifles. They forced their way into the building and quickly executed a dozen of the staff while wounding a similar number, then shot the guard on the street while escaping. The choice of dress, weapons, and style of the two attackers seemed rather similar to those who would attack the public employees of San Bernardino eleven months later.
Nearly all of France’s political class treated the brutal killing of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and writers as an outrageous assault against France’s long Voltairean traditional of freedom of speech and the incident was widely described as France’s own “9/11 Attack.” Within a couple of days, the Islamicist killers responsible had been identified by the police, tracked down, and killed but the political reverberations continued. Two days later, Paris saw a gigantic march of two million protesting the attacks and denouncing Islamic extremism. More than 40 world leaders led that procession, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu taking a prominent but controversial place at the front, and similar protests of some 1.7 million additional people occurred elsewhere in the country. France contained a large Muslim population with immigrant roots and French leaders united to endorse a severe political crackdown on perceived Islamic extremism and those who supported it. The standard account of all these events is provided in the Wikipedia page that runs around 17,000 words.
As these important French events unfolded, I’d been reading very detailed coverage in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and initially accepted this entire narrative without question. But I soon discovered that others took a much more conspiratorial line, and a series of email exchanges with that same well-connected academic friend of mine brought those surprising possibilities to my attention, gradually winning me over to his perspective. Based upon some of his discussions with knowledgeable friends in France, he believed that there was a strong possibility that the attacks may have been some sort of government false-flag operation, aimed at justifying a sharp crackdown against political dissent, though the exact details were not at all clear. He also said that such suspicions were very widespread in certain French intellectual and political circles, but almost no one dared voice them in public.
Prompted by those claims coming from someone whose opinion I respected, I began noticing certain elements of the story that greatly multiplied my suspicions.
Much like their later counterparts in San Bernardino, the two terrorist attackers had been wearing face-masks and commando-outfits, and after killing their victims with bursts of assault-weapons gunfire they had easily escaped long before the French police could respond. The only reason that they were quickly identified and caught was that one of the terrorists had carelessly left his ID card behind in an abandoned getaway vehicle, a crucial fact oddly excluded from the very comprehensive Wikipedia article. This seemed a remarkably suspicious detail, eerily similar to the undamaged hijacker passport found on the streets of NYC after the fiery crash of the jetliners into the WTC towers during on September 11th, or the lost luggage of 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta that later provided a wealth of incriminating background material regarding the terrorist plot and his motives.
For many decades, former Presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen had been the leader of France’s Far Right anti-Muslim political movement, and he had strong personal connections to the country’s military and security circles. Based upon his ideological beliefs, he might have been expected to welcome the anti-Muslim crackdown prompted by the terrorist massacre, but in an interview with Britain’s Daily Telegraph he said that the attacks seemed extremely suspicious to him and might have been a false-flag operation by some intelligence service. No other major English-language publication reported his surprising views and just a week or so later, Le Pen narrowly escaped death when his house suddenly caught fire, with that story also only being reported in the Telegraph. I later discussed these surprising developments in several comments, but the original articles themselves have now apparently vanished from the Telegraph archives, seemingly underscoring their significance. Naturally none of this information appears in the comprehensive Wikipedia articles on either the Charlie Hebdo attacks or Le Pen himself.
Wikipedia did devote a single sentence to another very odd development in the case. One day after the terrorist attack, the French police commissioner responsible for the investigation suddenly decided to commit suicide at his government office while preparing his official report, choosing to shoot himself in the head.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, France’s entire political leadership class declared themselves the absolute guarantors of the country’s freedom of speech and thought against the Islamic militants who challenged those sacred values. But the actual consequences that followed were somewhat different. Over the years France’s large Muslim population had become increasingly hostile to Israeli policy and Jewish influence, and such sentiments were now outlawed as constituting sympathy for terrorism, given that the alleged terrorists had come from that community and background. These harsh new prohibitions were enforced by a huge wave of arrests and investigations.
As an example of this ironic situation, consider the case of Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a French-born citizen of half-African ancestry. Although he was one of the France’s most popular comedians, over the years his stinging criticism of overwhelming Jewish influence had caused him enormous legal and professional difficulties. So a few days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he posted some mocking comments on his Facebook page, noting that the same authorities who now loudly proclaimed their support for free speech had regularly persecuted him for his humor, and he was quickly arrested on charges of publicly supporting terrorism.
Later that same year, Kevin Barrett released We Are NOT Charlie Hebdo, his edited collection of about two dozen essays highlighting many of the strange and suspicious aspects of that important terrorist incident. I finally read it a couple of years ago and I would strongly recommend it as a very helpful balance to the version of events provided by the mainstream media and codified in Wikipedia. In doing so I am merely seconding the favorable verdict of Prof. Richard Falk of Princeton University, an eminent expert on international law and human rights policy.
Around that same time I also read two other books released by Progressive Press, a small alternative publisher located in Southern California. These both provided a highly-conspiratorial counter-narrative to the mainstream account of our struggle against the Islamicist terrorists of the Middle East.
A decade ago, the terroristic forces of ISIS had become notorious throughout that region and the entire world for their brutal atrocities. These were demonstrated in the videos they regularly released showing the horrific beheadings they inflicted upon their enemies in Syria and Iraq, and ISIS supporters were usually blamed for terrorist attacks in the West, including those in France and San Bernardino. As a result, ISIS allegedly became the primary target of American military operations in the Middle East, but our efforts seemed surprisingly ineffective.
However, a 2016 collection of articles and essays descriptively entitled ISIS Is Us told a very different story. A number of alternative writers and bloggers presented arguments that the CIA and our own regional allies such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel had actually been responsible for creating and equipping that fanatical group of Sunni Muslim jihadists, then deploying them as a means of overthrowing Syria’s Shiite-aligned government, an important Iranian ally.
Indeed, that project came very close to success until Russian military intervention in September 2015 helped to turn the tide, along with the ground forces already committed by the Shiite Hezbollah militia of Southern Lebanon. Although I’d regularly seen these arguments floating around in corners of the Internet, I found it useful to have them presented in the pages of a book.
Over the last couple of decades French journalist Thierry Meyssan has become an influential figure in left-wing, conspiratorial circles, and his 2002 book 9/11: The Big Lie was one of the earliest works attacking the official 9/11 narrative, quickly becoming a huge best-seller in France and soon translated into English. That publishing success led him to establish the VoltaireNetwebsite in Lebanon, which has maintained a strong focus on Middle Eastern issues while being sharply critical of Western policies.
In early 2019 he published Before Our Very Eyes: Fake Wars and Big Lies, adopting a very similar approach to the story of the “Arab Spring” and the Western use of Muslim Jihadists in attempts to overthrow the governments of Libya and Syria, with the former effort being successful. Although some of his claims were already known to me and seemed solidly documented, others were much more surprising. But although he provided a vast number of specific statements about important matters, he usually did so without providing any sources for his material, so it was difficult for me to judge its credibility. I assume that much of his information came from his personal contacts with various regional intelligence organizations, who obviously would have had vested interests in promoting their desired narratives, whether or not those happened to be true.
In many respects, I think these three books constituted the photographic inverse-image of Margaret Sullivan’s text, focusing exactly upon the conspiratorial elements of all the major stories that she herself had carefully avoided noticing during her decades of mainstream journalism. So I suspect that the truth lies somewhere between those two extremes.
It’s also quite possible that Sullivan knows or at least suspects far more than she indicated in her book and she was being less than candid with her readers. Positions in elite mainstream journalism or academia are difficult to obtain and can easily be lost if someone strays outside accepted boundaries. After all Jill Abramson had held the top position in all of American journalism and then was suddenly fired for unclear reasons. Times Opinion Editor James Bennet had been a leading candidate to run his newspaper but had suddenly been forced to resign merely for publishing a controversial op-ed by a leading Republican Senator. The forty-year Times career of prominent science journalist Donald McNeil came to an end when he made a few incautious remarks at an extracurricular student outing in Peru. All these individuals far outranked Sullivan and their transgressions were very minor ones compared to the deadly journalistic sin of becoming a suspected “conspiracy theorist.” Indeed, if Sullivan had raised any of the dangerous points I have discussed above, I doubt her manuscript would have even been accepted for publication.
I actually think that there exists evidence that some elite journalists may have much broader views on various issues than they would ever admit in print.
A couple of months after the very suspicious case of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I decided to publish a highly-controversial analysis of Sen. John McCain’s Vietnam War record, an article that represented something of a sequel to Sydney Schanberg’s seminal expose of McCain’s role in the POW cover-up.
Although all my facts were drawn from fully mainstream sources—much of it from the Times itself—my analysis and conclusions were quite explosive, as indicated by a couple of my closing paragraphs:
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
My piece received a very favorable response in alternative media circles. But to my considerable surprise, a week or two later I was contacted by a Times editor who solicited my participation in a symposium on college reform, my first appearance in several years. And the favorable reaction to my piece arguing that our elite colleges should abolish tuition prompted me to launch my campaign for the Harvard Board of Overseers at the end of that year.
Similarly, my enormous suspicions that our media was hiding the truth about both the Charlie Hebdo and San Bernardino terrorist attacks gradually convinced me that many other important stories were also being concealed or distorted by our mainstream media and I began thinking of expanding my original 2013 American Pravda article into an entire series. The July 2016 death of Sydney Schanberg prompted me to launch that series, which opened with the following paragraphs, perhaps helping to explain much of the bland and blinkered material in Sullivan’s book:
The death on Saturday of Sydney Schanberg at age 82 should sadden us not only for the loss of one of our most renowned journalists but also for what his story reveals about the nature of our national media.
Syd had made his career at the New York Times for 26 years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk Memorial awards, and numerous other honors. His passing received the notice it deserved, with the world’s most prestigious broadsheet devoting nearly a full page of its Sunday edition to his obituary, a singular honor that in this degraded era is more typically reserved for leading pop stars or sports figures. Several photos were included of his Cambodia reporting, which had become the basis for the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, one of Hollywood’s most memorable accounts of our disastrous Indo-Chinese War.
But for all the 1,300 words and numerous images charting his long and illustrious journalistic history, not even a single mention was made of the biggest story of his career, which has seemingly vanished down the memory hole without trace. And therein lies a tale.
Could a news story ever be “too big” for the media to cover? Every journalist is always seeking a major expose, a piece that not merely reaches the transitory front pages but also might win a journalistic prize or even change the history books. Stories such as these appear rarely but can make a reporter’s career, and it is difficult to imagine a writer turning one down, or an editor rejecting it.
But what if the story is so big that it actually reveals dangerous truths about the real nature of the American media, portrays too many powerful people in a very negative light, and perhaps leads to a widespread loss of faith in our major news media? If readers were to see a story like that, they might naturally begin to wonder “why hadn’t we ever been told?” or even “what else might be out there?”
CEO of the Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions spoke to Sputnik and explained that Ukrainian drone operators with combat experience will be highly sought after by American private military companies, as well as even more sinister organizations such as global terrorist networks.
The transfer of operating experience of FPV drones from Ukrainian troops to American private military companies and beyond will be a key factor of the global terrorist threat, Dmitry Kuzyakin, the general director of the Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions, told Sputnik.
“The release of a huge number of Ukrainian servicemen with combat experience on FPV systems, which will ultimately lead to an increase in the global terrorist threat, is a major challenge to international security. They may already be transferring their [combat] experience to US private military companies, and further recipients are hard to predict – international terrorist organizations, criminal networks and so on,” Kyzyakin said.
The expert recalled that during his last visit to Kiev, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken inspected the drone production facility due to the fact that Ukrainian troops have extensive experience with FPV drones combat use.
“The FPV drone itself does not require any special know-how. We have dismantled US, European, Ukrainian drones, and we produce drones ourselves. Actually, any country from the US to Somalia can produce drones… Having combat experience is quite different, no one in the world except Russia and Ukraine actually has it,” he stressed.
Kuzyakin believes that the US is considering evacuating Ukrainian FPV drone operators from the front lines to train American troops.
“The experience of fighting not on a proving ground, but in blood and dirt. The experience of survival and victory. And more importantly, the experience of failure and loss. Apart from anything else, Blinken came for FPV drone operators, who will be evacuated by American private military companies so that they can train [US soldiers],” Dmitry Kuzyakin summed up.
The International Criminal Court is supposedly mulling war crimes charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other high-ranking Israeli political and military officials. But what reason could they possibly have for charging Netanyahu with war crimes? Uncover all the dirt on the unindicted war criminal presiding over Israel’s crimes against humanity in this important edition of The Corbett Report podcast.
The United States and its Western allies have stepped up a media campaign to accuse India of running an assassination policy targeting expatriate dissidents.
The government of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has furiously denied the allegations, saying there is no such policy.
Nevertheless, the American Biden administration as well as Canada, Britain and Australia continue to demand accountability over claims that New Delhi is engaging in “transnational repression” of spying, harassing and killing Indian opponents living in Western states.
The accusations have severely strained political relations. The most fractious example is Canada. After Premier Justin Trudeau publicly accused Indian state agents of involvement in the murder of an Indian-born Canadian citizen last year, New Delhi expelled dozens of Canadian diplomats.
Relations became further strained this month when the Washington Postpublished a long article purporting to substantiate claims that Indian security services were organizing assassinations of U.S. and Canadian citizens. The Post named high-level Indian intelligence chiefs in the inner circle of Prime Minister Modi. The implication is a policy of political killings is sanctioned at the very top of the Indian government.
The targets of the alleged murder program are members of the Sikh diaspora. There are large expatriate populations of Sikhs in the U.S., Canada and Britain. In recent years, there has been a renewed campaign among Sikhs for the secession of their homeland of Punjab from India. The New Delhi government views the separatist calls for a new state called Khalistan as a threat to Indian territorial integrity. The Modi government has labeled Sikh separatists as terrorists.
Indian authorities have carried out repression of Sikhs for decades including political assassination in the Punjab territory of northern India. Many Sikhs fled to the United States and other Western states for safety and to continue their agitation for a separate nation. The Modi government has accused Western states of coddling “Sikh terrorists” and undermining Indian sovereignty.
Last June, a prominent Sikh leader was gunned down in a suburb of Vancouver in what appeared to be a professional hit-style execution. Hardeep Singh Nijjar was murdered by three assailants outside a religious temple. Indian state media described him as a terrorist, but Nijjar’s family denied he had any involvement in terrorism. They claim that he was targeted simply because he promoted Punjabi separatism.
At the same time, according to the Post report, the U.S. authorities thwarted a murder plot against a well-known American-Sikh citizen who was a colleague of the Canadian victim. Both men were coordinating efforts to hold an unofficial referendum among the Sikh diaspora in North America calling for the establishment of a new independent state of Khalistan in the Punjab region of northern India.
The Post article names Vikram Yadav, an officer in India’s state spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), as orchestrating the murder plots against the Sikh leaders. The Post claims that interviews with US and former Indian intelligence officials attest that the killings could not have been carried out without the sanction of Modi’s inner circle.
A seemingly curious coincidence is that within days of the murder of the Canadian Sikh leader and the attempted killing of the American colleague, President Biden was hosting Narendra Modi at the White House in a lavish state reception.
Since the summer of last year, the Biden administration has repeatedly pressured the Modi government to investigate the allegations. President Biden has personally contacted Modi about the alleged assassination policy as have his senior officials, including White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA director William Burns. Despite New Delhi’s denial of such a policy, the Modi government has acceded to American requests to hold an internal investigation, suggesting a tacit admission of its agents having some involvement.
But here is where an anomaly indicates an ulterior agenda. Even U.S. media have remarked on how lenient the Biden administration has been towards India over what are grave allegations. It is inconceivable that Washington would tolerate the presence of Russian or Chinese agents and diplomats on its territory if Moscow and Beijing were implicated in killing dissidents on American soil.
As Tthe Washington Post report noted: “Last July, White House officials began holding high-level meetings to discuss ways to respond without risking a wider rupture with India, officials said. CIA Director William J. Burns and others have been deployed to confront officials in the Modi government and demand accountability. But the United States has so far imposed no expulsions, sanctions or other penalties.”
What appears to be going on is a calculated form of coercion by the United States and its Western allies. The allegations of contract killings and “transnational repression” against Sikhs in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia and Germany are aimed at intimidating the Indian government with further embarrassing media disclosures and Western sanctions. The U.S. State Department and the Congress have both recently highlighted claims of human rights violations by the Modi government and calls for political sanctions.
The objective, it can be averred, is for Washington and its Western allies to pressure India into toeing a geopolitical line of hostility towards China and Russia.
During the Biden administration, the United States has assiduously courted India as a partner in the Asia-Pacific to confront China. India has been welcomed as a member of the U.S.-led Quad of powers, including Japan and Australia. The Quad overlaps with the U.S. security interests of the AUKUS military partnership with Britain and Australia.
Another major geopolitical prize for Washington and its allies is to drive a wedge between India and Russia.
Since the NATO proxy war blew up in Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has been continually cajoling India to condemn Russia and to abide by Western sanctions against Moscow. Despite the relentless pressure, the Modi government has spurned Western attempts to isolate Russia. Indeed, India has increased its purchase of Russian crude oil and is importing record quantities, more than ever before the Ukraine conflict.
Furthermore, India is a key member of the BRICS forum and a proponent of an emerging multipolar world order that undermines U.S.-led Western hegemony.
From the viewpoint of the United States and its Western allies, India represents a tantalizing strategic prospect. With a foot in both geopolitical camps, New Delhi is sought by the West to weaken the China-Russia-BRICS axis.
This is the geopolitical context for understanding the interest of Western powers in making an issue out of allegations of political assassination by the Modi government. Washington and its Western allies want to use the allegations as a form of leverage – or blackmail – on India to comply with geopolitical objectives to confront China and Russia.
It can be anticipated that the Western powers will amplify the media campaign against India in line with exerting more hostility toward China and Russia.
On April 16th, Foreign Affairspublished an investigation, documenting in forensic detail how in May 2022 Kiev was a signature away from a peace deal with Russia “that would have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees,” which was scuppered by Western powers. The outlet attributes the failure of negotiations to “a number of reasons” – although it’s unambiguously clear the biggest was British Prime Minister Boris Johnson offering President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the blankest of blank cheques to keep fighting.
For two years, claims and counterclaims have abounded about these peace talks, initiated almost immediately after the conflict began, and why they collapsed. Independent journalists and researchers, the Kremlin, and some foreign officials involved, assert that a favorable settlement was within reach, only to be scuttled at the 11th hour by Western actors. By contrast, Kiev, its supporters, and proxy sponsors have strenuously denied that negotiations were ever taken seriously by either party, while claiming Moscow’s terms were completely unacceptable.
Foreign Affairs has now validated what anti-imperialists have consistently contended. Amicable peace could’ve been achieved in Ukraine at the earliest stages of the proxy conflict, on terms favourable to both parties. Western powers responsible for sabotaging negotiations in service of weakening Russia knew that all along. Yet, they kept this inconvenient reality consciously concealed until now, when the war is unambiguously an unwinnable lost cause for all concerned, bar Moscow.
Still, to have the truth confirmed by Foreign Affairs – an elite US journal published by the notorious, highly influential Council on Foreign Relations – is hugely significant, and the narrative threat posed is evident. Within hours of release, Polish think tank operative Daniel Szeligowski took to X to rubbish the investigation at length, reinforcing the established Western fable that negotiations could never have succeeded, due to Kremlin intransigence, and Ukrainian resolve, in the face of industrial scale Russian war crimes.
Such pushback is only to be expected. After all, Foreign Affairs has raised a number of troublesome questions about the proxy war. In particular, why it continues to grind on today at unsustainable human and financial cost for Kiev and its foreign sponsors. The investigation also confirms Western governments that pushed Ukraine into conflict with its neighbor and historic ally were completely unwilling to come to the country’s rescue, in the event Russia responded to their provocations.
Talks begin, major concessions offered
Foreign Affairs bases its investigation on multiple “draft agreements exchanged between the two sides, some details of which have not been reported previously,” and interviews “with several participants in the talks as well as with officials serving at the time in key Western governments.” It offers a granular timeline of events, “from the start of the invasion through the end of May, when talks broke down.”
Before then, Vladimir Putin and Zelensky reportedly “surprised everyone with their mutual willingness to consider far-reaching concessions to end the war.” This included peacefully resolving “their dispute over Crimea during the next 10 to 15 years.” Talks began four days after the invasion in Belarus, with President Aleksandr Lukashenko playing mediator.
Putin appointed a negotiating team led by Vladimir Medinsky, a senior adviser to the Russian president who previously served as culture minister. By his side were deputy ministers of defense and foreign affairs, among others. Kiev dispatched Davyd Arakhamia, parliamentary leader of Zelensky’s political party, Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, and other senior officials. The individuals involved amply underlines how seriously negotiations were taken by both sides.
By the third round of talks, drafts of a peace treaty began to circulate. Many more materialized over subsequent weeks, as the two sides sought to overcome “substantial disagreements”, refining details face-to-face in a variety of international venues, and via Zoom. In brief, Kiev would accept various limits on the size of its Armed Forces, striking range of any missiles sited on its territory, and number of tanks and armored vehicles it could maintain.
Most crucially, Ukraine would implement the Minsk Accords, “renounce its NATO aspirations and never host NATO forces on its territory,” accepting permanent neutrality. In return for ensuring Russia’s “most basic security interests”, Kiev was free to pursue EU membership, and “security guarantees that would oblige other states to come to Ukraine’s defense if Russia attacked again in the future.”
Those guarantees could extend to “imposing a no-fly zone, supplying weapons, or directly intervening with the guarantor state’s own military force” – “obligations…spelled out with much greater precision than NATO’s Article 5,” Foreign Affairs observes. The outlet suggests this component was the undoing of negotiations, due to Kiev’s “risk-averse Western colleagues”:
“Kyiv’s Western partners were reluctant to be drawn into a negotiation with Russia, particularly one that would have created new commitments for them to ensure Ukraine’s security.”
Whitewashing Johnson’s Kiev visit
Foreign Affairs notes that Naftali Bennett, Israeli premier while the talks were ongoing, who was “mediating between the two sides”, has said that he “attempted to dissuade Zelensky from getting stuck on the question of security guarantees.’ He explained, “There is this joke about a guy trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to a passerby. I said, ‘America will give you guarantees? It will commit that in several years if Russia violates something, it will send soldiers? After leaving Afghanistan and all that?’ Volodymyr, it won’t happen.’”
Of course, several of Ukraine’s “Western patrons” have sent soldiers to assist in the proxy conflict – most prominently Britain, which in January signed a wide-ranging “security cooperation agreement” with Kiev. Foreign Affairs references Boris Johnson’s visit to the country in April 2022, and how Davyd Arakhamia has claimed the then-Prime Minister “said we won’t sign anything at all… let’s just keep fighting.”
The outlet adds that “already on March 30, Johnson seemed disinclined toward diplomacy, stating that instead ‘we should continue to intensify sanctions with a rolling program until every single one of [Putin’s] troops is out of Ukraine.’” So it was that he arrived in Kiev on April 9, “the first foreign leader to visit after the Russian withdrawal from the capital.” Johnson reportedly told Zelensky:
“Any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid… some victory for him. If you give him anything, he’ll just keep it, bank it, and then prepare for his next assault.”
Yet, Foreign Affairs downplays Johnson’s intervention, claiming allegations the British premier sabotaged negotiations are “Putin’s manipulative spin.” In support, the outlet notes how despite Moscow’s withdrawal from the northern front resulting in “the gruesome discovery of atrocities that Russian forces had committed in the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin,” talks continued thereafter. The two sides worked “around the clock on a treaty that Putin and Zelensky were supposed to sign during a summit to be held in the not-too-distant future”:
“The sides were actively exchanging drafts [and] beginning to share them with other parties… the April 15 draft suggests that the treaty would be signed within two weeks. Granted, that date might have shifted, but it shows that the two teams planned to move fast… work on the draft treaty continued and even intensified in the days and weeks after the discovery of Russia’s war crimes, suggesting that the atrocities at Bucha and Irpin were a secondary factor in Kyiv’s decision-making.”
‘Bucha Effect’ leads to ‘frozen negotiations’
Bucha may have been a “secondary factor” in Ukrainian decision-making, but it wasn’t from the British government’s perspective. Unmentioned by Foreign Affairs, days before Johnson landed in Kiev, he boldly declared the alleged massacre of civilians in the town by Russian forces didn’t “look far short of genocide,” and “the international community – Britain very much in the front rank – will be moving again in lockstep to impose more sanctions and more penalties on Vladimir Putin’s regime.”
While a subsequent UN investigation failed to validate charges of genocide by Russia in Ukraine, once Johnson deployed the term, many Western officials followed suit. As a result, widespread public and state consent for keeping the proxy war going was very effectively manufactured across Europe and North America. To even speak of a negotiated settlement publicly became beyond the pale. Meanwhile, Britain’s shadowy, spook-infested Counter Disinformation Unit, which censors social media, began policing content related to Bucha online.
What happened in Bucha remains extremely murky. At the time, an anonymous US Defense Intelligence Agency official told Newsweek that civilian deaths could have resulted from “intense” ground combat over control of the town: “We forget two peer competitors fought over Bucha for 36 days, the town was occupied, Russian convoys and positions inside the town were attacked by the Ukrainians and vice versa.” They further warned the “Bucha Effect” had “led to frozen negotiations and a skewed view of the war”:
“I am not for a second excusing Russia’s war crimes nor forgetting that Russia invaded the country. But the number of actual deaths is hardly genocide. If Russia had that objective or was intentionally killing civilians, we’d see a lot more than less than .01 percent in places like Bucha.”
Such anxieties fell on deaf ears, although they reflect a broader resistance to escalating the proxy war on Washington’s part. In December 2022, the BBC reported that British officials were intensely worried about the “innate caution” of US President Joe Biden, “who is… concerned about provoking a wider global conflict.” A nameless state apparatchik revealed that London had “stiffened the US resolve at all levels”, via “pressure.”
Leaked material shows senior British military and intelligence officials leading London’s contribution to the proxy war are committed to challenging the “US position… firmly and at once.” One can only speculate whether incidents such as the Kerch Bridge bombing, which these officials secretly planned and helped Kiev execute – despite reported US opposition – were intended to escalate the conflict further, and keep Washington embroiled in the quagmire.
We are also left to ponder whether those officials played any role in the massacre of civilians in Bucha, whose names Ukraine refuses to release despite formal Russian requests. Kremlin apparatchiks, and Aleksandr Lukashenko, have claimed to possess evidence British special forces were responsible for the killings. None has emerged since, although why Britain prevented an emergency UN Security Council meeting on Bucha requested by Russia in April 2022 going ahead remains an open question.
In 2021, following the tragic murder of David Amess MP, the UK legacy media reported that Ali Harbi Ali, the man subsequently convicted of murdering Mr Amess, was quite possibly radicalised online:
Social media users could face a ban on anonymous accounts, as home secretary Priti Patel steps up action to tackle radicalisation in the wake of the murder of MP David Amess. [. . .] Police questioning Ali Harbi Ali on suspicion of terrorism offences are understood to be investigating the possibility that the 25-year-old [. . .] was radicalised by material found on the internet and social media networks during lockdown.
The police had already stated that the crime was being investigated as a terrorist incident. They reported a potential motive of Islamist extremism.
Ali Harbi Ali had been known to the UK government’s Prevent counter-radicalisation program for seven years, prior to murdering Mr Amess. In 2014 Ali Harbi Ali was referred to the Channel counter-terrorism programme, a wing of Prevent reserved for the most radical youths. A referral to Channel can only have come from the UK Police. The official guidance for a Channel referral states:
The progression of referrals is monitored at the Home Office for a period, with a view to offering further support if needed. An audit of non-adopted referrals is undertaken where these did not progress to police management. The Home Office works with Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters to share any concerns and agree necessary steps for improvement in partnership with the local authority and police.
It is likely, therefore, that Ali Harbi Abedi was known to the UK government, counter-terrorism police and the intelligence agencies. Yet we are told, having been flagged as among the most concerning of all Prevent subjects, for some seemingly inexplicable reason, Ali Harbi Ali was not known to the intelligence agencies. To date, there has been no explanation for this, frankly, implausible claim.
Following his conviction, the UK legacy media reported that Ali Harbi Ali was an example of “textbook radicalisation.” This was a quite extraordinary claim because there is no such thing as “textbook radicalisation.”
Ali Harbi Ali said that he had watched ISIS propaganda videos online. This was also highlighted at his trial. Consequently, the BBC reported:
[. . .] for a potentially bored teenager living a humdrum life in suburban London – the [Syrian] war not only appeared like an exciting video game on social media, it came packaged with an appealing message that there was a role for everyone else. [. . .] Harbi Ali told himself he could [. . .] join the ranks of home-grown attackers – on the basis of an instruction [online videos] from an IS propagandist who played a major role in the spread of terrorism attacks in western Europe.
The story we are supposed to believe about Ali Harbi Ali’s alleged path toward radicalisation is that he became a terrorist and a murderer because he watched YouTube videos and engaged in online groups that support terrorism. This is complete nonsense.
What is the Radicalisation Process?
In 2016, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson issued a report to inform potential UN strategies to counter extremism and terrorism. Emmerson reported there was neither an agreed-upon definition of “extremism” nor any single cogent explanation of the “radicalisation” process:
[M]any programmes directed at radicalisation [are] based on a simplistic understanding of the process as a fixed trajectory to violent extremism with identifiable markers along the way. [. . .] There is no authoritative statistical data on the pathways towards individual radicalisation.
This was followed, in 2017, with the publication of “Countering Domestic Extremism” by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS report stated that domestic “violence and violent extremist ideologies” were eventually adopted by a small minority of people as the result of a complex and poorly understood “radicalisation” process.
According to the NAS, there were numerous contributory factors to an individual’s apparent radicalisation, including sociopolitical and economic factors, personality traits, psychological influences, traumatic life experiences and so on. Precisely how these elements combined, and why some people were radicalised, while the majority who experienced the same weren’t, remained unknown:
No single shared motivator for violent extremism has been found, but the sum of several could provide a strong foundation for understanding
In July 2018, researcher team from from Deakin University in Australia largely corroborated Emmerson’s and NAS’ findings. Adding some further detail and research, their peer-reviewed article, “The 3 P’s of Radicalisation,” was based upon an meta-analysis of all the available academic literature on the radicalisation. They identified three broad drivers that could potentially lead someone toward violent extremism. They called these Push, Pull, and Personal factors.
Push factors are created by the individuals perception of their social or political environment. Awareness of things likes state repression, structural deprivation, poverty, and injustice can lead to resentment and anger. Pull factors are the elements of extremism that appeal to the individual. This might include an ideological commitment, a group identity and sense of belonging, finding a purpose, promises of justice, eternal glory, etc. Personal factors are the aspects of an individual’s personality that may predispose them to being more vulnerable to Push or Pull influences. For example, mental health problems or illness, individual characteristics, their reaction to life experiences and more.
Currently, the UN cites it’s own report—Journey To Extremism in Africa—as “the most extensive study yet on what drives people to violent extremism.” Building on the work we’ve just discussed, the report concluded that radicalisation is the product of numerous factors that combine to lead an individual down a path to extremism and possible violence.
The myriad of contributory factors to the radicalisation process acording to the UN’s “best study.”
The UN stated:
We know the drivers and enablers of violent extremism are multiple, complex and context specific, while having religious, ideological, political, economic and historical dimensions. They defy easy analysis, and understanding of the phenomenon remains incomplete.
The BBC report of “textbook radicalisation” was total rubbish. Everything we know about the radicalisation process reveals a convoluted interplay between social, economic, political, cultural and personal factors. These factors, which “defy easy analysis,” may combine to lead someone toward violent extremism and potentially terrorism. In the overwhelming majority of cases they do not.
It is extremely difficult to predict which individual’s may be radicalised. Millions of people experience all of the Push, Pull and Personal contributory factors and only a minuscule minority turn to extremism and violence.
We can say that watching videos and hanging around in online chat groups may be part of the radicalisation process but, absent all the other contributory elements, in no way is it reasonable to claim that anyone becomes a terrorist simply because they are “radicalised online.” The suggestion is absurd.
This absurdity was emphasised by the UN in its June 2023 publication of its report “Prevention of Violent Extremism.” The UN reported:
[. . .] deaths from terrorist activity have fallen considerably worldwide in recent years.
During the same period global internet use had increased by 45%, from 3.7 billion people in 2018 to 5.4 billion in 2023. Quite clearly, if there is a correlation between internet use and terrorism—doubtful—it’s an inverse one.
Adopting the precautionary principle we should perhaps be encouraging more people to have more access to a wider range of online information sources. There is a remote, but possible chance that this assists, in some unknown way, the reduction of violent extremism and deters the tiny minority from turning toward terrorism.
Marianna Spring
Exploiting the Online Radicalisation Myth
State propagandists, like the BBC’s Marianna Spring, have been spreading disinformation about online radicalisation for some time. They have been doing this to deceive the public into thinking that government legislation, such as the Online Safety Act (OSA), will tackle the mythical problem of online radicalisation.
It is a spike in hate that leaves young Britons increasingly exposed to radicalisation by algorithm. [. . .] Algorithms are recommendation systems that promote new content to a user based on posts they engage with. That means they can drive some people to more extreme ideas.
Building on her absurd Lord Haw-Haw level tripe, in reference to the work of the UK Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) Spring added:
The focus is on terrorism-related content that could lead to violence offline or risk radicalising other people into terror ideologies on social media.
Building on this abject nonsense Spring continued:
So what about all of the hate that sits in the middle? It’s not extreme enough to be illegal, but it still poisons the public discourse and risks pushing some people further towards extremes. [. . .] Responsibility for dealing with hateful posts – as of now – lies with the social media companies. It also lies, to some extent, with policy makers looking to regulate the sites, and users themselves. New legislation like the Online Safety Act does force the social media companies to take responsibility for illegal content, too.
This blurring of definitions from “terrorist” to “hate” to “hateful posts” to “extremes” was a meaningless slurry of specious drivel designed to convince the public that terrorists become terrorists because they watch YouTube videos or are influenced by the “hurty words” they read and share on social media. None of which was true.
Spring’s evident purpose was to lend some credibility to the State’s legislative push to silence all dissent online and censor legitimate public opinion. Spring spun the idea, that online radicalisation exists, to encourage people to give away their essential democratic rights in order to stay safe.
This moronic argument convinced the clueless puppeticians—we keep electing to Parliament by mistake—to pass the Online Safety Act into law in October 2023. They were told that it would protect children and adults from “harm”:
The kinds of illegal content and activity that platforms need to protect users from are set out in the Act, and this includes content relating to [. . .] terrorism.
Imagining this is what the Online Safety Act was supposed to protect adults from, the OSA received its Royal assent. Now that we have it on the statute books all the anti-democratic oppression it contains has been let loose.
The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) creates the offence of “sending false information intended to cause non-trivial harm.” Quite what “non-trivial harm” is supposed to mean isn’t entirely clear. The UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) certainly doesn’t understand it:
Section 179(1) OSA 2023 creates a summary offence of sending false communications. The offence is committed if [. . .], at the time of sending it, the person intended the message, or the information in it, to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience. [. . .] Non-trivial psychological or physical harm is not defined [. . .]. Prosecutors should be clear when making a charging decision about what the evidence is concerning the suspect’s intention and how what was intended was not “trivial”, and why. Note that there is no requirement that such harm should in fact be caused, only that it be intended.
Its seems the legal profession can’t quite grasp the horrific implications of the new punishable offence the UK State has created. Perhaps because they still imagine they serve a democracy. There’s no need for any confusion. The UK State has been quite clear about the nature of its dictatorship:
These new criminal offences will protect people from a wide range of abuse and harm online, including [. . .] sending fake news that aims to cause non-trivial physical or psychological harm.
“Fake news” is whatever the State, the Establishment and their “epistemic authorities” say it is. what constitutes “non-trivial harm” is also an entirely subjective judgement for the State. The Online Safety regulator, Ofcom, will decree the truth and the State will punish those who dare to contradict its official proclamations based upon whatever the Secretary of State tells Ofcom to outlaw.
If you think this sounds like “thought crime,” you are right. That is precisely what it is.
The idea that the OSA has something to do with protecting children and deterring people from online radicalisation was a sales pitch. Propagandists like the BBC’s Marianna Spring were dispatched to make the ridiculous arguments to deceive the public into believing their own speech needs to be regulated by the State.
The State is Completely Disinterested In Terrorist Content Online
Inciting violence, crime or promoting terrorism, sharing child porn and the online paedophile grooming of children has been illegal in the UK for many years. The Online Safety Act adds absolutely nothing to existing laws. The problem has never been insufficient law it has been insufficient enforcement.
In addition, it couldn’t be more obvious that the UK State and its propagandists are not in the least bit interested in tackling alleged “online radicalisation.” It is revealed in Marianna Spring’s article (referenced above) she reportedly got her wacky ideas about online radicalisation from CTIRU team members.
The CTIRU was set up in 2010 to remove “unlawful terrorist material” from the Internet. It makes formal requests to social media and hosting companies to take down material deemed to be terrorist related. If online radicalisation were a thing, which it isn’t, the CTIRU has been tasked for 14 years with stopping it. It doesn’t appear to have done anything at all.
The group Jabhat Fateh al Sham (JFS) was formerly known as the Al-Nusra Front or Jabhat al-Nusra (alias al-Qaeda in Syria, or al-Qaeda in the Levant). It subsequently merged with Ansar al-Din Front, Jaysh al-Sunna, Liwa al-Haqq, and the Nour al–Din al-Zenki Movement to form Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), or ‘Levant Liberation Front’.
HTS’ objective is to create an Islamic state in the Levant. According to the UK Government’s listing of proscribed terrorist groups:
The government laid Orders, in July 2013, December 2016 and May 2017, which provided that the “al-Nusrah Front (ANF)”, “Jabhat al-Nusrah li-ahl al Sham”, “Jabhat Fatah al-Sham” and “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” should be treated as alternative names for the organisation which is already proscribed under the name Al Qa’ida.
HTS, then, is officially defined as Al-Qa’ida. It is the same group supposedly responsible for 9/11.
In 2016, six years after the CTIRU was formed, BBC Newsnight interviewed Al-Qa’ida’s Director of Foreign Media Relations, Mostafa Mahamed, about the ambitions of Al-Qa’ida. The BBC gave him ample airtime to explain how Al-Qa’ida was leading the fight against the elected Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. The BBC claimed that JFS—now HTS—had formerly split from Al-Qa’ida. Probably attempting to justify its promotion of a proscribed terrorist organisation. The UK Government does not share the BBC appraisal but its Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit doesn’t appear to be overly fussed.
The BBC HTS promo video is still available to watch on YouTube. Alternatively, you could watch a JFS promotional video, or perhaps spend less than a minute searching YouTube to find the slew of videos it provides promoting proscribed Islamist terrorist groups.
You can still watch Channel 4’s in-depth 2016 report extolling the heroics of the Nour al-Din al-Zenki terrorists. This is the group that publicly beheaded a twelve-year-old boy. In fact, Channel 4 promoted those directly responsible for the despicable crime. Channel 4 said the child murderers had won a “famous victory”.
When it was pointed out that these people decapitate children, the BBC leapt to their defence, pointing out that the child was probably a combatant. The BBC didn’t ask its terrorist interviewee, Mostafa Mahamed, whether he was against murdering children in principle.
Such videos have been available online for years and have been shared liberally by mainstream media outlets such as Al-Jazeera, Channel 4, the BBC, AP, France24 and many others. This all seems rather odd, because in 2018, then CTIRU Commander Clarke Jarrett said:
It’s vital that if the public see something online they think could be terrorist-related, that they ACT and flag it up to us. Our Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) has specialist officers who not only take action to get content removed, but also increasingly, are in a position to look at those behind online content — which is leading to more and more investigations.
What does CTIRU mean by “terrorist-related” if not promotional videos made by terrorist organisations? How much investigation is needed to “take down” BBC interviews with Al-Qa’ida spokesmen, and to prosecute those who made and broadcast it?
Why aren’t the hundreds, if not thousands, of terrorist promos currently available via Google services deemed unlawful? Are only some terrorist groups unlawful while others are fine? Why are some terrorists promoted and others not?
The truth is the whole thing is a monumental sham. Not only is online radicalisation a myth the State couldn’t care less about terrorist promotional material. The online radicalisation myth has been punted by propagandists for one reason only. To convince you to submit to online censorship.
The Sharon Tate murders were as bizarre as they were bloody, and the story behind the story is even stranger.
Journalist Tom O’Neill spent 20 years researching, interviewing and digging in his effort to get to the bottom of it. His book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, co-authored by Dan Piepenbring, is an account of O’Neill’s personal odyssey as well as a presentation of his findings which unfold, page after page, in tragedy, weirdness and irony.
Charles Manson’s hit-team killed ten people, perhaps more. That was in California, back in the summer of 1969, while the U.S. Armed Forces were busily slaughtering millions of Asians in Vietnam. And in opposition to that war, hundreds of thousands of Americans marched in mass protests—the anti-war movement.
Even GIs and military veterans were speaking out against the war. The counterculture movement was in full bloom, having started for at least since “the summer of love” two years earlier. Woodstock, an historic occasion which drew 400,000 people to a music event in Upstate New York, also took place the year of the Manson murders in that same month of August.
War, anti-war, and counterculture—it was all going on when Charles Manson and his “family” suddenly stole the show and took center stage with that series of infamous killings. First there was the Gary Hinman murder, then the Sharon Tate killings, followed by the LaBianca murders. Two more victims about whom we do not often hear were Donald Shea, a caretaker at the Spahn Ranch, and Filippo Tenerelli, who was found dead in a Bishop, California, motel.
The FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS programs were also in play—part of intelligence’s covert war on dissent. Several shadowy characters, apparently CIA operatives, turn up in this story and appear to have crossed paths with Charles Manson. Among them was Dr. Louis Jolyon West of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind-control project. Another was Reeve Whitson who somehow knew of the Tate killings 90 minutes before anyone else did, and reported it in a phone call to Tate’s photographer. O’Neill devotes a chapter to each of them.
Thirty years had passed since the killings when O’Neill began work on his project in 1999. Several of the key players had already died, but Charles Manson was still in prison, and memories of the killings remained painfully alive. The topic was initially assigned to O’Neill as a magazine article, and the editor gave him three months to complete it.
However, as he launched into it, interviewing dozens—eventually hundreds—of cops, DA lawyers, clerks, Hollywood personalities, drug dealers and others, he found there was far more to the story than he had ever imagined.
He missed his deadline, then his next deadline, and the one after that. The project became his obsession, and the digging and research continued on through 20 long years of plowing through troves of documents: court records, old newspaper files, FOIA requests, and interviews. Research can be frustrating, and clearly it was. “Behind every solid lead, quotable interview, and bombshell document, I put in weeks of scut work that led to dozens of dead ends,” O’Neill tells us. His book finally came out in 2019.
Told in the first person, the book is a gripping detective story that I could not put down—actually an audio that I could not turn off. It is well written, and the audio by Kevin Stillwell is well read. My partner wanted to know what I kept listening to all the time. So I took off my headset and played it out into the room. She caught the bug and we listened to it together day after day, smitten by Tom O’Neill’s obsession.
At Charles Manson’s orders, people were murdered. This is a “mystery” where we know the “who-done-it” part of the story, but we are left to wonder and speculate about almost everything else—motives, the roles of intel and law enforcement, facts that were covered up, and who or what else might have been operating behind the scenes.
Crime novels typically end with the pieces all falling into place to form a coherent picture. Not so in most real-life crime mysteries, O’Neill cautions us. Some pieces are missing; others do not seem to belong, but they are there nonetheless, often in some grotesquely misshapen form.
A good many pieces are left over; they may seem important, but we do not know what to make of them. In this book, the author takes us into a world where cops, judges, prosecutors, witnesses and others do not function in ways that seem rational or above board.
Among the strange pieces in this picture puzzle is something O’Neill calls “Charlie Manson’s get-out-of-jail-free card.”
After having spent much of his life in various prisons, in 1967 Charles Manson was finally out on “federal parole for grand theft auto.” Being on probation is almost like living on the doorstep of a jailhouse.
A parolee can get thrown back in prison for the slightest mis-step. However, Charles Manson went around committing one offense after another—stealing cars, credit cards and firearms, sex with underage women, drugs, etc. Whatever a parolee was not allowed to do, Charles Manson did. He even flouted it. He was caught repeatedly, but none of his numerous violations landed him in jail for more than a few days at a time.
“We were told not to bother those people,” former Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff Preston Guillory told O’Neill. It was a policy handed down from on high, Guillory said: “Make no arrests, take no police action toward Manson or his followers.”
Cops who had clues, evidence or solid proof of Manson’s violations were pulled back from their investigations. On the occasions when Manson was arrested, judges would let him go. His probation officer, Roger Smith, wrote glowing letters about Manson’s supposedly wonderful progress.
Normally, a probation officer would supervise 20 to 100 parolees; but Roger Smith was supervising only one person—Charles Manson. It was with the encouragement of Probation Officer Roger Smith that Manson spent a year in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, at the time a Mecca of the hippie counterculture.
There Charlie acquired his “family” of followers, and morphed into the Charles Manson known to history and legend—the charismatic guru and apocalyptic cult leader, acid-dropping mystic, guitarist and songwriter, con artist, car thief and general predator, manipulator and abuser, and evangelist who expatiated on the Book of Revelation.
Manson was well-connected with Hollywood celebrities and music personalities: Doris Day’s son, music producer Terry Melcher, the Beach Boys, and many more, though most did not wish to have it known that they had been associated with him. Even after 30 years had passed, many refused to be interviewed by Tom O’Neill. The refusers’ list reads like a who’s who of Hollywood stardom. Cops and prosecutors were more inclined to talk, and some of them opened the author’s way to troves of documents and records.
Reading the accounts of these interactions, I sense that O’Neill must be something of a Will Rogers-type person who rarely met a person he did not like. And people in turn seemed to like him. Even officials who worked hard to cover things up seemed to warm up to him. Several, of course, including legendary prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, eventually screamed at him and threatened to sue for millions of dollars.
Bugliosi was the attorney who had prosecuted Manson and afterwards wrote the best-selling Helter Skelter. In the courtroom and later in his book, Bugliosi presented Manson’s murder rampage as a scheme to blame the Black Panthers and thus spark a race war between blacks and whites. That became the official narrative, though it was doubted by people who had researched the case. Tom O’Neill devoted a chapter to reviewing “Holes in Helter Skelter”; he exposes Bugliosi’s handling of the case and does the coup de grâce on that theory.
Vince Bugliosi surrounded by reporters when he was prosecuting the Manson case in 1971. Source: nytimes.com
However, by the time O’Neill’s book came out, Bugliosi had passed on, and thus far his ghost has not risen up to carry out the threatened lawsuit. Another person who had threatened to sue O’Neill was music producer Terry Melcher, also dead by the time the book came out. There can be upsides to being a slow writer, taking a long time to do research.
“I’d spoken to duplicitous celebrities, seedy drug dealers, bumbling cops, and spurious prosecutors. I’d been threatened and cajoled and warned off my investigation. But I didn’t have a smoking gun. There were only mountains of circumstantial evidence,” O’Neill tells us.
So he kept going, finding more pieces of the picture. And it reads like the script of a film noir.
Throughout the drama, Charles Manson was being closely monitored by law enforcement agencies and intel. And yet, even while they were watching him, he sent his acolytes out on those brutal killing sprees of August 1969. Incredibly enough, despite the surveillance, it took law enforcement four long months to eventually arrest him and his hit team. During those extra months of free rein, Manson killed Shea and Tenerelli and perhaps more.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detectives had almost immediately found clues leading to Charles Manson; many Hollywood people also suspected him. So why did it take law enforcement so long to catch him? It appears that the “hands off Manson policy” was still in effect.
Actually, Manson was not the only person in this story who seemed to be immune to prosecution; similar immunity appears to have been granted to two or three Hollywood drug dealers who turn up in the story. That seems to be a fairly common practice in law enforcement.
“A lot of times we arrest people and the DA would say, ‘We can’t keep this person in custody, he’s too valuable, we want him on the streets,’” former Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Guillory told O’Neill. “My suspicion is that Manson was left alone for a while for some reason.”
Former head deputy DA of Van Nuys, Lewis Watnick, gave a similar opinion. “Sometimes this is explained by just pure incompetence,” he said. “But this is not that. It dovetails right in. Manson was an informant.” Of course, that was just his guess, Watnick conceded, but it was an educated one, based on his 30 years of experience. “They’d been watching this guy for something large.”
Looking at the tolerance that authorities had for Manson’s lawbreaking, his relationship with probation officer Roger Smith, and more, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that somebody up there had a major investment in Mr. Charles Manson. They must have wanted him to do something. But what?
Along with his findings, O’Neill shares his uncertainties. “My work had left me, at various points, broke, depressed, and terrified that I was becoming one of ‘those people’: an obsessive, a conspiracy theorist… I don’t consider myself credulous, but I’d discovered things I thought impossible about the Manson murders and California in the sixties.” Further on, he tells us, “I thought most of all about the possibility that Manson, of all people, had some type of protection from law enforcement… It boggled the mind even to speculate that someone like Manson could be plugged into something bigger, and presumably even darker, than he was.”
Something darker than Charles Manson? Our leaders, and the establishment they work for, have a lot of closely guarded secrets—secrets that occasionally make their way out by way of researchers, whistleblowers, hackers, and even congressional hearings.
For background on the political environment of the late 1960s, O’Neill reviews the establishment’s war against the anti-war movement. That includes cases of people who were murdered as a result of FBI and CIA activities and manipulations here in the U.S. He ties this brutality to U.S. actions overseas.
O’Neill looks at the CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam, a kill-capture campaign, which resulted in the death of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. He quotes from a Special Forces soldier, Anthony Herbert, about his time in the Phoenix Program: “They wanted me to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it appear as though the Viet Cong had done it themselves. The rationale was that the Viet Cong would see that other Viet Cong had killed their own and… make allegiance with us. The good guys.”
A mission shared by the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS was to disrupt and discredit the anti-war movement, and that, O’Neill points out, was one effect of the Manson murders. Of course, Charles Manson was not an anti-war activist; it is doubtful that he ever attended an anti-war rally. He was a product of the prison system who somehow found his way into the fringes of the counterculture movement, and there was a lot of overlap between the anti-war and counterculture movements. Many hippies were anti-war, and many activists smoked grass and grew their hair long.
Scene from the 1967 Summer of Love that Manson and the CIA/FBI were out to destroy. Source: allthatsinteresting.com
The corporate media, then as now, was the voice of the establishment elite, and dutifully presented the murderous Manson and his “family” to the world as poster children of the “hippie movement.” A lot of people bought that framing. Even people who self-identified as countercultural were saying, “Manson ended the Summer of Love!”—a message the corporate media pushed.
Although the killings were billed as the “crime of the century” and have received massive newspaper coverage ever since, few articles went beyond the sensational aspects and asked truly penetrating questions. When (in 1971) whistleblower LA Sheriff’s Detective Guillory went public with what he knew about Manson’s get-out-of-jail-free card, the media showed little interest. Nor did many journalists work out a related source and connection between these killings and a society waging a brutal and unjust war.
We assume that our leaders in Washington care about the lives of ordinary people. Our experience with them shows otherwise.
We remember Vietnam. There have been several murderous wars since then, and now Gaza. As I write this, our president and our Congress are in the sixth month of funding, arming and giving diplomatic support to apartheid Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
Our leaders are not averse to promoting mass murder. We have the immortal words of former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright: When asked in 1996 about U.S. sanctions causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, she replied, “We think the price is worth it.”
The powers that be are a bloodthirsty lot when it serves their interests, every bit as murderous as Charles Manson himself. But who might have been the local- or regional-level functionaries authorizing immunity for such criminals?
O’Neill tells us about several high-placed California officials. One was Evelle Younger, then Los Angeles DA. Younger was a former FBI agent who, during World War II, was with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, and also oversaw the prosecution of Sirhan Sirhan; he went on to be California Attorney General from 1971 to 1979.
Another was California Governor Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the “Task Force on Riots and Disorders,” William W. Herrmann. Herrmann was a veteran of the CIA’s Phoenix Program; he had also been a lieutenant with the LAPD. However, O’Neill was not able to establish a definite connection between them and the on-the-ground operatives. We do get an idea of who they seem to have been.
In this book of strange dark characters, one of the stranger ones was Dr. Louis Jolyon West, known to his friends as “Jolly” West. He was a pioneering scientist of the CIA’s mind-control project—MK-ULTRA. In 1966 he came to San Francisco, shortly before Manson arrived, and his project was to study and manipulate hippies.
So there they were, the two of them, in the Haight-Ashbury. Tom O’Neill, with meticulous documentation, suggests that Manson became a product of Jolly West’s experiments.
Another dark character who seems to have worked for the CIA was Reeve Whitson, a friend of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. He somehow knew of the killings before anyone else did, and telephoned the awful news to Tate’s personal photographer, Shahrokh Hatami. That was 90 minutes before the bodies were discovered by Polanski’s maid.
Both Dr. Louis Jolyon West and Reeve Whitson are dead and gone, West in 1999 and Whitson in 1994, and are, thus, not available for interviews or comment.
In this book Tom O’Neill shows us convincing evidence that Charles Manson was some sort of operative, maybe unwittingly. It looks like the purpose of his handlers—presumably from the CIA’s CHAOS or the FBI’s COINTELPRO—was to set him up to create a bloody scene such as the one on August 9, 1969.
It needs to be recognized that Charles Manson and his followers served the establishment well. Nevertheless, they went to prison where they remained for the rest of their lives. Only one, Leslie Van Houten, was finally released last year on parole.
There is no need for an international investigation into the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines, Sweden’s Foreign Ministry has told RIA Novosti news agency.
Last week, China’s deputy envoy to the UN, Geng Shuang, called for a probe into the September 2022 blasts that ruptured the pipelines, which were built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe. Countries should work together on an investigation “to bring the perpetrators to justice in order to prevent the reoccurrence of similar incidents,” Geng said.
When asked about Beijing’s proposal by RIA Novosti on Friday, the Swedish Foreign Ministry insisted that “there is no need for an international investigation. It’s going to achieve nothing.”
“An investigation into the incidents was carried out by the Swedish authorities in accordance with the fundamental principles of independence, impartiality and the rule of law. Other national investigations are still ongoing,” the ministry stated.
Sweden conducted its own probe as the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines occurred in the country’s exclusive economic zone. Germany and Denmark carried out separate inquiries. However, in February, the Swedish and Danish investigations were aborted. Stockholm said it had come to the conclusion that the case did not fall under Swedish jurisdiction, while Copenhagen concluded that “there was deliberate sabotage” of the pipelines, but found insufficient grounds to pursue criminal proceedings.
Russia is carrying out its own investigation into the Nord Stream blasts despite the refusal of Western nations to cooperate. Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov said earlier that Moscow had sent more than a dozen requests for legal assistance to Germany, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Sweden, but only received a single formal reply from Copenhagen.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and other officials suggested previously that the pipelines were targeted by the US or on Washington’s behalf.
In January 2001, the security branch of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency began to receive a number of peculiar reports from DEA field offices across the country. According to the reports, young Israelis claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale had been attempting to penetrate DEA offices for over a year. The Israelis had also attempted to penetrate the offices of other law enforcement and Department of Defense agencies. Strangest of all, the “students” had visited the homes of numerous DEA officers and other senior federal officials.
As a pattern slowly emerged, the DEA appeared to have been targeted in what it called an “organized intelligence gathering activity.” But to what end, and for whom, no one knew.
Reports of the mysterious Israelis with an inexplicable interest in peddling art to G-men came in from more than 40 U.S. cities and continued throughout the first six months of 2001. Agents of the DEA, ATF, Air Force, Secret Service, FBI, and U.S. Marshals Service documented some 130 separate incidents of “art student” encounters. Some of the Israelis were observed diagramming the inside of federal buildings. Some were found carrying photographs they had taken of federal agents. One was discovered with a computer printout in his luggage that referred to “DEA groups.”
In some cases, the Israelis visited locations not known to the public — areas without street addresses, for example, or DEA offices not identified as such — leading authorities to suspect that information had been gathered from prior surveillance or perhaps electronically, from credit cards and other sources. One Israeli was discovered holding banking receipts for substantial sums of money, close to $180,000 in withdrawals and deposits over a two-month period. A number of the Israelis resided for a period of time in Hollywood, Fla. — the small city where Mohammed Atta and three terrorist comrades lived for a time before Sept. 11.
NCIX Alert: “suspicious visitors to federal facilities”
In March 2001, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX), a branch of the CIA, issued a heads-up to federal employees about “suspicious visitors to federal facilities.” The warning noted that “employees have observed both males and females attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings.” Federal agents, the warning stated, had “arrested two of these individuals for trespassing and discovered that the suspects possessed counterfeit work visas and green cards.” [see this]
In the wake of the NCIX bulletin, federal officials raised several other red flags, including an Air Force alert, a Federal Protective Services alert, an Office of National Drug Control Policy security alert and a request that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) investigate a specific case. Officials began dealing more aggressively with the “art students.” According to one account, some 140 Israeli nationals were detained or arrested between March 2001 and Sept. 11, 2001. Many of them were deported. According to the INS, the deportations resulted from violations of student visas that forbade the Israelis from working in the United States. (In fact, Salon has established that none of the Israelis were enrolled in the art school most of them claimed to be attending; the other college they claimed to be enrolled in does not exist.) After the Sept. 11 attacks, many more young Israelis — 60, according to one AP dispatch and other reports — were detained and deported.
The “art students” followed a predictable modus operandi. They generally worked in teams, typically consisting of a driver, who was the team leader, and three or four subordinates. The driver would drop the “salespeople” off at a given location and return to pick them up some hours later. The “salespeople” entered offices or approached agents in their offices or homes. Sometimes they pitched their artwork — landscapes, abstract works, homemade pins and other items they carried about in portfolios. At other times, they simply attempted to engage agents in conversation. If asked about their studies, they generally said they were from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem or the University of Jerusalem (which does not exist). They were described as “aggressive” in their sales pitch and “evasive” when questioned by wary agents. The females among them were invariably described as “very attractive” — “blondes in tight shorts or jeans, real lookers,” as one DEA agent put it to Salon. “They were flirty, flipping the hair, looking at you, smiling. ‘Hey, how are you? Let me show you this.’ Everything a woman would do if she wanted to get something out of you.” Some agents noted that the “students” made repeated attempts to avoid facility security personnel by trying to enter federal buildings through back doors and side entrances. On several occasions, suspicious agents who had been visited at home observed the Israelis after the “students” departed and noted that they did not approach any of the neighbors.
The document detailing most of this information was an internal DEA memo: a 60-page report drawn up in June 2001 by the DEA’s Office of Security Programs. The document was meant only for the eyes of senior officials at the Justice Department (of which the DEA is adjunct), but it was leaked to the press as early as December 2001 and by mid-March had been made widely available to the public. [pdf here, un-redacted version here.]
On the face of it, this was a blockbuster tale, albeit a bizarre and cryptic one, full of indeterminate leads and fascinating implications and ambiguous answers: “Like a good Clancy novel,” as one observer put it. Was it espionage? Drug dealing? An intelligence game? The world’s wackiest door-to-door hustle? Yet the mainstream media has almost entirely ignored the allegations or accepted official “explanations” that explain nothing. Even before the DEA memo was leaked, however, some reporters had begun sniffing around the remarkable story.
Anna Werner, KHOU-TV Houston – scoop of a lifetime?
On Oct. 1 of last year, Texas newswoman Anna Werner, of KHOU-TV in Houston, told viewers about a “curious pattern of behavior” by people with “Middle Eastern looks” claiming to be Israeli art students. “Government guards have found those so-called students,” reported Werner, “trying to get into [secure federal facilities in Houston] in ways they’re not supposed to — through back doors and parking garages.” Federal agents, she said, were extremely “concerned.” The “students” had showed up at the DEA’s Houston headquarters, at the Leland Federal Building in Houston, and even the federal prosecutor’s office; they had also appeared to be monitoring the buildings. Guards at the Earle Cabell Federal Building in Dallas found one “student” wandering the halls with a floor plan of the site. Sources told Werner that similar incidents had occurred at sites in New York, Florida, and six other states, “and even more worrisome, at 36 sensitive Department of Defense sites.”
“One defense site you can explain,” a former Defense Department analyst told Werner. “Thirty-six? That’s a pattern.” Ominously, the analyst concluded that such activity suggested a terrorist organization “scouting out potential targets and … looking for targets that would be vulnerable.”
Post-9/11, this should have been the opening thrust in an orgy of coverage, and the scoop of a lifetime for Werner: Here she’d gotten a glimpse into a possible espionage ring of massive proportions, possibly of terrorists scouting new targets for jihad — and those terrorists were possibly posing as Israelis. KHOU’s conclusions were wrong — these weren’t Arab terrorists — but at the time no one knew better. And yet the story died on the vine. No one followed up.
Carl Cameron, Fox News
Just about the same time that KHOU was stabbing in the dark, reporter Carl Cameron of the Fox News Channel was beginning an investigation into the mystery of the art students that would ultimately light the way into altogether different terrain. In a four-part series on Fox’s “Special Report With Brit Hume” that aired in mid-December, Cameron reported that federal agents were investigating the “art student” phenomenon as a possible arm of Israeli espionage operations tracking al-Qaida operatives in the United States. Yes, you read that right: a spy ring that may have been trailing al-Qaida members in the weeks and months before Sept. 11 — a spy ring that according to Cameron’s sources may have known about the preparations for the Sept. 11 attacks but failed to share this knowledge with U.S. intelligence. One investigator told Cameron that “evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.” [see video below]
According to Cameron, some 60 Israeli nationals had been detained in the anti-terrorism/immigrant sweeps in the weeks after Sept. 11, and at least 140 Israelis identified as “art students” had been detained or arrested in the prior months. Most of the 60 detained after Sept. 11 had been deported, Cameron said. “Some of the detainees,” reported Cameron, “failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States.” Some of them were on active military duty. (Military service is compulsory for all young Israelis.) Cameron was careful to note that there was “no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks” and that while his reporting had dug up “explosive information,” none of it was necessarily conclusive. Cameron was simply airing the wide-ranging speculations in an ongoing investigation.
Incendiary as it was, that story died on the vine, too, and the scuttlebutt in major newsrooms was that Cameron’s sources — all anonymous — were promulgating a fantasy. Reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post hit up their go-to people inside Justice and FBI and CIA, but no one could seem to confirm the story, and indeed numerous officials laughed it off. Fox got it wrong, the newspapers of record concluded. And nothing more was heard on the topic in mainstream quarters.
But inside the DEA, the Fox piece reverberated. An internal DEA communiqué obtained by Salon indicates that the DEA made careful note of Cameron’s reports; the communiqué even mentions Fox News by name. Dated Dec. 18, four days after the final installment in the Fox series, the document warns of security breaches in DEA telecommunications by unauthorized “foreign nationals” — and cites an Israeli-owned firm with which the DEA contracted for wiretap equipment — breaches that could have accounted for the access that the “art students” apparently had to the home addresses of agents.
News reports in France
It wasn’t until nearly three months after the Fox reports that the “art student” enigma resurfaced in newsrooms, this time in Europe. On Feb. 28, the respected Paris-based espionage newsletter Intelligence Online reported in detail on what turned out to have been one of Cameron’s key source documents: the 60-page DEA memo. The memo itself, which Salon obtained in mid-March, went no further than to speculate in the most general terms that the “nature of the individuals’ conduct” suggested some sort of “organized intelligence gathering activity.” The memo also pointed out that there was some evidence connecting the art students to a drug ring. “DEA Orlando has developed the first drug nexus to this group,” the memo read. “Telephone numbers obtained from an Israeli Art Student encountered at the Orlando D.O. [District Office] have been linked to several ongoing DEA MDMA (Ecstasy) investigations in Florida, California, Texas and New York.”
However, Intelligence Online and then France’s newspaper of record, Le Monde, came to a much more definite — and explosive — conclusion. This was the jackpot, they concluded, a proven spy ring run by the Mossad or the Israeli government. Thus you had Intelligence Online leading its Feb. 28 piece with the statement that “a huge Israeli spy ring operating in the United States was rolled up,” and you had Le Monde trumpeting on March 5 that a “vast Israeli spy network” had been dismantled in the “largest case of Israeli spying” since 1985, when mole Jonathan Pollard was busted selling Pentagon secrets to the Mossad. Reuters that same day went with the headline “U.S. Busts Big Israeli Spy Ring,” sourcing Le Monde’s story.
The two French journals came to conclusions that the memo itself clearly did not. And yet they had unearthed some intriguing material. Six of the “students” were apparently carrying cell phones purchased by a former Israeli vice consul to the United States. According to Le Monde, two of the “students” had traveled from Hamburg to Miami to visit an FBI agent in his home, then boarded a flight to Chicago and visited the home of a Justice Dept. agent, then hopped a direct flight to Toronto — all in one day. According to Intelligence Online, more than one-third of the students, who were spread out in 42 cities, lived in Florida, several in Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. — one-time home to at least 10 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers. In at least one case, the students lived just a stone’s throw from homes and apartments where the Sept. 11 terrorists resided: In Hollywood, several students lived at 4220 Sheridan St., just down the block from the 3389 Sheridan St. apartment where terrorist mastermind Mohammed Atta holed up with three other Sept. 11 plotters. Many of the students, the DEA report noted, had backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence and/or electronics surveillance; one was the son of a two-star Israeli general, and another had served as a bodyguard to the head of the Israeli army.
The DEA report on which the French journals based their investigations contained a wealth of remarkable tales. To take just a few samples:
On March 1, 2001, a DEA special agent in the Tampa division offices “responded to a knock at one of the fifth floor offices. At the door was a young female who immediately identified herself as an Israeli art student who had beautiful art to sell. She was carrying a crudely made portfolio of unframed pictures.” Aware of the “art student” alert, the agent invited the girl to an interview room, where he was joined by a colleague to listen to the girl’s presentation. “She had approximately 15 paintings of different styles, some copies of famous works, and others similar in style to famous artists. When asked her name, she identified herself as Bella Pollcson, and pointed out one of the paintings was signed by that name.” Then things got interesting: In the middle of her presentation, she changed her story and claimed that the paintings were not for sale, but “that she was there to promote an art show in Sarasota, Fla., and asked for the agents’ business cards so that information regarding the show could be mailed to them.” Well, where’s the show? asked the agents. When’s it going up? Pollcson couldn’t say: didn’t know when or where — or even who was running it. Later it was determined that she had lied about her name as well.
On Oct. 20, 2000, in the Houston offices of the DEA, a “male Israeli art student was observed by the Security Officers [entering] an elevator from a secure area. [The officers] were able to apprehend the art student before he could enter a secure area on the second floor.” Three months later, in January 2001, a “male Israeli” was apprehended attempting to enter the same building from a back door in a “secured parking lot area.” He claimed “he wanted to gain access to the building to sell artwork.”
On April 30, 2001, an Air Force alert was issued from Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City concerning “possible intelligence collection being conducted by Israeli Art Students.” Tinker AFB houses AWACS surveillance craft and Stealth bombers. The report does not elaborate on what kind of intelligence was being sought.
On May 19, 2001, two Israeli nationals “requested permission to visit a museum” at Volk Field Air National Guard Base in Camp Douglas, Wis. “Approximately ten minutes after being allowed on the base, the two were seen on an active runway, taking photographs.” The men, charged with misdemeanor trespass, were identified as 26-year-old Gal Kantor and 22-year-old Tsvi Watermann, and were released after paying a $210 fine. According to the Air Force security officer on duty, “Both were asked if they were involved in the selling of art while in the U.S. Kantor became very upset over this, and questioned why they were being asked about that … Kantor’s whole demeanor changed, and he then became uncooperative.”
‘Art students’ throughout U.S.
So it went week after week, month after month, for more than a year and a half. In addition to the locations mentioned above, there were “art student” encounters in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, El Paso, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, New Orleans, Phoenix, San Diego, Little Rock, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Arlington, Texas, Albuquerque, and dozens of other small cities and towns.
“Their stories,” the DEA report states, “were remarkable only in their consistency. At first, they will state that they are art students, either from the University of Jerusalem or the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem. Other times they will purport to be promoting a new art studio in the area. When pressed for details as to the location of the art studio or why they are selling the paintings, they become evasive.”
Indeed, they had reason to be nervous, because they were lying. Salon contacted Bezalel Academy’s Varda Harel, head of the Academic Students’ Administration, with a list of every “student” named in the DEA report, including their dates of birth, passport numbers, and in some cases military registration numbers. Not a single name was identified in the Bezalel database, either as a current student or as a graduate of the past 10 years (nor had any of the “students” tried to apply to Bezalel in the last ten years). As for the University of Jerusalem, there is no such entity. There is the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but Heidi Gleit, the school’s foreign press liaison, told me that Israelis commonly refer to the school as Hebrew University, not the University of Jerusalem. (Hebrew University, she said, does not release student records to the public.)
Washington Post ‘debunks’ reports using anonymous officials
Still, the U.S. press was uninterested. Just one day after the Le Monde report, the Washington Post ran a story on March 6 that seemed to put the whole thing to rest. Headlined “Reports of Israeli Spy Ring Dismissed,” the piece, by John Mintz and Dan Eggen, opened with official denials from a “wide array of U.S. officials” and quoted Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden as saying, “This seems to be an urban myth that has been circulating for months. The department has no information at this time to substantiate these widespread reports about Israeli art students involved in espionage.”
The Post quoted anonymous officials who said they thought the allegations had been “circulated by a single employee of the Drug Enforcement Administration who is angry that his theories have not gained currency … [T]wo law enforcement officials said the disgruntled DEA agent, who disagreed with the conclusion of FBI and CIA intelligence experts that no spying was taking place, appears to be leaking a memo that he himself wrote.”
An INS spokesman acknowledged to the Post that several dozen Israelis had been deported, but said it was the result of “routine visa violations.” At the same time, DEA spokesman Thomas Hinojosa told the Post that “multiple reports of suspicious activity on the part of young Israelis had come into the agency’s Washington headquarters from agents in the field. The reports were summarized in a draft memo last year, but Hinojosa said he did not have a copy and could not vouch for the accuracy of media reports describing its contents.”
The Post’s apparent debunking was far from convincing, even to the casual reader. Of course there was no proof that the art students were part of a spy ring: Intelligence Online and Le Monde had jumped the gun. However, the real possibility that they were part of a spy ring could not be dismissed — any more than could any other theory one might advance to explain their unusual behavior. With that in mind, Justice spokeswoman Dryden’s assertion that reports of an Israeli spy ring were an “urban myth” was an oddly overplayed denial. A response that fit the facts would have been something like “There have been numerous reports of suspicious behavior by Israelis claiming to be art students. We are looking into the allegations.” Instead, Dryden appeared to be trying to forestall any discussion of just what the facts of the case were. Given the political sensitivities and the potentially embarrassing nature of the case, that was not surprising,
If the whole thing was an “urban myth,” like the sewer reptiles of Manhattan, and if it all led back to one deskbound nut job in the DEA, then what were those “reports of suspicious activity” that had come in from agents in the field? Hinojosa’s statement about the DEA memo was suspiciously evasive: If the “media reports describing its content” (that is, the articles in Le Monde and Intelligence Online) were in fact based on the DEA memo whose existence Hinojosa acknowledged, then the “lone nut” explanation offered by anonymous U.S. officials was at best irrelevant and at worst a rather obvious piece of disinformation, an attempt to shove the story under the rug. (In fact, the French articles were based on the actual DEA memo — a fact any news organization could have quickly verified, since the leaked DEA document had been floating around on various Web venues, such as Cryptome.org, as early as March 21).
To someone not familiar with the 60-page DEA memo, or to reporters who didn’t bother to obtain it, the fact that a disgruntled employee leaked a memo he wrote himself might seem like decisive proof that the whole “art student” tale was a canard. In reality, the nature of the memo makes its authorship irrelevant. The memo is a compilation of field reports by dozens of named agents and officials from DEA offices across America. It contains the names, passport numbers, addresses, and in some cases the military ID numbers of the Israelis who were questioned by federal authorities. Pointing a finger at the author is like blaming a bank robbery on the desk sergeant who took down the names of the robbers.
Agents confirm reports
Of course, the agent (or agents) who wrote the memo could also have fabricated or embellished the field reports. That does not seem to have been the case. Salon contacted more than a half-dozen agents identified in the memo. One agent said she had been visited six times at her home by “art students.” None of the agents wished to be named, and very few were willing to speak at length, but all confirmed the veracity of the information.
Despite such obvious holes in the official story, neither the Post nor any other mainstream media organization ran follow-up articles. The New York Times has not yet deemed it worth covering – in fact, the paper of record has not written about the art student mystery even once, not even to pooh-pooh it. One or two minor media players did some braying – Israel had been caught spying, etc. – and the bonko conspiracy fringe had a field day, but the rest of the media, taking a cue from the big boys, decided it was a nonstarter: the Post’s “debunking” and the Times’ silence had effectively killed the story.
So complete was the silence that by mid-March, Jane’s Information Group, the respected British intelligence and military analysis service, noted: “It is rather strange that the U.S. media seems to be ignoring what may well be the most explosive story since the 11 September attacks — the alleged break-up of a major Israeli espionage operation in the USA.” [Jane’s Intelligence Digest, 3/13/02]
The only major American media outlet aside from Fox to seriously present the “art student” allegations was Insight on the News, the investigative magazine published weekly by the conservative Washington Times. In a March 11 article, Insight quoted a senior Justice Department official as saying, “We think there is something quite sinister here but are unable at this time to put our finger on it” — essentially echoing what the DEA report concluded.
Managing editor Paul M. Rodriguez, who wrote the Insight story and had quietly tracked the art student phenomenon for weeks before Intelligence Online scooped him, took an agnostic stance toward the mystery. “There is zero information at this time to suggest that these students were being run by the Mossad,” he told me. “Nothing we’ve come across would suggest this. We have seen nothing that says this is a spy ring run by the Israeli government directly or with a wink and a nod or some other form of sub rosa control. Based on what we’ve been told, seen and obtained I just don’t see the so-called spy ring as a certain fact. Does that make it not so? I don’t know.”
Rodriguez added, “I think the investigators’ take is this: What were these ‘students’ doing going around accessing buildings without authorization, tracking undercover cops to their homes — if not for some sort of intel mission? It’s sort of a mind-fuck scenario, if one were to believe this was a conspiracy by a foreign intel source and/or a bunch of nutty ‘kids’ fucking around just to see how far they could push the envelope — which they seem to have pushed pretty damn far, given the page after page after page of intrusions and snooping alleged.”
The Israeli embassy denies the charges of a spy ring. “We are saying what we’ve been saying for months,” spokesman Mark Reguev [usually spelled Regev] told Salon, referring to the Fox series in December. “No American official or intelligence agency has complained to us about this. The story is nonsense. Israel does not spy on the United States.”
Whether or not the “art students” are Israeli spies, Reguev’s blanket disavowal is untrue: Israel does spy on the United States. This should come as no surprise: Allies frequently spy on each other, and Israeli intelligence is renowned as among the best and most aggressive in the world. Israel has been at war off and on since its birth as a nation in 1948 and is hungry for information it deems essential to its survival. And America’s relationship to Israel and support for it is essential to the survival of the Jewish state. Add these things up, and espionage against the United States becomes understandable, if not justifiable.
The U.S. government officially denies this, of course, but it knows that such spying goes on. In 1996, the U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report indicating that “Country A,” later identified as Israel, “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally.” A year earlier, the Defense Investigative Service circulated a memo warning U.S. military contractors that “Israel aggressively collects [U.S.] military and industrial technology” and “possesses the resources and technical capability to successfully achieve its collection objectives.” The memo explained that “the Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every facet of their political and economic policies.”
Jonathan Pollard & Israeli spying
In the history of Israeli espionage in and against the United States, the case of Jonathan Pollard was certainly the most heinous. Pollard, a civilian U.S. naval intelligence analyst, provided Israeli intelligence with an estimated 800,000 pages of classified U.S. intelligence information. The information eventually ended up in Soviet hands, compromising American agents in the field — several of whom were allegedly captured and killed as a result. Israel at first denied, and then admitted, Pollard’s connections to the Mossad after he was arrested in 1985 and imprisoned for life. The case severely strained American-Israeli relations, and continues to rankle many American Jews, who believe that since Pollard was spying for Israel, his sentence was unduly harsh. (Other American Jews feel equally strongly that Pollard and the Israelis betrayed them.)
Any attempt to understand the official U.S. response to the Israeli art student mystery — and to some degree, the media response — must take into account both the smoke screen that states blow over incidents that could jeopardize their strategic alliances, and America’s unique and complex relationship with Israel. The Jewish state is a close if problematic ally with whom the United States enjoys a “special relationship” unlike that maintained with any other nation in the world. But U.S. and Israeli interests do not always coincide, and spying has always been deemed to cross a line, to represent a fundamental violation of trust. According to intelligence sources, the United States might perhaps secretly tolerate some Israeli spying on U.S. soil if the government decided that it was in our interest (although it could never be acknowledged), but certain types of spying will simply not be accepted by the United States, whether the spying is carried out by Israel or anyone else.
If England or France spied on the United States, American officials would likely conceal it. In the case of Israel, there are far stronger reasons to hide any unseemly cracks in the special relationship. The powerful pro-Israel political constituencies in Congress; pro-Israel lobbies; the Bush administration’s strong support for Israel, and its strategic and political interest in maintaining close ties with the Jewish state as a partner in the “war against terror”; the devastating consequences for U.S.-Israeli relations if it was suspected that Israeli agents might have known about the Sept. 11 attack — all these factors explain why the U.S. government might publicly downplay the art student story and conceal any investigation that produces unpalatable results.
Pro-Israel lobby is a vast and powerful force
The pro-Israel lobby is a vast and powerful force in American politics; the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is the No. 1 foreign-policy lobby and the fourth most powerful lobby in Washington, according to Fortune Magazine. Michael Lind, a senior fellow of the New America Foundation and a former executive editor of the National Interest, calls the Israel lobby “an ethnic donor machine” that “distorts U.S. foreign policy” in the Middle East. Among foreign service officers, law enforcement and the military, there is an impression, says Lind, that you can’t mess with Israel without suffering direct and indirect smears, such as being labeled an Arabist. Lind, who himself has been virulently attacked as an anti-Semite for his forthrightness on the subject, acknowledges that the Israel lobby is no different from any other — just more effective. “This is what all lobbies do,” Lind observes. “If you criticize the AARP, you hate old people and you want them to starve to death. The Israel lobby is just one part of the lobby problem.”
Considering the volatility of the issue, it is not surprising that almost no one in officialdom wants to go on the record for a story like the art students. “In government circles,” as Insight’s Rodriguez put it, “anything that has to do with Israel is always a hot topic, a third rail — deadly. No one wants to touch it.” Fox News’ Cameron quoted intelligence officers saying that to publicly air suspicions of Israeli wrongdoing was tantamount to “career suicide.” And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in one of its bloodiest and most polarizing phases, has only exacerbated sensitivities.
Some of the same pressures that keep government officials from criticizing Israel may also explain why the media has failed to pursue the art student enigma. Media outlets that run stories even mildly critical of Israel often find themselves targeted by organized campaigns, including form-letter e-mails, the cancellation of subscriptions, and denunciations of the organization and its reporters and editors as anti-Semites. Cameron, for example, was excoriated by various pro-Israel lobbying groups for his exposé. Representatives of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) argued that the Fox report cited only unnamed sources, provided no direct evidence, and moreover had been publicly denied by spokesmen for the FBI and others (the last, of course, is not really an argument).
“Jewish/Israeli groups” attack Fox, Cameron
In a December interview with Salon, CAMERA’s associate director, Alex Safian, said that several “Jewish/Israeli groups” were having “conversations” with representatives of Fox News regarding Cameron’s piece. Safian said he questioned Cameron’s motives in running the story. “I think Fox has always been fair to Israel in its reporting,” said Safian. “I think it’s just Cameron who has something, personally, about Israel. He was brought up in the Middle East. Maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe he’s very sympathetic to the Arab side. One could ask.” The implicit suggestion was that Cameron is a bigot; in conversation, Safian would later make the same allegation about the entire editorial helm at Le Monde, which he called an anti-Semitic newspaper.
Told of Safian’s comments, Cameron said, “I’m speechless. I spent several years in Iran growing up because my father was an archaeologist there. That makes me anti-Israel?” The chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, Cameron had never before been attacked for biased coverage of Israel or Israeli-related affairs — or for biased coverage of Arabs, for that matter. Cameron defends his December reporting, saying he had never received any heat whatsoever from his superiors, nor had he ever been contacted by any dissenting voices in government.
All traces of Cameron’s broadcast are removed from Fox
Oddly, four days after the Cameron investigation ran, all traces of his report — transcripts, Web links, headlines — disappeared from the Foxnews.com archives. (Normally, Fox leaves a story up for two to three weeks before consigning it to the pay archive.) When Le Monde contacted Fox in March for a copy of the original tapes, Fox News spokesmen said the request posed a problem but would not elaborate. (Fox News now says Le Monde never called.) Asked why the Cameron piece disappeared, spokesman Robert Zimmerman said it was “up there on our Web site for about two or three weeks and then it was taken down because we had to replace it with more breaking news. As you know, in a Web site you’ve got x amount of bandwidth — you know, x amount of stuff you can put stuff up on [sic]. So it was replaced. Normal course of business, my friend.” (In fact, a text-based story on a Web site takes up a negligible amount of bandwidth.)
When informed that Cameron’s story was gone from the archives, not simply from the headline pages (when you entered the old URL, a Fox screen appeared with the message “This story no longer exists”), Zimmerman replied, “I don’t know where it is.”
‘A lot of patriots would like to remain alive’
The extreme sensitivity of the Israeli art student story in government circles was made clear to this reporter when, in the midst of my inquiries at DEA and elsewhere, I was told by a source that some unknown party had checked my records and background. He proved it by mentioning a job I had briefly held many years ago that virtually no one outside my family knew about. Shortly after this, I received a call from an individual who identified himself only by the code name Stability. Stability said he was referred to me from “someone in Washington.” That someone turned out to be a veteran D.C. correspondent who has close sources in the CIA and the FBI and who verified that Stability was a high-level intelligence agent who had been following the art student matter from the inside.
Stability was guarded in his initial conversation with me. He said that people in the intelligence community were suspicious about my bona fides and raised the possibility that someone was “using” me. “Your name is known and has been known for quite a while,” Stability said. “The problem is that you’re going into a hornet’s nest with this. It’s a very difficult time in this particular area. This is a scenario where a lot of people are living a bunker mentality.” He added, “There are a lot of people under a lot of pressure right now because there’s a great effort to discredit the story, discredit the connections, prevent people from going any further [in investigating the matter]. There are some very, very smart people who have taken a lot of heat on this — have gone to what I would consider extraordinary risks to reach out. Quite frankly, there are a lot of patriots out there who’d like to remain alive. Typically, patriots are dead.”
In a subsequent conversation, Stability said that the DEA’s Office of Professional Responsibility is currently undertaking an aggressive investigation targeting agents suspected of leaking the June 2001 memo. The OPR inquiry was initiated as a result of Intelligence Online’s exposé of the DEA document in late February. According to Stability, at least 14 agents — including some in agencies other than DEA — are now under intense scrutiny and interrogation. Half a dozen agents have been polygraphed several times over, computers have been seized, desks have been searched.
A DEA spokesman would neither confirm nor deny the allegation. “Anything that has to do with internal security, which would include OPR, is not anything we’re able to discuss,” the spokesman said.
As for the DEA document itself, Stability said that all information gathering for it ceased around June 2001. He also noted that “there are multiple variations of that document” floating around DEA and elsewhere.
“It was a living, breathing document,” Stability said, “that grew on a week-by-week basis, that was being added to as people forwarded information. To say this was a coordinated effort would be a stretch; it was ad hoc. But that document [the DEA memo] didn’t just happen. That document was the result of literally dozens of people providing input, working together. These events were going on, people were looking at them, but could not understand them.”
“It wasn’t until the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001 that field agents ran across a series of visits that occurred within a very close period of time,” Stability said. Agents from across the country began talking to each other, comparing notes. “There was an embryonic understanding that there was something here, something was happening. People kept running across it. And agents being who they are, gut feelings being what they are, they would catch a thread. They’d start to pull a thread, and next thing, they’d end up with the arm of the jacket and the back was coming off, and then you’d end up with reports like you saw. The information, in its scattered form, is one thing. The information compiled, documented, timelined, indexed, is a horrific event for some of these people. Because it is indisputable.”
Going to agents’ homes
“Agents started to realize that people were coming to their homes,” he continued. “If you are part of an organization like this, you tend to be careful about your security. When something disturbs that sense of security, it’s unnerving. One thing that was understood fairly early on was that the students would go to some areas that didn’t have street signs, and in fact they would already have directions to these areas. That indicated that someone had been there prior to them or had electronically figured where the agents were located — using credit card records, things of that nature. This sat in the back of people’s minds as to the resources necessary to do that.”
“I will tell you that there is still great debate over what [the art students] specific purposes were and are,” Stability went on. “When you take an individual who picks up a group of individuals from an airport, individuals who supposedly have no idea what they’re doing in-country, who fly on over from a foreign land, whose airline tickets could in some instances total a value greater than $15,000 — and who get picked up at the airport and drive specifically to one individual’s home, which they know the exact directions to: Yeah, you could say there’s a problem here. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that. The overarching item is that a lot of work went into going to people’s houses to sell them junk from China in plastic frames.”
Why? Organized crime & drugs?
But to what end? What was the value? What was to be gained? “Unknown, unknown,” Stability said. “You could be anywhere from D.C. to daylight on that one. Even on our side, you have to take all the stuff and draw it all out and clean out all the chaff. I will tell you that from those who are working ground zero [of this case], it is a difficult puzzle to put together, and it is not complete by any means.” Even the spooks are baffled; they have no answers.
So let’s draw out the chaff ourselves and see if we can at least speculate. In intel circles, there are a number of working theories, according to Stability. “Profiling of federal agents is one,” said Stability. “Keeping tabs on other people, other foreign nationals, is another. A third is that they were working for organized crime — that’s an easy one, and it almost sounds more like a cover than a reality. The predominant thought is that it was a profiling endeavour, and from a profiling aspect, also one of intimidation.”
You mean this whole vast scheme was a mind fuck, to use Paul Rodriguez’s elegant phrasing? A psy-ops endeavor to spook the spooks? Perhaps. As Stability put it, “Almost nothing is wrong in this particular instance, Mr. Ketcham. In this particular situation, right is wrong, left is right, up is down, day is night.”
Yet for the most part the targeted agents weren’t spooks in the strictest sense: They were DEA — cops who bust drug dealers. And that leads us into Theory No. 1, also known as the Art Student/Drug Dealer Conspiracy. This theory has a piece of evidence to support it: the link, mentioned in the leaked DEA memo, between an Ecstasy investigation and the telephone numbers provided by an Israeli detained in Orlando. There are “problems” with Israeli nationals involved in the Ecstasy business, according to Israeli Embassy spokesman Reguev. “Israeli authorities and the DEA are working together on that issue,” he said. In a statement before Congress in 2000, officials with the U.S. Customs Service, which intercepted some 7 million Ecstasy tablets last year, noted that “Israeli organized-crime elements appear to be in control” of the multibillion-dollar U.S. Ecstasy trade, “from production through the international smuggling phase. Couriers associated with Israeli organized crime have been arrested around the world, including … locations in the U.S. such as Florida, New Jersey, New York and California.”
Miami was cited as one of the main entry points of Ecstasy into the United States and was specified as one of the central “headquarters for the criminal organizations that smuggle Ecstasy”; Houston was also cited for large Ecstasy seizures — an interesting nexus, given the large number of “art students” who congregated both in the Miami and Ft. Lauderdale area and in Houston. “Israeli nationals in the Ecstasy trade have been very sophisticated in their operations,” says a U.S. Customs officer who has investigated the groups. “Some of these individuals have been skilled at counterintelligence and in concealing their communications and movements from law enforcement.”
It would thus seem that Israeli organized crime has at least the capacity to pull off a widespread surveillance and intelligence operation. The drug connection would also explain the sizable reserves of cash one Tampa student was handling.
One DEA agent named in the “art student” report told Salon that the best possible explanation for the affair – and he admitted to being utterly baffled by it – was that drug dealers were involved.
“Why us if not because of the DEA’s mission?” the agent asked. “I mean, what would Israeli intel want with us? Here’s another avenue of inquiry to take: Israeli organized crime is the now the biggest dealer of Ecstasy in the United States. These students? It was Israeli organized crime judging our strength, getting a survey of our operations. What if I wanted to burglarize your building and go through your files? I’d do a reconnoiter. Get a sense of the floor plan and security, where the guards are stationed, how many doors, what kind of locks, alarm systems, backup alarm systems.”
The trouble with this theory is the obvious one: In the annals of crime chutzpah, for drug dealers to brazenly approach drug agents in their homes and offices may represent the all-time world record. And what conceivable useful intelligence could they gather that would be worth the risk? Were the tee-heeing tight-sweatered Israeli babes pulling some kind of Mata Hari stunt, seducing paunchy middle-aged DEA boys and beguiling them into loose-lipped info sharing?
Espionage?
Theory No. 2 is that they were all engaged in espionage. This scenario has the virtue of simplicity — if it smells like a spy, walks like a spy, and talks like a spy, it probably is a spy — but doesn’t make much sense, either. Why would the Mossad — or any spy outfit with a lick of good sense — use kids without papers as spies? And, just as our incredulous DEA agent noted, what intelligence useful to Israel could be gathered from DEA offices, anyway?
I suggested to Stability that the operation, if it was that, was purposely conspicuous — almost oafish. “Yes, it was,” he replied. “It was a noisy operation. Did you ever see ‘Victor/Victoria’? It was about a woman playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this from that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that was in your face, that didn’t make sense, that couldn’t possibly be them.” He added, “Think of it this way: How could the experts think this could actually be something of any value? Wouldn’t they dismiss what they were seeing?”
That’s where you enter truly dark territory: Theory No. 3, the Art Student as Agent as Art Student Smoke Screen. It has major problems, but let’s roll with it for a moment. This theory contends that the art student ring was a smoke screen intended to create confusion and allow actual spies — who were also posing as art students — to be lumped together with the rest and escape detection. In other words, the operation is an elaborate double fake-out, a hiding-in-plain-sight scam. Whoever dreamed it up thought ahead to the endgame and knew that the DEA-stakeout aspect was so bizarre that it would throw off American intelligence. According to this theory — Stability’s “Victor/Victoria” scenario — Israeli agents wanted, let’s say, to monitor al-Qaida members in Florida and other states. But they feared detection. So to provide cover, and also to create a dizzyingly Byzantine story that would confuse the situation, Israeli intel flooded areas of real operations with these bumbling “art students” — who were told to deliberately stake out DEA agents.
Perhaps. Why not? Up is down, left is right. I nudged Stability on the obvious implication of the “Victor/Victoria” scenario: If this was a ruse, a decoy to conceal another operation, what was that other operation? “Unknown,” Stability said.
Then of course there’s Theory No. 4: that they really were art students. Either they were recruited in Israel as part of an art-selling racket or they simply hit upon the idea themselves. This theory is basically the de facto position held by the U.S. and Israeli governments, which insist that the only wrong committed by the “students” was to sell art without the proper papers. There are almost too many problems with this to list, but it’s worth mentioning a few: Why in the world would people try to sell cheap market art to DEA officials? Why would they almost all use the same bogus Bezalel Academy of Arts cover story? Why would anyone running such a racket to make money use foreign nationals without green cards, knowing that they would quickly be snagged for visa violations? And why did so many of these itinerant peddlers, wandering the United States on their strange mission of hawking cheap Chinese knockoff paintings, have “black information” about federal facilities?
There are other theories. One is that these were spies in training, newly minted Mossad graduates on test runs to see how they would operate in field conditions. I asked Stability how hotly the matter was now being pursued in intel and law enforcement. “Depends on who you speak to,” he told me. “Some people say that it’s a dead issue, a fantasy. Most of the investigations are happening at an ad hoc level. There are people out there that you couldn’t sway off some of the cases, because that’s how dedicated they are.”
Apparently, at least some agents in the FBI remain quite concerned about the art student problem. According to several intelligence sources, including Stability, on Dec. 3, 2001, six separate FBI field offices simultaneously forwarded communiqués to FBI headquarters inquiring into the status of the investigation. The FBI agents wanted to have a “clarification” as to what was going on.
The subject may not be officially dead yet. The art student matter may be taken up by the congressional committees investigating intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, according to another source.
What about the crucial Washington Post article, in which anonymous federal agents alleged the DEA memo was the work of a disgruntled employee?
“The Washington Post article was a plant — that’s obvious. The story was killed,” Stability told me. Who planted the story? Stability claimed the FBI was behind it. “Every organization is running scared,” Stability added, “because they’re afraid of the next shoe to drop. There are many smoking guns out there, many. So consequently every one is at a level of heightened anxiety, and when they’re anxious they make mistakes.”
Yes, but what are they afraid of? What will the smoking guns prove? Questions, questions, labyrinthine questions, and the more you ask in this matter, the fewer get answered. When I called the CIA to inquire about the agency’s March 2001 alert — an alert that evinced deep disquiet over the affair — an official who was aware of the inquiry told me, “I’ll make a recommendation to you: Don’t write a story. This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. As far as we’re concerned, we reported it, yes, but subsequently it’s nothing of interest to us. And we’ve just closed the book on it. And I really recommend you do the same. Let it go. There’s nothing here.”
Not everyone else in law enforcement is so sure. “There’s a lot of concern among the agents,” said the DEA source. “We’re investigators. We’re not satisfied when we don’t have answers. This is a mystery that has an answer and it has to be resolved.”
Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate attempted to assassinate Anatoly Shariy, a Ukrainian blogger and vocal Kiev regime critic, and pin the blame on Moscow, a Russian law enforcement source told Sputnik Tuesday.
“The circumstances of the organization of the attempted murder of popular Ukrainian blogger Anatoly Shariy, who lives in Spain, have been established. Once again, Ukraine’s special services are behind the terrorist action against a journalist undesirable to the Kiev regime,” the source said.
“According to the data received, the preparation of the assassination attempt on March 6, 2024, was carried out by the Main Intelligence Directorate … which, in close cooperation with the Security Service, developed a ‘false flag’ operation with the aim of physically eliminating the blogger, while placing responsibility for his murder on Russia. The operation was directly supervised by the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, Kyrylo Budanov,” the source added.
Spanish law enforcement officials did not take the investigation into the circumstances of the assassination attempt seriously, the source said, adding that they did not go to inspect the scene of the assassination attempt and did not interview witnesses.
“On behalf of the Russian special services, Ukrainian agents recruited participants in the assassination attempt from among ethnic Ukrainians living in Spain and representatives of local criminals. As part of the operation, surveillance was carried out, traffic routes were identified, weapons were delivered and handed over to the criminals,” the source said.
I try not to write about anyone who has died because if it was my family member I would not want to read any speculations about their death. However, in this case I feel that justice has not been given a chance and therefore it needs highlighting. ... continue
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Over the last couple of decades French journalist 
The Sharon Tate murders were as bizarre as they were bloody, and the story behind the story is even stranger.
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