Angleton, Mossad, and the Kennedy Assassinations
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • JUNE 5, 2022
Edward Curtin wrote four years ago on Counter-Currents:
perhaps no one epitomized the twisted mind games played by intelligence agencies more than James Jesus Angleton, the notorious CIA Counterintelligence Chief for so many years, in whose safe were found gruesome photos of Robert Kennedy’s autopsy. Why, one may ask, were those photos there, since Angleton allegedly had no connection to the RFK killing and since Sirhan was said to be the assassin? Was Angleton’s work as CIA liaison with Israel in any way connected?
If you ask me, I strongly suspect it was. Angleton had been the Mossad’s indispensable ally in John Kennedy’s assassination. So he had personal reasons to cooperate with them again in stopping Robert Kennedy from reaching the White House, a position from which, according to multiple testimonies, Robert intended to track his brother’s assassins.[1]
I summarized the case against Ben-Gurion’s Israel in the assassinations of both Kennedy brothers in this article, which still turns up regularly among The Unz Review’s “Past classics”. Here I’ll try to show that an inquiry into Angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors” makes the case even stronger.
The “World War III” Virus
Angleton’s name often comes up in books incriminating the CIA in the 1963 Dallas coup, because he is believed to have engineered the staged visits and telephone calls by an Oswald impersonator to both the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in late September and early October 1963. Over the phone, this bogus “Oswald” referred to an arrangement with Vladimir Kostikov, who was known to the FBI as the officer in charge of assassinations in the United States. These visits and calls were, of course, monitored by the local CIA cell, and would constitute, after November 22, evidence of a Cuban-Soviet conspiracy.
According to the most natural and common interpretation, the purpose of staging Oswald as a communist conspirator was to blame the Dallas shooting on Cuba and/or the Soviet Union — a classic false flag scenario. Besides getting rid of Kennedy, the theory goes, the motive was to create a pretext for invading Cuba, something that Kennedy had forbidden after the Bay of Pigs debacle and the firing of Allen Dulles. That has become the dominant JFK conspiracy theory, best articulated recently by James Douglass. But it has one major flaw: there was no invasion of Cuba following Kennedy’s assassination. How can that be explained?
And why did Johnson, Hoover and the Warren Commission quickly suppress the “rumors” of Oswald’s communist profile (already hitting the news on November 23, e.g. the morning front-page of the Washington Post titled, “Pro-Castro Fort Worth Marxist Charged in Kennedy’s Assassination”[2]), to replace it with his “lone nut” profile? James Douglass’s explanation is that Johnson thwarted the plot hatched by the CIA and Pentagon hawks, thus saving us from World War III. “To Johnson’s credit, he refused to let the Soviets take the blame for Kennedy’s murder; to his discredit, he decided not to confront the CIA over what it had done in Mexico City. Thus, while the secondary purpose of the assassination plot was stymied, its primary purpose was achieved.”[3] The problem with this theory is its internal contradiction, since it also affirms that the reason Kennedy was assassinated was that he refused to start World War III: therefore, starting the war was supposedly the primary — not the secondary — purpose of the whole plot.
The alternative explanation is that Oswald’s profile as a Communist assassin was crafted by the conspirators, not for the purpose of starting a war against Cuba and Russia, but for allowing Johnson to bully Federal and State administrations, and even the news community, into closing the investigation quickly, lest the discovery of Cuba and Russia’s responsibility force the U.S. into a global nuclear war “that would kill 40 million Americans in an hour,” as Johnson kept repeating to everyone from Dallas to Washington. To convince Senator Richard Russell to sit in the Warren Commission, for example, Johnson told him in a taped phone conversation: “we’ve got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour…”[4]
Besides allowing Johnson to shut down Police investigations and secretly task the Warren Commission with the goal of “rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy” (as recommended by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach’s November 25 memo[5]), the threat of nuclear war kept the American people satisfied that, if they were being lied to — as many felt they were — it was for their own good. And so the lie about Kennedy’s assassination was two-sided: on one side was the Cuban-Soviet conspiracy, and on the other was the lone assassin. Both sides of the lie had to be maintained over the years, the Soviet conspiracy remaining in the background in order to keep the Warren Commission’s conclusion, if not credible, at least justifiable. That is why, in a September 1969 filmed interview (broadcast on CBS on April 24, 1975), Johnson could calmly declare that “there might have been international connections,” but that the Warren Commission did a fine job anyway.[6]
Like most JFK researchers, John Newman, a retired U.S. Army major and Political Science professor and the author of Oswald and the CIA, believes that long before Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, Oswald was maneuvered and his activities “carefully monitored, controlled, and, if necessary, embellished and choreographed,” so that, “on 22 November, Oswald’s CIA files would establish his connection to Castro and the Kremlin.” However, in an epilogue added in 2008 to his book (which Ron Unz has already referred to here and here), Newman reasons that the real purpose of setting up Oswald as a Communist was not to start World War III, but to create a “World War III virus”, used by Johnson as a “national security” pretext to shut all investigations and intimidate the corporate media. “It is now apparent that the World War III pretext for a national security cover-up was built into the fabric of the plot to assassinate President Kennedy.”[7]
After reviewing the steps taken to design this plot, Newman concludes: “In my view, there is only one person whose hands fit into these gloves: James Jesus Angleton, Chief of CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff.”
No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot. No one else had the means necessary to plant the WWIII virus in Oswald’s files and keep it dormant for six weeks until the president’s assassination. Whoever those who were ultimately responsible for the decision to kill Kennedy were, their reach extended into the national intelligence apparatus to such a degree that they could call upon a person who knew its inner secrets and workings so well that he could design a failsafe mechanism into the fabric of the plot. The only person who could ensure a national security cover-up of an apparent counterintelligence nightmare was the head of counterintelligence [Angleton].[8]
As a matter of fact, no one pushed more for incriminating the KGB than Angleton. Michael Collins Piper, who wrote much about Angleton in his groundbreaking Final Judgment, showed that Angleton went to great lengths to discredit, imprison and torture Russian Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, who in 1964 claimed insistently that the KGB had decided against trying to use Oswald in any way during his sojourn in Russia, and that the KGB had nothing to do with Kennedy’s assassination. Angleton was also the main source for Edward Jay Epstein’s book, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (published in 1978), which laid the blame on the KGB.[9]
Angleton and Counterintelligence
Angleton was appointed head of the Counterintelligence Staff by CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1954, a position he kept for twenty years. According to Tom Mangold, author of Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: the CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (Simon & Schuster, 1991): “Angleton’s longstanding friendships with Dulles and Helms were to become the most important factor in giving him freedom of movement within the CIA. He was extended such trust by his superiors that there was often a significant failure of executive control over his activities.”[10]
After Kennedy fired Dulles and his two Deputy Directors Richard Bissel and Charles Cabell in autumn 1961, Angleton was shielded by new Deputy Director Richard Helms, who had survived the purge and would end up as head of the CIA. In 1962, as the CIA moved into its new headquarters in Langley, Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff had nearly two hundred people.[11]
As one colleague and friend said, “Jim’s central dominating obsession was communism, something that for him was the essence of absolute and profound evil. For him nothing else really mattered, but he would use anyone and anything to combat it.”[12] The most secret component of Angleton’s empire was the Special Investigation Group (SIG), tasked with exploring the possibility that the CIA was infiltrated by the KGB. “The SIG was so secret that many members of the Counterintelligence Staff didn’t even know it existed,” writes Mangold, “and nearly everyone was denied access to it. . . . Secret units within a secret unit were a hallmark of Angleton, the SIG, and the Counterintelligence Staff.”[13]
The tragicomic story of Angleton’s “mole hunt” is told in detail by Tom Mangold. It involves a megalomaniac KGB defector named Anatoly Golitsyn, who, responding to Angleton’s paranoia, convinced him that the KGB had infiltrated the CIA through a high-level source code-named “Sacha”, and that all other defectors after him would be phony. Angleton’s quest for Sacha would last seven years. About 40 senior Agency officers were put on the suspect list and many had their careers ruined, while at least 22 genuine defectors were turned away. No real KGB spy was ever caught by Angleton. Meanwhile, the British Soviet agent Kim Philby remained Angleton’s most trusted friend until being unmasked in 1963, and one Counterintelligence agent, Clare Edward Petty, ended up believing “Sacha” must be Angleton himself.[14] This fiasco is the subject of David C. Martin’s book Wilderness of Mirrors (2018).[15] As Los Angeles Times journalist David Wise writes: “In the end, Angleton never found a mole. But he did more harm to the CIA than even the most talented mole could ever have accomplished.”[16]
When William Colby, from the Soviet Division, became Director of the CIA, he looked for a pretext to sack Angleton, and fired him in December 1974 after the disclosure by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times of two dubious domestic operations that his Counterintelligence Staff had been conducting in violation of the CIA’s charter: intercepting mail sent between the United States and the Soviet Union (Program HT/LINGUAL) and spying on American antiwar protestors (Operation CHAOS).
When George Kalaris, who replaced Angleton, directed an investigation into Angleton’s files, his team located over 40 vaults that had to be drilled open. It took three years to sort, destroy or classify the discovered materials, which had never been archived into the CIA’s central filing system. And it took CIA officer Cleveland Cram six years to write a report in 12 legal-sized volumes on the activities of the Counterintelligence Staff from 1954 to 1974.[17]
The most important conclusion is that Angleton’s Counterintelligence, which was involved in the preparation for JFK’s assassination, was not the CIA, but rather a “second CIA within the CIA” (as Peter Dale Scott put it), sealed from scrutiny and accountable to no one, yet supported by almost unlimited budget.[18] During Kennedy’s presidency, John McCone, an outsider, of course had no idea what Angleton was doing or not doing, and Richard Helms, his Deputy, let him do as he pleased.
But this Counterintelligence disaster is only half of Angleton’s story. There is another half, rarely told. Tom Mangold only refers to it in an endnote:
I would like to place on the record, however, that Angleton’s professional friends overseas, then and subsequently, came from the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence-gathering service) and that he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death.[19]
To be fair, Mangold also writes: “Angleton’s ties with the Israelis gave him considerable prestige within the CIA and later added significantly to his expanding counterintelligence empire,” while stirring “the utter fury of the division’s separate Arab desks.”[20] But that’s all we’ll learn from Mangold about the Mossad-side of Angleton. To know more about it, we must turn to Jefferson Morley’s more recent and thorough investigation, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (St. Martin’s Press, 2017). We will learn that Angleton was less “out of control” than we think — only the people who controlled him were not those who were supposed to.
Angleton and Mossad
When Angleton became chief of Counterintelligence in 1954, he had already been occupying, since early 1951, the CIA’s Israeli Desk, or Israeli Account, as it was called. And he had exclusive authority on the CIA station in Tel Aviv. The Israeli Desk was created for Angleton after the visit of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to the United States in May 1951. Besides launching a drive to raise $1 billion from the sale of Israel Bonds,[21] the purpose of Ben-Gurion’s visit was to establish collaboration between U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. Israel’s population of immigrants from the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe made the country a privileged source of information about what was going on behind the Iron Curtain. In exchange for this service, Israel wanted strategic, economic and military support against their enemy Nasser, whom they did their utmost to push into the Soviet camp. Here is Morley’s account of the background for that turning point in U.S.-Israel relationship:
In 1950, Reuven Shiloah, the founder of Israel’s first intelligence organization, visited Washington and came away impressed by the CIA. In April 1951, he reorganized the fractious Israeli security forces to create a new foreign intelligence agency, called the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, inevitably known as the Mossad, the Hebrew word for “institute.” In 1951, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion came to the United States and brought Shiloah with him. Ben-Gurion met privately with President Truman and Walter Bedell Smith [director of CIA]. Angleton arranged for Ben-Gurion to lunch with Allen Dulles [Deputy Director for Plans] . . . Shiloah stayed on in Washington to work out the arrangements with Angleton. The resulting agreement laid the foundation for the exchange of secret information between the two services and committed them to report to each other on subjects of mutual interest. Shiloah, according to his biographer [Haggai Eshed], soon developed “a special relationship” with Angleton, who became the CIA’s exclusive liaison with the Mossad. Angleton returned the favor by visiting Israel. Shiloah introduced him to Amos Manor, chief of counterespionage for Israel’s domestic intelligence agency [1953-1963], known as Shabak or Shin Bet.[22]
For almost 25 years, Angleton was the CIA’s exclusive liaison with Israeli intelligence. In this capacity, recalled one of his friends interviewed by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn for their book Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship, “he was getting the benefit of Israeli networks and connections all over the place, not just in the Communist bloc.”[23]
Angleton’s special channel to the Mossad brought little profit to the U.S. in terms of intelligence. In October 1956, no warning came from Angleton about the Israelis’ plan to invade Egypt. As rumors of war were reaching the State Department, Robert Amory, head of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence, called an emergency meeting on October 26. After he presented Allen Dulles with evidence that the Israelis “were mobilizing to attack someone — Egypt,” Angleton contradicted him saying, “I can discount what Amory is saying. I spent last night with our friends and they have assured me that they are just carrying out protective measures against the Jordanians.” Amory got mad and said to Dulles: “The taxpayer lays out $16,000 a year to me as your deputy director for me to give you the best intelligence available. Either you believe me or you believe this co-opted Israeli agent here [pointing to Angleton].”[24] Within days, Israel had invaded Egypt’s Sinai.
James Jesus Angleton made his first visit to Israel in October 1951. “By the mid-1950s,” Morley writes, “Angleton liked nothing better than to leave the cramped office politics of Washington for the austere frontier of the Holy Land. On his visits, Angleton stayed in Ramat Gan, on the suburban coastal plain north of Tel Aviv, the home to many Israeli intelligence officers and diplomats.”
“He used to come from time to time, to meet the head of Mossad, to get briefings,” recalls Efraim Halevy, who served as the Mossad’s liaison officer to the CIA station in Tel Aviv in the early 1960s. Halevy escorted Angleton on his rounds and recorded his meetings with Israeli officials. “He used to meet with David Ben-Gurion, whom he knew for many years,” Halevy recalled. “Ben-Gurion ultimately left office [in 1963] and Angleton went down to Sde Boker [Ben-Gurion’s home in the Negev] to meet him. I didn’t attend those meetings. Those were just the two of them. He had business to transact.”[25]
Angleton knew at least six of the men closest to Ben-Gurion and privy to his secrets. Besides Efraim Halevy (on the right in the top picture), he befriended Isser Harel, founder of the Shin Bet and chief of the Mossad from 1951 (“Jim had enormous admiration for Isser,” said Halevy). Angleton also enjoyed the lifetime friendship of Amos Manor, director of Shin Bet from 1953 to 1963, of Teddy Kollek, who later became mayor of Jerusalem, and of Meir Amit, head of Mossad from 1963 to 1968. When Halevy accompanied Yitzhak Rabin for his ambassadorship to Washington (1968-1973), Angleton met him as often as five times a week, and had monthly lunches with Rabin, Halevy recalled. Angleton’s friends were among the builders of the Zionist state, and Angleton was the only American authorized to talk to them.[26]
This, coupled with his infatuation with Zionism, gave Angleton a great influence on Washington’s Israeli policy. According to Morley, “he was a leading architect of America’s strategic relationship with Israel that endures and dominates the region to this day.”[27] “Angleton’s influence on U.S.-Israeli relations between 1951 and 1974 exceeded that of any secretary of state, with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger. His influence was largely unseen by Congress, the press, other democratic institutions, and much of the CIA itself.”[28]
Speaking of Kissinger, Michael Piper mentions, quoting Deborah Davis’s biography of Katharine Graham, that Kissinger actually moved Angleton’s Israeli desk into the White House, and that both men worked very closely. In one of the most interesting appendixes added to his 1998 edition of Final Judgment, Piper argues that Angleton was the mastermind of the Watergate dirty trick that caused Nixon’s fall, using his longtime ally Ben Bradlee, then Washington Post editor. According to Piper, Watergate was “a joint CIA-Mossad operation—orchestrated by James Angleton—for the purpose of removing Nixon from the presidency.” Nixon had to be removed because, like Kennedy before him, he had become a threat to Israel’s survival.[29]
Dimona and the Stolen Uranium
Naturally, Angleton’s influence on U.S.-Israeli relationship touched upon the sensitive question of Israel’s military nuclear ambition. Morley again:
In Washington, he and Cicely [Angleton’s wife] had spent many evenings with Memi de Shalit, a Lithuanian-born military intelligence officer stationed in the Israeli embassy. Angleton “adored” de Shalit and his wife, Ada, said Efraim Halevy. The de Shalits moved back to Israel in the 1950s, but the friendship continued, and it brought Angleton into the circle of other knowledgeable Israelis. Amos de Shalit, Memi’s brother, was a professor of nuclear physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Tel Aviv. He would be a major contributor to the Israeli nuclear program.[30]
According to Seymour Hersh, “Angleton’s close personal ties with the DeShalit family and others in Israel made it inevitable that he would learn about the [Dimona] construction in the Negev.” Yet he never reported on the Israelis’ efforts to build a nuclear reactor for military purposes.[31] In 1960, Angleton ignored a request from the U.S. Intelligence Board, which reviewed CIA operations on behalf of the White House, that all information regarding Dimona be transmitted “expeditiously”.[32]
Angleton also failed to notice or to report about the stealing of weapons-grade enriched uranium from a plant of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, Pennsylvania. The NUMEC had been created under U.S. government license by David Lowenthal, a Zionist financier, and was run by Zalman Shapiro, the son of an Orthodox rabbi from Lithuania, who was also head of the local chapter of the Zionist Organization of America. Over the 9 years from 1959 to 1968, the Atomic Energy Commission estimated that 267 kilograms of uranium went missing at the Apollo NUMEC plant. One Israeli masquerading as a nuclear engineer who visited the plant was a Mossad agent named Rafael Eitan, who was known to Angleton. “With the fissile material diverted from NUMEC, Israel was able to construct its first nuclear weapon by 1967 and become a full-blown nuclear power by 1970 — the first, and still the only, nuclear power in the Middle East. Angleton, it is fair to say, thought collaboration with Israel was more important than U.S. non-proliferation policy.”[33]
“Angleton’s loyalty to Israel betrayed U.S. policy on an epic scale,” Morley concludes. “Instead of supporting U.S. nuclear security policy, he ignored it.” John Hadden, then CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, who felt betrayed by his superior Angleton, wrote in 1978: “A crime was committed 10 or 20 years ago, a crime considered so serious that for its commission the death penalty is mandatory and no statute of limitations applies.”
Angleton had regular professional and personal contact with at least six men aware of Israel’s secret plan to build a bomb. From Asher Ben-Natan to Amos de Shalit to Isser Harel to Meir Amit to Moshe Dayan to Yval Ne’eman, his friends were involved in the building of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. If he learned anything of the secret program at Dimona, he reported very little of it. . . . The failure of the U.S. nonproliferation policy to prevent the introduction of nuclear weapons to the Middle East in the 1960s is part of Angleton’s legacy, and its effects will be felt for decades, if not centuries.[34]
Angleton himself implicitly acknowledged his role to New York Times foreign correspondent Tad Szulc, who declared before the Church Committee in 1975:
I was told by one of my news sources that a situation had occurred in the 1960s in which the CIA delivered to the Israeli government classified information, technical knowledge, know-how, the services of distinguished physicists and fissionable material in the form of plutonium to assist in the development of an Israeli nuclear weapon at the Dimona Israeli Nuclear Testing grounds. . . I have raised the subject in a private conversation with Mr. James Angleton in the spring of this year [April 1975]. Mr. Angleton told me that essentially this information was correct.[35]
The Six Day War and the USS Liberty
According to Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, “There is a body of opinion within the American intelligence community that Angleton played a leading part in orchestrating the events leading up to the June 1967 war. One long-serving official at CIA’s ancient rival, the code-breaking National Security Agency, states flatly that ‘Jim Angleton and the Israelis spent a year cooking up the ’67 war. It was a CIA operation designed to get Nasser.’”[36]
In that period, according to Joan Mellen, author of Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspire to Ambush the USS Liberty (2018), “Meir Amit was Angleton’s chief ally in Israel, but in the United States, he relied on another Mossad operative, Ephraim ‘Eppy’ Evron, who in 1967, as a Mossad operative as well as deputy Israeli ambassador to Washington, enjoyed greater importance at the Israeli embassy than the ambassador, Avraham Harman. It was Evron who had arranged meetings between Angleton and Moshe Dayan . . . to discuss the feasibility of an attack on Egypt with the objective of toppling Nasser. Lyndon Johnson had authorized Angleton to inform Evron that the United States would not intervene to stop an attack on Egypt.”[37]
In May 1967, Eppy Evron met Johnson at the White House. Evron later said that Johnson told him, “You and I are going to pass another Tonkin resolution,” in reference to the mock incident in the Gulf of Tonkin that Johnson used to justify the aggression against North Vietnam.[38] On May 30, Meir Amit, then head of global operations for Mossad, flew to Washington and met first with Angleton the next day. There is no documentary record of their conversation, but on June 1, Amit reported to Israel: “there is a growing chance for American political backing if we act on our own.”[39] “It would be Angleton,” says Joan Mellen, “who would prevail in formulating, with Meir Amit, the configuration of the operation that would culminate in the attack on the USS Liberty.”[40]
Here a summary of Tom Segev’s account of this meeting in 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (2007): “Amit’s trip to Washington had ben instigated by Aharon Yariv, and its main purpose was to find out, through intelligence channels, what the Americans would really do if Israel attacked Egypt.” The first person Amit met there was James Jesus Angleton, who introduced him to Helms, head of CIA. Helms “arranged for Amit to meet with Secretary of Defense McNamara.” Presenting Israel’s plan to attack Egypt, Amit “heard no objections from McNamara.” McNamara was called out of the meeting twice to talk with Johnson on the phone, and reported to Amit the President’s message: “I read you loud and clear.” Amit reported back to Israel his impression that the Americans would give their blessing to an Israeli strike “crushing Nasser.” In response to Eshkol’s question, Amit said they might even assist Israel in such a strike. “Jim Angleton was enthusiastic,” writes Segev; he saw in Israel’s strike “the possibility of solving the region’s problems.” He “stressed the issue’s delicacy and asked to preserve complete secrecy.” When corresponding with Eshkol on the phone, Amit acknowledged the decisive importance of Angleton’s support. Angleton, he said, intimated that the Americans “would undoubtedly look positively on a knockout” on Egypt; “Angleton was an extraordinary asset for us. We could not have found ourselves a better advocate.” He was “the biggest Zionist of the lot,” insisted Amit.[41]
In December 1967, having more than doubled their territory, the Israelis threw a big party for Angleton when he visited them on his 50th birthday.
Conclusion
The Mossad side of Angleton is part of the “unspoken Kennedy truth” that, in Michael Collins Piper’s footsteps, I documented in my book and in this article. It is no small part. As Morley writes, “Angleton’s formative and sometimes decisive influence on U.S. policy toward Israel can be seen in many areas — from the impotence of U.S. nuclear non-proliferation policy in the region, to Israel’s triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War, to the feeble U.S. response to the attack on the Liberty, to the intelligence failure represented by the Yom Kippur War of 1973.”[42]
Angleton is remembered in the U.S. as a mentally unstable man who caused irreparable damage to the CIA’s efficiency and reputation. In contrast, he is remembered in Israel as a great benefactor of the Zionist state. Here is an extract from the Washington Post report about a ceremony held in his honor in Jerusalem after his death. Although it was supposedly secret, a couple of Israeli reporters, including Andy Court of the Jerusalem Post, had been tipped off and attended:
The head of the pathologically secretive spy agency, the Mossad, was there, as was his counterpart with Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service. Five former heads of those agencies and three former military intelligence chiefs were also present. Their mission: to pay final tribute to a beloved member of their covert fraternity — the late CIA chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. . . . Following the planting [of trees], the group gathered again in Jerusalem behind the King David Hotel at a scenic spot not far from the walls of the Old City that Angleton often visited on his trips here. There they dedicated a memorial stone that read, in English, Hebrew and Arabic: “In memory of a dear friend, James (Jim) Angleton.” . . . The ceremonies symbolized the respect and affection that the Israeli intelligence community holds for Angleton . . . Although his name appears in few history books about Israel, Angleton played a crucial role in the early years of the young Jewish state. In the 1950s and early 1960s, when most of official Washington was wary of — even hostile to — Israel, he helped forge links between the Mossad and the CIA that established the basis for cooperation in intelligence gathering that still exists today. . . . Angleton “was a friend you could trust on a personal basis,” said Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who spoke at the tree-planting ceremony. Rabin knew Angleton from his days as Israeli Army chief of staff in the mid-1960s and later as ambassador to the United States. Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, who rose from his sickbed to attend the ceremonies, told the small crowd, “We commemorate a great friend, who saw Israel-U.S. relations through their most difficult period in the 40 years of Israel’s existence.” . . . Those who attended, according to Court, included the current heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet, neither of whom can be named under government security laws; former Mossad chiefs Meir Amit, Zvi Zamir and Yitzhak Hofi; former Shin Bet chiefs Avraham Ahituv and Amos Manor, and former military intelligence heads Aharon Yariv, Shlomo Gazit and Binyamin Gibli.[43]
There is still a mystery about Angleton’s relationship with Israel, a mystery that perhaps Angleton himself could not have cleared up. It is a reasonable guess that most of Angleton’s Israeli friends were well aware of his personality issues and of his delusional worldview, and that they exploited them to the fullest; they convinced Angleton that they were his indispensable allies against Communism. One former Mossad chief said to the Cockburns: “Of course, Jim had some pretty weird ideas, like that one about the Sino-Soviet split [Angleton believed it was a cunning deception]. But I think that he found himself a little more appreciated here in Israel than in Washington. We would listen respectfully to him [here the smirk] and his opinions.” The Israelis, gather the Cockburns, “took great care to flatter him and bend a respectful ear to his interpretation of events in the shadowy world of intelligence and deception.” Taking a closer look at the Angleton memorial in the Jerusalem forest, the Cockburns point out that, “Unlike the other memorial groves, the inscription here is not carved in stone, but is written on a sheet of plastic screwed to the stone itself. Within a year of the commemoration of the site most of the trees, tiny saplings, were dead or dying. The ground all around was covered in garbage: cans, rags, and, here and there, bones.”[44] What kind of memorial is this? A memorial for a useful idiot that can be soon forgotten.
What was Angleton’s position in the organizational chart of the plotters against Kennedy? If, as John Newman believes, Angleton was the “general manager” of Oswald’s handlers, and the engineer of his mock appearance in Mexico, what did he really know of Oswald’s ultimate function in the plot? There is no indication that Angleton ever felt that he had been used by his Israeli friends, and it is therefore more than likely that he was a deliberate participant in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. What has been shown beyond a reasonable doubt is that Angleton, the central CIA player in the plot to kill JFK, was in reality more controlled by the Mossad than by the CIA itself.
I am happy to see that this conclusion is now becoming more accepted among Kennedy researchers. Peter Janney, author of the acclaimed Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (2012), in which Angleton figures prominently, honored me with a comment on the Amazon page of my book:
In addition to his book JFK – 9/11: 50 Years of Deep State, which was published in 2017, Laurent Guyénot has given us yet another gem with The Unspoken Kennedy Truth.
As the author of “Mary’s Mosaic” and someone who has spent many, many years studying the JFK assassination, Laurent Guyénot takes us where few have dared to tread — the role of Mossad and Israel in the murders of both Kennedy brothers and very likely in the event of 9/11 itself. I have been persuaded by both these books and have come to the conclusion that JFK assassination researchers have missed a vital element in understanding the larger role of Israel…
Is it a coincidence that there are not just one — but two — monuments in Israel to the legendary CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton? Are we anti-Semites for making an indictment against Israel, given Guyénot’s persuasive argument that is supported by evidence? The answer is no! The truth takes no prisoners…
Phillip Nelson, author of LBJ, The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination (2010), the ultimate 720-page indictment of Johnson (followed by LBJ: From Mastermind to “the Colossus” and Remember the Liberty), also wrote a comment that I am proud to quote: “Guyénot’s short book covers much territory, some of it never so thoroughly explored before. … He has made a very compelling and persuasive argument for his position and I recognize the truths he has revealed.” Nelson has reservations, however, on the thesis that Ben-Gurion was the “driving force” behind the assassination of JFK.
The major problem with his thesis is that the problems with Dimona didn’t arise and become the hot topic between JFK and Ben-Gurion until 1963. LBJ’s plot to take the White House by the “back door” began in 1958, when he pushed the Texas legislature to allow him to run on both the state ballot and the national ballot at the same time, something it had then prohibited. That was only the first box he had to check-off, five years before the assassination.
In my opinion, it’s more likely that, during that five years, Johnson and Ben-Gurion, with their submissive acolytes, discussed many of their goals and priorities, and that the “Big Event” became a mutually-agreed high priority, with plenty of time to set all the knights, bishops, kings, queens, and pawns, in their place.
I think Johnson made it on Kennedy’s ticket in 1960 only because the Zionists (Abe Feinberg) wanted him there, as Kennedy’s potential assassin and future “best U.S. president for Israel ever.” For as I wrote in “The Umbrella Man, the Sins of the Father, and the Kennedy Curse”, long before 1960, the Israelis saw the Kennedys as a serious potential threat to their expansionist ambitions, and rightly so. In the organization chart of the plot, I place Ben-Gurion higher than LBJ. But that is open to debate.
https://odysee.com/@KontreKulture:c/Israel-and-the-Assassinations-of-The-Kennedy-brothers:9
Notes
[1] This has been shown conclusively by David Talbot in Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, Simon & Schuster, 2007.
[2] Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, University Press of Kansas, 2008, p. 207.
[3] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Touchstone, 2008, p. 232.
[4] Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 82.
[5] Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 82-83.
[6] “LBJ speaks on a conspiracy in JFK murder,” on YouTube.
[7] John M. Newman, Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK, Skyhorse, 2008, pp. 613-637. Excerpts on spartacus-educational.com
[8] Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 636-637 (on spartacus-educational.com)
[9] Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy, American Free Press, 6th ed., 2005, pp. 166-169.
[10] Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: the CIA’s Master Spy Hunter, Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 52.
[11] Mangold, Cold Warrior, p. 55.
[12] Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship, HarperCollins, 1991, p. 43.
[13] Mangold, Cold Warrior, p. 57.
[14] Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, St. Martin’s Press, 2017, p. 229.
[15] David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents, Skyhorse, 2018.
[16] David Wise, “The Spookiest of the CIA’s Spooks,” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2006, on www.latimes.com.
[17] Jefferson Morley, “Wilderness of Mirrors: Documents Reveal the Complex “Legacy of James Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence Chief and Godfather of Mass Surveillance”, January 1, 2018, The Intercept, on theintercept.com/
[18] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, University of California Press, 1993, p. 54, quoted in Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment, 6th ed., 2005, p. 63.
[19] Mangold, Cold Warrior, p. 362.
[20] Mangold, Cold Warrior, p. 49.
[21] Cockburn and Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, p. 41.
[22] Morley, The Ghost, 55
[23] Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, p. 43.
[24] Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, p. 65; Morley, The Ghost, p. 78.
[25] Morley, The Ghost, p. 171.
[26] Morley, The Ghost, pp. 174, 73; Jefferson Morley, “Wilderness of Mirrors.”
[27] Morley, The Ghost, p. 262.
[28] Jefferson Morley, “CIA and Mossad: Tradeoffs in the Formation of the U.S.-Israel Strategic Relationship,” conf for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 2018 May, on www.wrmea.org/
[29] Piper, Final Judgment, 6th ed., 2005, pp. 461-478.
[30] Morley, The Ghost, p. 174.
[31] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, p. 147.
[32] Morley, The Ghost, p. 92
[33] Morley, “CIA and Mossad.”
[34] Morley, The Ghost, pp. 261-262.
[35] Michael Holzman, James Jesus Angleton: The CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, pp. 167-168.
[36] Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, pp. 146-147.
[37] Joan Mellen, Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty, Prometheus Books, 2018, on www.worldtruth.online/, p. 50.
[38] Peter Hounam, Operation Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty nearly caused World War III, Vision, 2003, pp. 266-267.
[39] Mellen, Blood in the Water, pp. 37-40.
[40] Mellen, Blood in the Water, p. 49.
[41] Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, Henry Hold, 2007, pp. 329-332.
[42] Morley, “CIA and Mossad”
[43] Glenn Frankel, “The Secret Ceremony,” Washington Post, December 5, 1987, on www.washingtonpost.com. Andy Court’s article, “Spy Chiefs Honour a CIA Friend,” Jerusalem Post, December 5, 1987, is not online.
[44] Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, p. 44.
UK students urged to report ‘propaganda’
Samizdat | June 3, 2022
The University of Edinburgh in Scotland has urged its students to report “misinformation” after one of its teachers was accused of spreading false Russian narratives.
According to The Times and the BBC, while stating that it was committed to freedom of expression and creating a “safe space for staff and students to discuss controversial topics,” the university noted that it has a “strong view against the spread of misinformation” and asked students to report concerns they might have about teachers.
The academic in question – Tim Hayward, a professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh – had retweeted a statement made by a Russian representative to the UN, who claimed that the alleged Russian bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine was a false flag operation.
In March, Hayward also shared a link to an article questioning the reported Russian attack on a theater in Mariupol, and asked “what do we know of the reality?” The article suggested that the assault may have also been a false-flag operation carried out by Ukrainians in an attempt to generate public outrage and provoke a military intervention from the West.
Kvitka Perehinets, a Ukrainian student at the university, who says she has family members fighting now, told the BBC that she was deeply concerned over the professor’s social media activity, stating that: “The moment we start to equate the two sides in the story is the moment we lose our humanity. The oppressor — in this case Russia — should not be given the same kind of platform as those who are being oppressed.”
Perehinets told the outlet that she alerted the university to Professor Hayward’s tweets.
Another student, Mariangela Alejandro, expressed concern over Hayward’s statements on the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria, and his critical view of the White Helmets organization, which he shared with students during a lecture.
According to a lecture obtained by the BBC, Hayward told his students that there were two prevailing narratives surrounding the alleged attack in Douma, Syria in 2018: “One narrative says the White Helmets helped rescue victims, provided evidence and gave witness statements about the chemical attack on Douma on 7 April 2018. The critics say the White Helmets were responsible for staging a false flag event to spur the West to attack the Syrian government.”
“In fact, dispute about this case is still current,” he noted.
The BBC wrote that Alejandro said she came away from Hayward’s lecture “thinking ‘it could be true’ that the attack was faked, until she spoke to a Syrian friend.” The article, however, did not specify what her friend said.
Hayward has defended his teaching by stating that his course simply asks whether a claim should be accepted solely on the basis of someone’s authority, adding that the concept extends to his own words as well.
He hit out against the BBC for what he considers to be attacks on him and other academics who are challenging the prevailing narrative. Following the BBC’s article, Hayward wrote on Twitter: “Academia should support open discussion of propaganda, not be constrained to tow an official line in an information war.”
A World at War?
Biden lashes out against “enemies” as our country declines
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MAY 31, 2022
One recalls that when war fever surged demanding intervention by Imperial Britain in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, a song became popular in the music halls which included “We don’t want to fight, But by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.” If the refrain sounds familiar, it should as the United States has been experiencing extreme “jingoism” since 2001. Any rejection of the “rules based international order” established and policed by “leader of the free world” Washington has resulted in immediate punishment by sanctions followed by threats of military intervention. In some cases, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the actual armed intervention seeking regime change has been the end result. And it is all done to spread “freedom” and “democracy,” a claim that might be disputed by the millions of dead mostly Muslims who have had to suffer the consequences.
So the United States of America has been a country, like its best friend Israel, that seems to be perpetually at war… so what else is new? What’s new is that under President Joe Biden there has been zero diplomacy and almost reflexive reliance on wielding the “big stick.” To quote another bon mot from one of my favorite authors Raymond Chandler, creator of private eye Philip Marlowe, “… when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.”
Don’t worry, Chandler’s two guys and many more like them are now in Ukraine under cover and in mufti training Ukrainians to use all the nifty Raytheon and Lockheed toys Uncle Joe has sent them. They are working together with the largely neocon advisers coaching Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is guarded by British and US special forces, on what to say and do during his increasingly strident international calls to widen the war. If they are successful and manage to sink another Russian ship or two using harpoon missiles, which Zelensky is threatening to do, the proxy US war with Russia could quickly become for real. Zelensky’s family meanwhile is reportedly safely ensconced in an $8 million villa in Israel. He also has a multi-million dollar villa property near Miami and another in Tuscany. Who would have thought that being president of the poorest country in Europe could bring such material rewards?
Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone, who has a huge worldwide audience, opines that Biden is possibly the worst US president ever, worse even that his consistently denigrated predecessor and media punching bag Donald Trump. Her recent article succinctly addresses what makes Biden’s egregious failure both different and incredibly dangerous. She writes “Preventing nuclear war is a US president’s single most important job. It’s so important you shouldn’t even really have to talk about it, because it’s so self-evidently the number one priority. And this administration is just rolling the dice on nuclear conflict with increasing frequency every day. Even if humanity survives this standoff (and the one with China that’s next in line), Biden will still have been an unforgivably depraved president for allowing it to get this close. There’s no excuse whatsoever for just casually rolling the dice on all terrestrial life like this.”
Indeed, Joe Biden’s latest tricks include declaring that the US will go to war with China to protect Taiwan if Beijing should prove so bold as to want to take control of its wayward province. But the US established policy is to maintain “strategic ambiguity” about China/Taiwan, a diplomatic solution crafted in 1979 to help prevent any provocations by either party that would lead to the situation developing into a shooting war. Joe seems to have missed that point, if he ever understood it in the first place, and certainly his advisers appear to be no more savvy than he is, though the White House quickly issued a correction on the apparent gaffe in the form of a statement that automatic defense of Taiwan is not official policy. Yet.
But my favorite move by the Biden Administration, if one might be so bold as to suggest that it is actually capable of administering anything more kinetic than a hot dog stand, is the latest pander to Israel. The recent murder by military sharpshooter of Palestinian/American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh followed by a humiliating spectacle of police violence at the funeral as well as subsequently at a second Palestinian funeral, actually found some administration flunkies and congress critters calling for a full investigation by Israel. The Israeli government and army refused to do so and the White House has pretended that there is no longer anything to see or consider. Israeli Defense (sic) Minister Benny Gantz recently visited Washington but the issue of a murdered American was not even raised as top officials tried to outdo each other in expressing both their love for and fealty to the Jewish state, which Biden will soon be visiting. The US president will ignore the fact that Israel is celebrating his visit with its greatest eviction of Palestinian residents in twenty years.
That the United States has been a major source of money, weapons and political cover for Israel since 1967 if not before is indisputable, the result of corruption of America’s government at all levels by the groups and billionaires euphemistically described as the “Israel Lobby.” War criminal Israeli leaders like Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have boasted about their control over Congress and the White House as well as the media and every time Israel does something atrocious the only US response has been to give it more money. Israel would sorely love to have the United States fights its wars, most prominently by attacking Iran, but somehow that military intervention and regime change, apart from a number of assassinations, has not yet taken place.
But now all of that might be changing due to a combination of the Biden regime’s recklessness and Israel’s genuine contempt for the American people, who they have been parasitically feeding off of since their settler state was founded. The US has, for the first time, participated in a large-scale military exercise with Israel on May 18th which was designed to simulate an attack on Iran using American Air Force refueling planes to enhance the ability of Israel to keep its jets flying to maintain air superiority over the Persians. It was a war game in the most literal sense even though the tanker aircraft did not actually refuel any Israeli planes and it basically commits the United States to be a dedicated participant if the Israelis should throw the dice and chance on a military attack on Iran’s presumed nuclear and air defense sites.
I also smell a possible false flag if the exercise is repeated, as it surely will be. What if one of the US planes taking part in a future exercise were to be shot down in an incident staged by Israel that might plausibly be attributed to Iran? As the exercises will presumably take place over the Mediterranean Sea in the coastal waters part of which Israel has inter alia stolen from Gaza and controls, bringing Iran into the equation would be difficult but possible to manage with enough cleverness combined with hubris, which the Israelis have in plentiful supply. That Israel would without hesitation shed American blood if it were to advance its own perceived interests should not be doubted by anyone. Look only at the two Israel false flag attacks against the US, the Lavon bombing incident in 1954 and the bloody assault on the USS Liberty in 1967, which killed 34 American sailors and injured more than a hundred others in an attempt to sink the ship and kill all its crew. That is the Israel America has grown to love and nourish, a viper in one’s bosom, always willing to strike the body that feeds it.
But to return to Caitlin Johnstone’s observation, America is in deep trouble. Its economy is visibly sinking while standards of living are dropping and will decline further as military spending grows while both the increasingly “woke” educational system and industrial base are no longer competitive. We have a plausibly psychopathic government that is bringing us to the brink of war with several nuclear powers. What we Americans need is not another war, but rather an end to war, particular those wars that can somehow kill most or even all of us. Instead, help build pressure to wind down the Ukraine war through negotiations, stop feeding Zelensky with weapons and money. Leave China alone and stop being Israel’s patsy against Iran and inside Syria. Try to get along with competitors. It would indeed be a Brave New World, wouldn’t it? A country at peace with itself and working to benefit the American people – something that we have rarely seen since 1945.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Was the Maidan Massacre a False Flag?
By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | May 30, 2022
To understand the war in Ukraine, you have understand the events that led up to it. And no preceding event is more important than the toppling of Viktor Yanukovych’s government in February of 2014.
Officially known as the ‘Revolution of Dignity’, it was denounced by Vladimir Putin as an “unconstitutional coup”. And while most Western media stick to the official nomenclature, some prominent voices dissent. John Mearsheimer has referred to “the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president”, while George Friedman has described what happened as “the most blatant coup in history”.
A recap of the basic facts is in order.
In November of 2013, Yanukovych’s government suspended plans for signing an Association Agreement with the EU, and decided to renew talks with Russia. This decision sparked protests in Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev. By December, the number of protestors had reached the tens of thousands, and a permanent encampment had been established on Maidan square. Although most of the protesters were ordinary Ukrainians, far-right groups were also present.
Beginning in December, there were violent clashes between protesters and the police. On 23rd January, protestors succeeded in occupying various buildings around Maidan square. The situation came to a head on 18–20th February when protestors were fired upon by snipers, leaving scores dead and hundreds wounded. A dozen police offers were also killed in the clashes. From November 2013 to February 2014, 112 protestors and 18 police officers lost their lives; though most of the killings happened on 20th February.
On 21st February, Yanukovych signed an agreement with the parliamentary opposition calling for reforms and new elections. But the next day, he was impeached by the Ukrainian parliament. This impeachment process was in several respects unconstitutional, and Yanukovych declared he was still “the legitimate head of the Ukrainian state elected in a free vote by Ukrainian citizens”. However, he subsequently fled to Russia and a new government was formed.
The ‘Revolution of Dignity’ led immediately to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the outbreak of civil war in Donbas – so its geopolitical importance can hardly be overstated. Yet despite huge international attention, one question remains shrouded in mystery: who ordered snipers to fire at protestors on 18–20th February?
The ‘official’ narrative is that the snipers were from the Berkut – a special police unit loyal to Yanukovych. On the other hand, Russia has long maintained they were deployed by the Ukrainian far-right as part of a false flag operation to bring down Yanukovych’s government.
What is true is that more than eight years after the massacre – which took place amid a giant demonstration at the centre of Ukraine’s capital in front of dozens of television cameras – not a single person has been convicted. The perpetrators of one of the deadliest mass shootings in European history remain at large.
Why don’t we have an answer? Well, perhaps we do.
Away from the limelight, one Canadian academic has been poring over the evidence for the last eight years. And he’s convinced the ‘official’ narrative is wrong. Ivan Katchanovski (a political scientist at the University of Ottawa) believes the Maidan massacre was a false flag operation carried out by the Ukrainian far-right.
Professor Katchanovski cannot be dismissed as some fringe commenter or stooge of the Kremlin. He has published his arguments in scholarly books and journals, and has presented them at academic conferences. His latest article, which can be accessed for free, reviews all the evidence he’s collected to date – including witness testimonies, weapon ballistics and medical forensics. It’s based on hundreds of hours of footage of the Maidan massacre trials, as well as synchronised video segments of the massacre itself.
As Katchanovski explains, the ‘false flag theory’ first gained credence in March of 2014, when a phone call between two European officials was leaked online. During the call, the Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet tells the EU’s Catherine Ashton about a conversation he’d had with someone called Olga:
What was quite disturbing, the same Olga told, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides among policemen and then people from the streets – that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides. She also showed me some photos. She said that as medical doctor, she can, you know, say that it is the same handwriting, same type of bullets. And it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened. So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych but it was somebody from the new coalition.
‘Olga’ was later identified as Olga Bohomolets, a doctor who had treated wounded protestors on Maidan square. When quizzed by the press, she said she had not told Paet that somebody from the new coalition was behind the snipers. Likewise, the Estonian Foreign Ministry said, “We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition’s involvement in the violence” (though they acknowledged the recording was authentic). It is still unclear why Paet would divulge such shocking revelations if he did not believe they had some basis in fact.
Aside from TV recordings and media reports, much of Katchanovski’s evidence comes from the trials of five Berkut police officers, who were charged with the murder of protestors on 20th February, 2014. Various other state actors, including Yanukovych himself, were also charged, but they were not brought to trial as they had already fled the country. (Recall that none of those put on trial were convicted.)
What, then, is Katchanovski’s evidence?
The majority of wounded protestors who testified at the trail said they were shot by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings. Remarkably, even many witnesses for the prosecution said this. Their testimony is consistent with video footage of journalists and protestors pointing to snipers in buildings like the Hotel Ukraine, which were under Maidan control at the time.
Police snipers testified that they had been ordered to locate and neutralise snipers firing from Maidan-controlled buildings. And Yanukovych himself, who appeared at the trial via video-link, testified that he had received reports of snipers firing from those buildings.
Several Georgian ex-military personnel who testified at the trail actually confessed they were among the snipers, and had been given orders by specific Maidan leaders to fire upon the protestors. They also testified that they had witnessed other snipers shooting from Maidan-controlled buildings. By contrast, no police officers or other state actors confessed to having fired upon protestors.
In the majority of cases where wounded protestors testified that they had been shot by snipers from police-controlled areas, other evidence contradicted their testimony. For example, synchronized video segments showed the exact times they were hit did not coincide with the exact times police officers were discharging their weapons. Other videos showed that several protesters were killed before police officers had even taken up their positions.
Forensic examinations by government experts revealed that the majority of protestors were shot from the side or back, and from top to bottom, strongly suggesting they had been hit by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings. Only one protestor had a horizontal entry wound. Experts also determined that several protestors were killed by bullets that did not match those used by the police.
An American architecture company created a 3D model of the killing of three protestors, which was used as evidence that those protestors were in fact killed by the police. (This 3D model was covered in a 2018 New York Times article.) However, the wound locations in the model did not match the wound locations from forensic medical examinations.
A screenshot from the video appendix to Katchanovski’s latest paper.
Aside from what Katchanovski calls “overwhelming evidence” that protestors were shot from Maidan-controlled buildings, he believes there was a cover-up by the post-Maidan authorities.
On 21st February, the Ukrainian parliament passed an amnesty law granting blanket immunity to Maidan protestors for serious crimes that had taken place during the protests. This law also prohibited investigation of the protestors for such crimes, and ordered that existing evidence be destroyed.
Two of the Berkut police officers who had been charged with murdering protestors were released by trial judges due to lack of evidence, suggesting the charges against them were trumped up. And all remaining defendants were released in a prisoner exchange within several months of the expected verdict.
Public statements made by various Maidan participants concerning the far-right’s involvement in the massacre were never investigated. One politician said she saw Maidan leaders bringing snipers into a building and then saw snipers firing from that building. Several activists said they witnessed snipers being evacuated by Maidan leaders. And another politician said that Maidan leaders had “arranged” the massacre.
There were unexplained reversals of testimony on the part of wounded Maidan protestors. Key pieces of evidence went missing or were destroyed. Several trees with bullet holes in them were cut down; all helmets and shields used by those who were shot disappeared, as did security camera footage from Maidan-controlled buildings.
Finally, two far-right politicians stated in separate interviews that a Western government official told them killings of a few protestors would not be enough for Western governments to stop recognising Yanukovych, and for that to happen the number of victims would need to be 100. The protesters who lost their lives subsequently became known as the “Heavenly Hundred”, even though some of those ‘hundred’ were not killed in the massacre itself (and in fact simply died of illness.)
On the basis of all the evidence he’s gathered, Katchanovski concludes that the Maidan massacre was “a false flag operation” which involved “elements of the Maidan leadership”.
If true, the implications are immense. It would mean the event that marked the turning point of Euromaidan – that set in motion Yanukovych’s removal from power – was in fact orchestrated by his political opponents. And aside from implicating those individuals in a brutal act of mass murder, it would remove any doubt that the that the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ was illegitimate.
Is it true?
I have been unable to track down any serious criticism of Katchanovski’s work, and when I reached out to him, he told me “there is no other scholarly study” that disputes his findings. What’s more, the political scientist Gordon Hahn reached similar conclusions in his book Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West and the “New Cold War”.
So why haven’t Western governments shown more interest in investigating the massacre? I put this question to Katchanovski. He said that such an investigation would be “politically inconvenient” because it would “upend the narrative that the Western backed overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 by the pro-Western Maidan opposition was peaceful and democratic”. He added that a definitive answer could be obtained by consulting relevant documents once they are declassified.
As I mentioned above, Katchanovski has published his arguments concerning the ‘false flag theory’ in scholarly books and journals, and has presented them at academic conferences. All the germane papers are available for free online. You might therefore expect for his work to have received significant media attention – particularly in the last few months.
Yet with the exception of a few ‘non-mainstream’ outlets, it hasn’t. Major Western media have ignored his studies “for political reasons”, he told me. This is despite the fact that Katchanovski’s other work on Ukraine (unrelated to the massacre) has received ample media attention, including from the Associated Press, Reuters and the Washington Post.
Katchanovski knows that certain media outlets are aware of his work because he’s brought it to their attention. Following the New York Times article on the 3D model of killings at Maidan, he sent a letter to the editor pointing out they had “misrepresented the wound locations”. But his letter wasn’t published. In another case, “Open Democracy accepted a popular version of my Maidan massacre study, but then did not publish it.” Katchanovski said he gave “long interviews concerning the Maidan massacre to several major TV and Radio networks” but “none of them were broadcast”. In every single case “there was no reason given”.
The only time Katchanovski’s work on the massacre has been put under the spotlight was in Oliver Stone’s 2019 documentary Revealing Ukraine. This film is available on Rumble, and the relevant segment begins at 20:00.
What about everything that’s happened since? In our email exchange, Katchanovski clarified that the Maidan massacre “does not justify the Russian invasion and other actions in Ukraine”. Equally, however, Russia’s invasion does not justify ignoring – in his words – “overwhelming and undeniable evidence” of Maidan snipers.
If others believe that Katchanovski is mistaken, they must come forward and present their arguments. In the meantime, I would strongly recommend reading his papers: they make a compelling case that what’s been labelled a “conspiracy theory” is, in fact, true.
Bill Gates: Next Pandemic Likely to be Caused by Climate Change
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | May 30, 2022
Billionaire Bill Gates says there’s a 50 per cent chance the next pandemic will be caused by man-made climate change or be deliberately released by a bio-terrorist.
The Microsoft founder made the comments during an interview with Spanish news outlet El Diario.
Asserting that the next major pandemic is likely to occur within 20 years, Gates said, “It could be a virus made by man, by a bioterrorist who designed it and intentionally circulated it. That is a very scary scenario because they could try to spread it in different places at once.”
“Or it could be something that makes the leap from the natural world. The human population is growing and we are invading more and more ecosystems. That is why I calculate that there is a 50% chance that we will have a pandemic of natural origin in the next 20 years, as a consequence of climate change,” he added.
The prediction that climate change will cause a virus which will then require another global vaccine rollout is somewhat convenient for Gates given that he is heavily invested in both areas.
Gates reiterated the call made in his recent book to pump billions of dollars into researching future pathogens by creating a 3,000-strong team of specialists under the control of the World Health Organization, which would require a 25% budgetary increase.
Commenting on the recent outbreak of monkeypox, Gates said “there is very little chance” it will have an impact anything like coronavirus, although he cautioned that it could mutate into something significantly nastier.
Gates infamously warned of a coming super-virus five years before the emergence of COVID-19 during a 2015 TED talk.
As we highlighted earlier this month, Gates warned that COVID was not over and that there is likely to be an “even more fatal” variant of the virus coming.
During an event at the Munich Security Conference back in February, Gates said that “sadly” Omicron is a “type of vaccine” and has “done a better job getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines” by providing natural immunity.
UK using Cold War’s black propaganda tactics against Russia
By Lucas Leiroz | May 19, 2022
Once again, the West appears to be operating with an old Cold War mentality against Russia. Documents recently declassified by the British government reveal a series of sabotage practices used by the UK during the bipolar era whose similarities to the current relations with Russia seem evident. In fact, sabotage, fomenting hatred, spreading lies and other common tactics seem like a commonplace part of British foreign policy and the current Special Operation in Ukraine is just another target.
Recently, it was revealed that the British government ran a series of secret “black propaganda” campaigns against enemy countries during the decades of the Cold War. Not only the Soviet Union and Communist China were targets of British intelligence, but also countries in Africa, the Middle East and specific regions of Asia. The tactics included various methods of sabotage, from information warfare to the promotion of racial and terrorist tensions, always aimed at promoting the destabilization of rival nations.
Commenting on the case, expert in intelligence Rory Cormac told The Guardian during an interview: “These releases are among the most important of the past two decades (…) It’s very clear now that the UK engaged in more black propaganda than historians assume and these efforts were more systemic, ambitious and offensive. Despite official denials, [this] went far beyond merely exposing Soviet disinformation (…) The UK did not simply invent material (…), but they definitely intended to deceive audiences in order to get the message across”.
An example of how British praxis worked was the extensive and complex action operated to promote tensions between the Soviet Union and the Islamic community. In the second half of the 1960s, the Information Research Department (IRD) forged at least eleven Soviet state media documents exposing the government’s alleged “anger” at the “waste” of Soviet weapons by Egypt during the 1967 Six-Day War. Later, the same department forged documents supposedly originating from the Muslim Brotherhood accusing Moscow of sabotaging the Egyptian campaign, criticizing the quality of Soviet military material and calling the Russians “filthy-tongued atheists” who saw the Egyptians as “peasants who lived all their lives nursing reactionary Islamic superstitions”.
Last year, The Observer had already revealed that the IRD was directly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of people in Indonesia through the spread of lies in a black propaganda campaign in 1965. At the time, the department financed the preparation of pamphlets allegedly belonging to the PKI, then the largest communist party in the non-communist world, which were actually just British false flags. This encouraged anti-communist militias to promote an unprecedented massacre in the country, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of communist militants and civilians. Now, with the new declassified documents, it is possible to see that this was not an isolated episode, but a regular practice in British intelligence services.
In fact, it seems impossible to analyze this case and not correlate in some way to the current Western campaign against Russia, in which the UK seems to be very involved. In a way, it appears that despite the end of the Cold War, the bipolar mentality has never stopped working in the West. Simply, what was once aimed at the Soviet Union is now aimed at Russia.
This is precisely what political analyst Joe Quinn thinks: “The timing of this declassification of the documents is interesting insomuch as it may serve, for some, as confirmation that the West’s geopolitical war against the Soviet Union never really ended, it just continued as a war against the Russian Federation, but without the justification of fighting against Communism”.
The British media has been one of the most active in spreading anti-Russian narratives, fake news and pro-Kiev propaganda. Although most of the work is operated by the private sector, it is naive to think that there is no state incentive for pro-NATO propaganda. The British state – as well as the US and allied nations – has a very deep interest in creating a psychological warfare scenario, so there is a type of clandestine public-private cooperation between the state departments and these media agencies for their common objective to be achieved.
The special military operation in Ukraine is the main reason why Russia is attacked by Western propaganda today. From accusations of war crimes, false flags (like the tragedy in Bucha) to the absolutely unrealistic “analyses” alleging that Ukraine is “winning” the conflict, we have in all these cases examples of how the British media acts in collusion with the interests of NATO, operating old tactics of misinformation and black propaganda against London’s geopolitical enemies.
In this regard, Adriel Kasonta, a London-based foreign affairs analyst and former chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Bow Group think tank, believes that currently the main interest of British intelligence is to have a public opinion approving the sending of weapons to Ukraine and believing it is strategic, forging data to make it appear that that Kiev is close to “winning”.
“It aims to mislead the domestic audience by convincing them that the ‘special operation’ is not going according to plan and to persuade them that sending lethal weapons to the front by NATO allies contributes to the alleged victories and successful resistance of the Ukrainian side. It is a psychological game, and nothing persuades the naturally peaceful population to support a war in a distant land [more] than the opponent’s alleged low morale and military losses”, says the analyst.
With that, it seems to be clear that there is indeed a blatant anti-Russian campaign going on which aim is to harm Moscow using old and well-known black propaganda and information war tactics. It is essential that the recently declassified documents are released so that Western public opinion is aware of the weapons used by their governments and media agencies against nations that are not aligned with NATO’s geopolitical plans.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
Bill Gates wants to build a dystopia
By Toby Green | UnHerd | May 9, 2022
It’s not easy being a regular multi-billionaire. Bill Gates used to be the simple guy-in-the-mansion next door, worried about virus outbreaks and global warming. Then, during the pandemic he became the point at which all conspiracy theories met.
Ever since March 2020, the memes have spread. Was Gates a mass murderer with a global depopulation agenda? Was he a “biofascist” seeking control over the world’s population through vaccine passports and microchips?
It didn’t stop there. Was the Covid-19 pandemic actually “plandemic”? Did the Microsoft founder and his acolytes create it through funding “gain of function” research in a biosecurity lab in Wuhan? Was it all war-gamed at Event 201 in October 2019?
Bill Gates has not much enjoyed being the focus of these stories for the past 18 months. He just wants to help out. He wants to solve problems so badly, he tells us early on in How To Prevent the Next Pandemic, that in February 2020, he flew from Seattle to South Africa to participate in a charity tennis match, no doubt on one of his four personal jets.
It was in South Africa that he first began to join the Covid-19 dots. The tech entrepreneur delivers the story with characteristic flair: “A couple of days after returning from South Africa, I sent an email about scheduling something for the coming Friday night: ‘We could try and do a dinner with the people involved with coronavirus work to touch base.’” Gates is happy, “everyone was nice enough to say yes — despite the timing and their busy schedules”. His work on the pandemic begins.
Now Gates is tired of all the conspiracies. He asks his critics to judge him by his actions. And the best way to do so is by reading the book: does Gates have anything sensible to say about the best way to combat future pathogenic outbreaks?
His model for the future is built on what he feels has worked over the past two years: isolate contacts, close borders, lockdown as quickly as possible, then remove restrictions slowly and cautiously. He cites Dr Anthony Fauci, who Gates says he spoke to once a month during the pandemic: “Not only should you appear to overreact at first, as Tony Fauci said, but you also have to be careful about relaxing all NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions] too soon.” Meanwhile, you should invest enormous sums in boosting global public health systems, vaccine production in poor and rich countries, and fund a Global Pandemic Emergency Response Unit to monitor potential outbreaks. The aim, says Gates, is to vaccinate the entire world — twice if necessary — within six months while lockdown measures restrict the spread of the new pathogen.
It all sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? Or it might do to those who haven’t seen the footage of Shanghai’s lockdown circulating on social media, to those who can work online in relative comfort, or indeed to billionaires with comfortable gardens and libraries in which to while away those six months. With the Gates model, a little translation is in order.
The massive investment required to make this vision happen is a good starting point. Where will it come from? Gates is a well-known philanthropist, and makes much of the more than US$2 billion which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have ploughed into fighting Covid-19. Yet this is a small amount compared to the US$6 billion that the US government has invested in the Moderna vaccine alone. As Gates points out, “Most of the world’s greatest talent for translating research into commercial products is in the private sector… It’s the government’s role to invest in the basic research that leads to major innovations, adopt policies that let new ideas flourish.”
Translation: taxpayers invest in developing products through government agencies, and private companies and their shareholders reap the profits. How does this work in practice? Gates does not give what we might call full disclosure. He offers the example of the antiviral Molnupiravir which “Merck and its partners developed”. It was authorised to great fanfare as a Covid treatment in November 2021.
Yet Merck did not develop this drug. It was initially developed as a veterinary drug for horses at Emory University, with a US$19 million grant from Fauci’s NIAID and funding from other sectors of the US government. Molnupiravir costs US$17.74 per dose to manufacture, according to an estimate from researchers at Harvard and King’s College London, but is being retailed to the US government for US$712 per course — a profit of 4,000%.
Another example of Gates’s eye for detail is his discussion of Remdesivir, which was approved as “Standard of Care” for Covid in the US by the Federal Drug Agency. Again, like Molnupiravir, much of the funding and institutional support for the drug originally came from the US government. Remdesivir was the baby of the drug company Gilead.
Gates describes how one study showed that “it may have a major impact in patients who aren’t yet sick enough to be in the hospital”. But other details are ignored. He doesn’t tell us that in an earlier, peer-reviewed study from China, published in the Lancet in May 2020, “Remdesivir was not associated with statistically significant clinical benefits”, and that the trial was “stopped early because of adverse events in 18 (12%) patients versus four (5%) patients who stopped placebo early”. All the same, the profits were good: while the drug cost Gilead just US$10 per dose to manufacture, it was being retailed to US taxpayers at US$3,120.
Maybe Gates knows nothing about the Lancet study. Perhaps he doesn’t know that in both of these cases, public investment has funded enormous private profits — and that in the case of one of the drugs, there’s little evidence that this was to any benefit. He’s just a software engineer after all.
For Gates, technology really does provide all the answers, as it certainly has in his own life. He believes humanity belongs online: “once people learn the digital approach, they generally stick to it”. Post-Covid, he envisages a world of flexible working, in which regular guys like him with large mansions and decent living space can languidly choose between going into the office on Wednesdays or Thursdays. The problem with Gates’s digital utopia — full of virtual spaces where 3D avatars attend business meetings — is that I suspect many of us will not want to live in it.
Gates tries to show in this book that he gets it, while at the same time demonstrating on every page that he just doesn’t. As he draws up his elaborate plans for global governance, Gates writes that he does so knowing that he hasn’t been elected. He tells us he wouldn’t want to be anyway (after all, we can surmise, if he were elected, he might be accountable).
Gracefully, Gates understands that people are angry at the huge increases in wealth disparities during the pandemic, and pledges to return his profits to “make the world a fairer place”. He recognises that poor people across the world have suffered, and are far less able to deal with lockdowns, and even acknowledges that harsh measures might not be a good idea for some of them… And yet he recently went on record as saying that “if every country does what Australia did, then you wouldn’t be calling it a pandemic”. We can, in fact, judge him by his actions, and his words: he says one thing, and funds and promotes others.
Looking forward, the outlook is bleak. Preventing pandemics in Gates-World means shutting down immediately at the “next major outbreak” — a favourite, and alarming turn of phrase. Future semi-permanent global lockdowns are baked-in as the new normal, something I warned of in the conclusion to my book The Covid Consensus. As Gates notes, the WHO have identified 1,500 new pathogens in the past 50 years, and thus the “next major outbreak” surely cannot be far off. In the past 20 years, pre-Covid, there were already three of note (SARS — 2003; Avian Flu — 2005; Swine Flu — 2009). In each case enormous fatalities were falsely predicted, and would surely have led to six month shutdowns in the Gates model.
Gates-World is one where citizens make sacrifices for his model to work. And it’s also one where class is totally ignored. Does Gates know what it was like for Angolan children to be forced to stay at home for seven months in 2020? He admits that internet connections need to be improved to make digital schooling possible — but does he understand that no IT in the world can help children of sex workers in Mumbai slums with their homework? Can he comprehend what it is like to be incarcerated in a flat with small children for months on end in New York, Shanghai or London?
Gates wants to be respected, and understood. His world is one of innovative scientists having dinner with one another. They solve the world’s problems by the pool, or near the barbecue. It’s what he likes doing best, because “I’ve had some of the best conversations of my working life with a fork in my hand and a napkin in my lap” (p4). He wants to fund more and more work leading to experiences like this, and meanwhile turn the rest of human society into a digital avatar of itself.
No doubt he means well. But you don’t need to indulge the conspiracy theories to realise that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Toby Green is a Professor of History at King’s College, London.
It’s Time We Get Answers About the FBI’s Involvement In the OKC Bombing
By John Kline | The Libertarian Institute | April 27, 2022
This past week marked the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. As the worst terrorist act committed on U.S. soil at the time, we all know the reported facts of the horrific event well: a 27-year-old Desert Storm-vet, Timothy McVeigh, acting with minimal help from Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, detonated a 7,000-pound fertilizer bomb from a parked Ryder truck outside the federal Alfred P. Murrah building, killing 168 people, 19 of them children.
Two years later, in 1997, McVeigh was convicted of “Using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death,” among other federal charges. For a time, he was held on the same cell block as the Unabomber and WTC-bomber Ramzi Yousef (who tried to convert him to Islam), before being put to death by lethal injection in 2001.
There is much we still don’t know about the case, however. Thanks to years of heroic work by people like Salt Lake City-based attorney Jesse Trentadue, writer and researcher J.M. Berger, and independent investigative reporter Wendy S. Painting, the American public is slowly learning more and more key (and disturbing) facts about the case. Facts involving the FBI’s possible incitement of McVeigh and the subsequent cover-up of these facts by Newsweek magazine.
FBI incitement is more topical than ever, of course. Reports of the FBI being involved in Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s kidnapping plot and of FBI agents and assets being involved in the January 6th events has collapsed whatever level of trust the public had with federal law enforcement, not to mention the mainstream media whose related coverage rarely digs deeper than the government’s official line.
What other crimes have been committed or conspiracies planned, the public wonders, where the initial momentum was actually created the FBI? How much have FBI infiltrators pushed constitutionally protected “heated talk” into the unlawful planning and execution of deadly crimes? To what extent has the FBI been, as the saying goes, arsonists posing as firefighters? These are especially important questions when it comes to the OKC bombing.
Operation PATCON
As most know, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have conducted surveillance and infiltration operations against right-wing groups for decades. Chief among them being the “Patriotic Conspiracy” or “PATCON” operation. Despite its official ending in late 1993 (although some say it was carried forward in some form), PATCON only became public in 2007 thanks to a public records request.
Partly citing internal FBI documents, Painting in her explosive 2016 book about PATCON and McVeigh, describes how the former’s secret operatives and paid informers “were given license to engage in provocateur activities and instructed to make known their willingness to commit violence and advocate for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.”1 She quotes one informer who went public about the operation, John Matthews, saying he realized that although initially told “the objective was to infiltrate and monitor,” he would later come to understand that its real objective was to “to infiltrate and incite.”2 This, says Matthews, included providing “the ideas, detailed instructions, and even live C4 explosives and automatic weapons to targeted individuals as a way of entrapping them into terrorist plots, so the FBI could capitalize on foiled and actualized plots.”3 According to Trentadue, through PATCON, the FBI was actually trying to sow a full-on rebellion.
While the FBI has indeed infiltrated hard-left and Islamic groups in the past, the extent and complete failure of the FBI’s overreach when it comes to right-wing groups (which diversely included pro-gun, ultra-libertarian, survivalist, and white racist or advocacy groups) makes this area especially alarming. For instance, there was just one minor conviction over stolen military night-vision goggles that was ever made through PATCON, and it relied on army, not FBI, intelligence. As Oklahoma City journalist J.D. Cash said about PATCON and certain precursor programs of the 1980s, “there isn’t a neo-Nazi or racist group in the country that isn’t operationally controlled by the FBI.” This seems to concur with what a former young Aryan Nation-member told Painting for her book4:
It was well known that at any Aryan Nation event, in a crowd of 300 people, there’d be at least 30 undercover federal agents in attendance to monitor us, and another third of the crowd were informants… It was rampant, just like cops at a Grateful Dead show trying to sell people LSD.
One of those assets was Vietnam War veteran John Matthews. Up until 1986, the government had been supporting U.S. civilian groups conducting operations in Nicaragua for anti-communist contra forces; a cause which Matthews chose to serve. When such efforts turned into a political scandal, however, the government broke-off ties with these groups and refused to help its members. This included people like Matthews’ fellow soldier Tom Posey who would later be indicted on weapons-smuggling charges.5 While he beat the rap, Posey felt cheated and shifted his efforts to anti-U.S. government organizing. When he revealed plans to break into a federal armory, however, Matthews contacted the FBI, establishing a relationship with law enforcement that led him to infiltrate over 20 militia, libertarian, gun-rights, and racist groups over a 20-year period.
Matthews, who has long been suffering from an Agent-Orange-related cancer, is key to what understanding we have about PATCON’s connection to the OKC bombing. In the early nineties, Matthews was assigned to attend a PATCON-infiltrated, militia-training camp in Texas. While there, he met Timothy McVeigh. After the bombing and when McVeigh was arrested, Matthews immediately recognized him and called his FBI handler, Don Jarrett, to tell him this was the same man he saw at the Texas training camp. Jarrett assured Matthews they knew this already and told him to “forget about it.”
In interviews with Painting, Matthews says he was disturbed by this for a few reasons, a major one being, she paraphrases, that “if they were watching McVeigh and friends back then, they had likely continued watching them throughout the bombing plot.”6 “I felt Don knew more about this,” he said elsewhere.
What other items he knew may have been what came out later in Trentadue’s public records suit against the FBI. Dozens of witnesses to the bombing had apparently reported to police and the FBI they had seen someone in the passenger side of McVeigh’s truck while parked outside the Murrah building. Other witnesses reported seeing McVeigh with several people at his motel the night before, including someone sitting at some point behind the wheel of the truck—And Nichols himself (who was in Kansas when the bombing took place) told journalists in 2007 that FBI provocateurs had lent their support to McVeigh’s plans.7
Also disturbingly, using a fertilizer truck to blow up a federal building had been an idea Matthews had actually heard a few times before, including from suspected FBI infiltrators. For instance, he had heard it raised by two militia members he met who later became part of a busted plot to rob a bank, but who never got arrested, let alone jailed for it.
All of this would seem to point to the OKC bombing being something like 2010’s Operation Fast and Furious, in which the FBI intentionally put guns into the hands of criminals, but failed to close the loop leading to a border agent being killed by a Mexican cartel. Was OKC a similar ‘gunwalking case gone awry’? Only one, far, far deadlier? Someone who McVeigh contacted two weeks before the bombing, Andy Strassmeir, later told a journalist it is possible the FBI was “going to arrest McVeigh at the site with the bomb in hand, but he didn’t come at the right time.” “[M]aybe he changed the time”, he said, “you never know with people who are so unreliable.”8
Newsweek’s Complicity
In 2011, wishing to tell his story before he died, Matthews was put in touch with former Associated Press-writer and then-editor of Newsweek, John Solomon. At the time, Newsweek was still foremost in the U.S. media field, coming in second in circulation only to Time magazine. It was an important and respected news source. Over months, Solomon and article-author Ross Schneiderman worked with Matthews and other sources, including former FBI officials, to confirm everything he told them about the murky workings of PATCON, including the unanswered questions about its operatives’ possible involvement in the OKC bombing.
Enter Newsweek managing editor, Tina Brown. Above the heads of Solomon and Schneiderman, Brown (who left in 2013 and has been blamed for the periodical’s collapse) took what may have been a Pulitzer-worthy piece of journalism and cut away virtually all detail that could directly or indirectly impugn the government for the fallout of its PATCON operations. In the process, she reduced the original 7,000-word draft (found here) down to a mere 4,000 words (found here). As the since-defunct Examiner detailed at the time, all of the aforementioned suspicions Matthews aired about the FBI’s hand in the OKC bombing were cut.
Brown’s puzzling decision had real consequences for Matthews. As Painting recounts in her book, the dying Matthews had taken a lot of risk by coming forward. He was now Newsweek’s cover story, but for reasons that had been omitted. Now, he was still a target but “for no good reason and he regretted coming forward.”9
More broadly, by keeping such information away from the public, Brown was confirming the existence of a state-media axis in America. While examples of such direct state-interventions into our otherwise free media system are rare (although certainly plentiful enough), media analysts like Noam Chomsky have long posited that, yes, news outlets do profit off the circulation of their stories and are thus incentivized to objectively report on events potentially embarrassing to the powerful elite. But, the big media houses still need government access and wish to maintain good relations with major power centers; hence, their occasional compliance with direct government demands—One might add the promise of future political jobs as an incentive for compliance or, in cases such as this where right-wing groups were clearly being mistreated, plain old liberal media bias (consider, for instance, the fairly wide–reporting on the FBI’s infiltration of Islamic extremist groups).
It seems without a doubt that the FBI did get to Brown. At the time Matthews approached Newsweek, Attorney General Eric Holder’s Operation Fast and Furious-debacle was still in the news. How could the Obama Administration handle yet another and far bigger scandal involving the FBI helping dangerous people do harm against innocent Americans?
More Alarming Questions about FBI Conduct
Elsewhere, the FBI has demonstrated a serious interest in keeping any questions about the OKC bombing firmly under wraps. When Matthews was slated to testify in Trentadue’s 2014 public records case over the release of Murrah building surveillance footage, his fear of retaliation led to the judge allowing him to testify at a secret location by video—Trentadue thought what Matthews had witnessed while a PATCON operative would help provide a motive for what had become the FBI’s ongoing, unlawful refusal to provide the footage under public records law.
And despite the judge’s precautions, Matthews’s testimony still never took place. At the last minute, Matthews was supposedly threatened with having his VA medical benefits cut off and told to “stand down” by Jarrett and another FBI agent, Adam Quirk. Such a rank case of witness tampering, in fact, led to the judge ordering the FBI to reveal what exactly they had communicated to Matthews; an investigation that has been strangely ongoing since 2015.
At the heart of Trentadue’s marathon public records case certainly has the FBI worried. Someone who did manage to testify early on in the case was an Oklahoma police officer and first responder to the OKC bombing. He told the court he witnessed the FBI actually stop the beginning of the recovery process while victims were still under piles of rubble in order to remove a surveillance camera from the Murrah building. Some believe the camera would have recorded anyone else besides McVeigh who left the truck after it was parked and, in fact, did so.
Finally, there’s the questions about the FBI’s conduct vis-à-vis Trentadue himself. Why Trentadue got involved with the OKC case is because six weeks after the bombing, his brother Kenneth, another war vet, was taken into custody after a traffic incident triggered a parole violation relating to a minor event from years previous. Soon after, he was found hanging in a cell of a federal detention center.
Photos released to Trentadue following a subsequent lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons, however, showed his brother’s throat having been cut and his body covered in bruises—authorities had apparently tried to cover his wounds with make-up before releasing it to Kenneth’s family. The theory behind his death is, having shared a close resemblance with someone called Richard Guthrie, a white supremacist who the FBI thought had information about the OKC bombing, Kenneth was mistaken as Guthrie and taken in by the FBI for interrogation. McVeigh himself called and advised Trentadue of this, telling him he heard that the FBI had indeed mistaken Kenneth for Guthrie and that his death was the result of a botched interrogation session.
Adding to suspicions, the DOJ formed a special team to handle media inquiries and the Trentadue family’s immediate requests for information. It apparently obstructed and delayed the Trentadue’s right to know what happened to Kenneth in every way it could, even when it came to releasing his corpse. Who happened to be the head of this operation (dubbed internally as “the Trentadue Mission”)?10 Then-Deputy Attorney General, Eric Holder.
Finally, there are the other related and mysterious deaths. After Guthrie himself was arrested, he told the LA Times he had “a couple grand juries to talk to” about what really happened with the OKC bombing, and was also later found hanging in his cell.11
And later in 1999, a supposed inmate and witness to Kenneth’s murder, Alden Gillis Baker, threatened to come forward about what he saw. He too was later found hanging in his cell.12
Conclusion
The details surrounding the OKC bombing show it to have all the elements of a “perfect,” post-war American tragedy: Vietnam vets disrespected by the liberal-media class and tossed aside by a government they loyally served; an unhinged federal bureaucracy using its sprawling resources to violate the civil rights of poor and ignored Americans; and, a state-liberal media-axis willing to cover up for government when the “cause” was right.
And consider the following. Even if we ignore the aforementioned evidence about the FBI’s hand in the OKC bombing, remember that the twin motivations for McVeigh’s crimes were Waco and Ruby Ridge—McVeigh chose April 19 as his bombing date because it was the same day as the Waco massacre two years previous. Matthews has actually expressed the view that both massacres had PATCON fingerprints all over them. That’s certainly the case with Ruby Ridge. There, a federal agent/infiltrator pushed former Green Beret Randy Weaver into selling him an illegal sawed-off shotgun. This led to his attempted arrest and an eventual standoff, which then led to the shooting deaths of his 14-year-son by federal marshals and his unarmed wife (baby in hand) by an FBI sniper.
In public and in private correspondence, McVeigh tore into the federal government over these events, expressing fear of a state that was at war with its own citizens. Without federal law enforcement acting so heinously in these events, it’s likely McVeigh would not have carried out the crime that he did.
Further, these rank FBI abuses ironically pushed “right-wing terror groups” to become the threat we were warned about all along. As the original Newsweek article rightly said about Ruby Ridge, the FBI’s conduct “quickly galvanized the radical right like never before” with talks between “various white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and anti-government groups… about joining forces… quickly turn[ing] to action.”
And as Painting writes, even more absurd perhaps, Ruby Ridge was used by federal law enforcement as a justification for increased PATCON resources and investigatory powers.13
So, we have FBI abuses leading to organized rage and resistance, which is then given even more momentum by FBI infiltration and incitement. And with the help of a media sphere that refuses to do its job, all of this works to amp up yet more fear, anxiety and division among the public. It’s a spinning wheel which loyal, patriotic Americans never asked for and certainly want off of.
While we should certainly hope these allegations can be explained away, it’s high-time the OKC victims and the American people generally get the transparency they deserve about what really happened that fateful day.
Kiev Plans False Flag Missile Strikes on Mass Gatherings in Western Ukraine on 8 May – MoD
By Tim Corso | Samizdat | May 7, 2022
The Russian Defence Ministry has stated that Ukrainian forces are planning a false flag operation involving missile strikes at gatherings of civilians in the Lvov and Volyn regions in Ukraine’s west. The ministry said that the goal of this operation is to falsely accuse Russia of causing civilian deaths.
“The Kiev regime plans to carry out yet another sophisticated provocation involving the death of civilians in the western regions of the country on May 8 during the Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation celebrated in Ukraine instead of the Victory Day […] It will be carried out in order to accuse the Russian Armed Forces of indiscriminate missile strikes”, the ministry said.
The ministry elaborated that Ukrainian forces will be using Tochka-U missiles for this purpose. Kiev has repeatedly accused Moscow of firing these missiles at Ukrainian civilian targets, but Moscow strongly denied these accusations, noting that the Russian Armed Forces stopped using Tochka-U missiles a long time ago, unlike its Ukrainian counterpart.
Russia has repeatedly stressed that its forces are only targeting military installations in Ukraine as they carry out the special military operation. Moscow accused Kiev’s forces of hitting civilian infrastructure to delay Russian forces’ advance and later accuse them of damaging these targets.
“RUSSIAN CYBERATTACKS” INCOMING?
OffGuardian | April 24, 2022
The last few days have seen a barrage of warnings and predictions of possible Russian cyber warfare.
The Telegraph warns that work from home software could be vulnerable to Russian cyber attacks. The Guardian says that “cyber crime groups” have “publicly pledged support for Putin”. ITV wants you to be scared of cyberattacks taking down the NHS or a nuclear power stations.
Apparently, those darn Ruskies have already started, attacking not the Western banking system, the NHS OR a nuclear power station… but the Ukrainian post office, for printing propaganda stamps.
It’s all ludicrous propaganda, of course… but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a “cyber attack” (or something they pretend is a cyber-attack).
Remember, Klaus Schwab and the WEF have been predicting a “major cyber attack” with “Covid-like characteristics” (whatever that means) for over a year now, including holding a “cyber pandemic” training exercise as part of Cyber Polygon in October 2021, well before the Russian “special operation” in Ukraine.
With both the energy and food markets beings put under deliberate pressure to raise the cost of living, a “cyberattack” to take out the power grid or further hurt supply lines is not at all out of the question. But if it does come, it will have nothing to do with Russia.
Top Prosecutor Drops Out of Whitmer Kidnapping Case
By Jonathan Turley | April 20, 2022
We recently discussed the collapse of the Whitmer kidnapping case after a jury acquitted defendants in Michigan. Now, one of the lead prosecutors is leaving the case, according to a motion filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Roth. That adds questions about how the case will move forward after the earlier loss.
Shortly before the 2020 election, Gov. Whitmer stood before cameras describing her narrow escape from being kidnapped and murdered by “domestic terrorists.” Despite the fact that the Justice Department in the Trump Administration made these arrests, Whitmer blamed former president Donald Trump. President Biden agreed that Trump was fostering a “civil war.”
The media went into a frenzy, declaring that the case proved that “Trump’s rhetoric and policies have unleashed a second pandemic in the form of far-right domestic terrorism.”
The problem is that the case — and the narrative — quickly fell apart after the election. A Michigan jury recently acquitted Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta and hanged on the verdicts against Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. Fox is portrayed as a ringleader of the group and leader of the conspiracy.
While Fox and Croft can be retried, the acquittal raises an additional challenge. Harris and Caserta may feel fewer inhibitions in testifying. With the exception of perjury, they can safely take the stand to discuss their actions — and more importantly, the actions of the government.
The Michigan case stands as one of the most chilling examples of entrapment techniques used by the FBI. While Whitmer declared Trump “complicit” in her planned execution, the FBI increasingly appeared more “complicit” in the creation of a government-inspired, government-funded, and largely government-staffed plot.
The problem was that these guys seemed at points more interested in partying than conspiring. The FBI, therefore, decided to take control and get them serious about some major crimes. An informant known as “Big Dan” was paid over $50,000 to get the conspiracy going, including paying for the defendants to travel to Wisconsin to “train.”
Special Agent Jayson Chambers pushed Big Dan to get the men to take violent acts against Whitmer. The defendants reportedly resisted those entreaties. Dan pushed the alleged leader to fire a round into the window of Whitmer’s home and mail the casing to the news media. On Sept. 5, 2020, Chambers texted to remind Dan “Mission is to kill the governor specifically.“
The Whitmer conspiracy was a production written, funded, and largely populated by FBI agents and informants. At every point, FBI literally drove the conspirators and controlled their actions. In the end, a majority of the “conspirators” were actually FBI agents or informants.
As discussed earlier, various key FBI agents and informants were removed from the case due to their own legal problems.
Now, Roth is pulling out. That will create a vacuum in the second trial. Retrials often allow prosecutors to better prepare for defense arguments. Yet, it has lost the one prosecutor most experienced in the case.
Politically, it would be highly damaging for both Biden and Whitmer to have the case dropped. The question is whether the reduction of the defendants and the change in the prosecution team will change the prospect for convictions. It could work for the defense if the two acquitted parties are more active in the case. Conversely, focusing on the alleged leader could strengthen the optics for the jury by eliminating marginal figures.
There could also be a more generous plea deal offered to the defense to avoid the threat of acquittal. It is notable to see a lead prosecutor bow out in such a high-profile case. Whether this indicates other significant changes in the case will likely become clear in the coming days.
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MI5 plotted assassination of Irish PM in 1985 – Ulster Volunteer Force
RT | December 29, 2017
Former Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey was warned by loyalist paramilitaries that they were once tasked with murdering him in an assassination plot purportedly dreamt up by the British secret service.
The sensational disclosure was sent in a letter to the Irish government, newly released under the Public Records Act, which requires documents of historical value to be published by the National Archives within 30 years.
Written on Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) signature paper, the warning claims the terrorist organization was asked by an MI5 operative about the prospect of carrying out an attack on Republic of Ireland leader Haughey in 1985.
At the time, Haughey would have been in opposition as head of political party Fianna Fáil, but details of the solicitation did not become known to Irish authorities until 1987.
“In 1985 we were approached by a M15 officer attached to the Northern Ireland Office and based in Lisburn, Alex Jones was his supposed name,” the letter reads, according to the Irish Times. “He asked us to execute you.”… continue
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