Cassville is located in the extreme southwest of Missouri, sitting adjacent to the northeastern Oklahoma and southeastern Kansas state borders. It’s about an hour away from the nearby cities of Joplin and Carthage and about two and a half hours, 130 miles, from Elohim City, Oklahoma.
It was in Cassville that William Maloney operated a real estate brokerage office. In the fall of 1994, Maloney had advertised for sale forty acres of property in the Ozark Mountains. Sometime from October 25th to 27th, 1994, Maloney’s office received a phone call inquiring about that property.
The caller expressed an interest in purchasing the property and Maloney wrote down the caller’s name. Maloney recalled that he asked the caller to repeat his last name, and that the caller told him “McVeigh.” Maloney spelled the name back to the caller, saying “M-C-V-E-Y.” According to Maloney, the caller responded “That’s close enough.”
Thus begins William Maloney’s fateful encounter with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The phone call wouldn’t be the last time that Maloney heard from McVeigh. In fact, he would come face to face with the bomber and co-conspirator Terry Nichols, with a third accomplice, in the first week of November.
William Maloney and Joe Davidson were working at Maloney’s realty office on the morning of November 2nd, 1994 when three men in a white late 70’s model Monte Carlo pulled into the parking lot. One man remained in the vehicle while the other two got out and went inside.
The two men who went inside the office introduced themselves to Bill Maloney as Bob Jacquez and Terry Nichols. Maloney related that “they was just nice and calm,” just a couple of potential buyers as far as Maloney was concerned. After a few minutes of discussion the third man who had stayed in the car at first finally came into the office and introduced himself as Tim. The group was there, they told Maloney, to discuss their mutual interest in the forty acre parcel in the Ozarks that McVeigh had called about two weeks prior.
During the conversation, Maloney observed that it appeared Jacquez was the leader of group, saying “Jacquez was very articulate; he was smart. He did about all the talking, and during that period of time, he was in charge. He was the boss man.” Maloney’s business partner, Joe Davidson, was equally observant of the scene, saying “He [Jacquez] seemed to be the one that was in control and in charge of what was going on.” The unusual trio of supposed buyers did not tell Bill Maloney why they were interested in buying land that had been advertised as “in the middle of nowhere, at the end of a rough road, at the bottom of a hollow” with the addendum that “there may be a cave.”
Maloney said that at the time he was curious what the men were interested in, asking the question “Were they looking for a place to hide?” Joe Davidson noted that the men chuckled at the question but provided no verbal response. Later, Oklahoma FBI agent Bob Ricks would express a similar sentiment to a documentary film crew:
“The theory there was that Timothy McVeigh was searching for a place to perhaps have a hide-out and Robert Jacquez was utilized to perhaps obtain property in Missouri. It’s very remote terrain, it’s terrain familiar — there are a lot of right wing groups around there, from Elohim City Oklahoma to other groups in Arkansas to the Ozarks in Missouri which would be the perfect type spot.”
In discussing the geography surrounding the for-sale property, Maloney had Jacquez handle a new laminated topographical map of the area and afterwards he put the map in his safe. Maloney provided the map to the FBI during his first interview, hoping it may turn up fingerprints that could identify the man he saw as being in charge that day. It is unknown what became of this map: once it was in the FBI’s hands, it disappeared. As with the Murrah building surveillance tape videos, Maloney’s map with its possible fingerprint evidence has disappeared from the investigatory record, never to appear at trial.
Maloney told FBI Special Agent Bill Teater that Robert Jacquez was a muscular man with large biceps and a bulging neck, standing about 5’11 and said that “he looked like a military guy. I spent a long time in the service and I can pretty well spot ’em. He was real muscular; he looked maybe like a weightlifter.” Maloney’s description, given during his witness interview, was documented by the FBI in what is called a 302 report. In general, an FBI 302 report contains information about what a witness said to the interviewing Special Agent and includes whatever details the interviewing agent deems relevant to an investigation. Maloney’s 302 report details that Jacquez was wearing black pants, a black t-shirt, and olive colored hiking boots with small “suction cups” on the soles. He had a tattoo visible on his left forearm that had wings or some sort of insignia, possibly military. Jacquez had a short “flat-top” type haircut and a dark tanned complexion, described as “possibly American Indian.” This detail is notable — McVeigh was, by all accounts, a white-supremacist as were the vast majority of other potential suspects suggested as possible co-conspirators within alternative accounts of the bombing. Who was this dark skinned man, described as the evident “boss” of McVeigh?
The FBI considered Maloney and Davidson’s account significant enough to submit Maloney to a polygraph test, which he passed. The FBI also took the unusual step of placing Maloney’s secretary, Nora Young, under hypnosis in an effort to recall potentially more details about the encounter. They commissioned the “OKBOMB” task force’s sketch artist, Jean Boylan, to produce a sketch based on Maloney’s description. There was an unusual level of secrecy surrounding the sketch of the suspect, with an FBI teletype about the suspect containing the disclaimer “CAUTION: SENSITIVE INFORMATION: THIS SKETCH OF JACQUES IS ON A “NEED TO KNOW” BASIS AND HAS NEVER BEEN RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC, THE MEDIA, OR EVEN OTHER LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES. PROTECT.”
Unlike the other sketches produced for the task force, this one was not widely circulated and appears to convey a level of sensitivity and significance that is uncommon in the bombing case. One source told this writer that Associated Press Washington Bureau Chief John Solomon interviewed a senior Customs Agency rep at OKC for the investigation, and that he told Solomon that the FBI were not real concerned about John Doe #2 reports, but they were really worried about John Doe #3, or “Robert Jacquez,” getting media attention. This is obvious enough from the bureau’s unusual disclaimer that is plastered all over November 1995 teletypes concerning the suspect. The notion that Jacquez could have been connected to some sort of sensitive operation comes to mind when you consider the unusual level of secrecy surrounding the sketch, and FBI investigators’ worry over the suspect receiving media attention.
The Manhunt for “John Doe #3”
The timing of the Jacquez visit to Cassville was reason enough for FBI investigators to suspect the man was a key conspirator in the bombing plot: just three days after the visit to Cassville, McVeigh was checked into a hotel in Kent, Ohio attending the Niles Gun Show while accomplices were busy carrying out the robbery of gun dealer Roger Moore in Royal, Arkansas.
Just five days after the Cassville visit, Terry Nichols rented a storage locker in Council Grove, Kansas where many of Roger Moore’s stolen firearms were kept. The Moore robbery was directly linked to funding the Oklahoma City bombing, with $60,000 worth of guns and precious metals stolen to raise funds for the bombing.
At the time of the Cassville visit, McVeigh had spent the previous month gathering bomb components: three 55-gallon barrels of nitromethane and 2,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate had already been sourced and secured in storage lockers. So, too, had McVeigh and Nichols burglarized a quarry for over 350 pounds of Tovex high explosive and blasting caps. Clearly, whoever this Jacquez figure was, he was with McVeigh and Nichols in the middle of the bombing operation when central actions were being carried out in furtherance of the bombing conspiracy.
FBI lead investigator Danny Defenbaugh would continue the Robert Jacquez investigation for five years, much longer than the FBI’s prematurely aborted manhunt for John Doe #2. This indicates that the FBI believed that John Doe #2—a man seen at Elliott’s Body Shop with someone witnesses identified as Timothy McVeigh—was a separate and different person than the man witnesses described as Robert Jacquez and it also indicates that the FBI considered Jacquez to be of great importance given the length of time and man hours invested in investigating him.
The results of a Rocky Mountain News investigation into the Jacquez manhunt was published in the fall of 1998 and revealed that in the three years since the bombing, the FBI had been relentlessly looking for the suspect. Investigative journalist Kevin Flynn wrote that “No other name investigated in the bombing consumed nearly the time and effort the FBI spent turning the nation upside down to find him” and Flynn provided many examples, some recounted here:
Over a three year period, the FBI performed hundreds of background checks on people whose last names are Jacks, Jacques, Jacquez or Jocques.
FBI agents fanned out through 39 states, interviewing people and performing records searches related to any people whose names were variations on the name “Jacquez”
The lengths to which the FBI went when investigating Jacquez are exemplified by the investigation of a woman named Linda Jacquez from Percy, Illinois. The FBI examined records of over 1,000 personal calls made from her home in 1994. Similar records analysis was likely performed on the other hundreds of subjects whose names were Jacquez or variations thereof.
A man named Jacquez who lived in Colorado Springs was interviewed by the FBI in August 1995 because agents had found his name on a motel registration card at a Days Inn in Rogers, Arkansas dated September 5th, 1994. While the man was found to have had no connection to the bombing, some clues regarding the FBI’s interest emerge from the details: Rogers, Arkansas is located just 35 miles from Cassville, Missouri. Additionally, and perhaps significantly, a group of bank robbers that FBI investigators at one time linked to the bombing had been through Rogers, Arkansas casing armored car routes.
The FBI subpoenaed Newsweek for its subscription records on anyone named Robert Jacks, Jacques or Jocques. Other contemporary news magazines were probably similarly the recipients of targeted subpoenas.
It appears that the FBI’s all-encompassing investigation was in some respects superficial: the FBI investigated every person and conceivable record that might feature the name “Jacquez” (and variations thereof) even though “Jacquez” was probably a fake name that the man had used. Surely FBI investigators would have realized this, but nevertheless continued to track down any and all details they could related to the phony name.
Unresolved Leads and Dead Ends
Among the details uncovered when investigating Jacquez was that McVeigh buddy Michael Fortier’s former neighbor and associate Jim Rosencrans once shared a post office box with a “Robert Jacquez” in Odessa, Texas. This fact did little to contribute to understanding the man’s true identity—only denials were offered from Rosencrans with him saying that he had never heard of anyone using the name Jacquez in spite of evidently having shared a mail box with the man. Thus, this possible lead remains unresolved to the satisfaction of anyone curious enough to consider the lead possibly relevant. Who was it, and why wasn’t Rosencrans more thoroughly “motivated” to provide answers? Was the mailbox detail a red herring?
Yet another bizarre fact emerged concerning Jacquez as it relates to suspects in the investigation: the FBI discovered an address book in Terry Nichols’ home which featured the name “Jacquez” written out multiple times with variations on the spelling: Jacques, Jacquez, Jacks. The handwriting on the paper was thought to belong to Marife Nichols, Terry Nichols’ mail order bride from the Philippines, because the address book belonged to her. However, what exactly Marife (or someone else) was doing writing this name down on an otherwise blank page in her address book remains unknown and incredibly suspect. When interviewed about this unusual detail by Kevin Flynn of the Rocky Mountain News, former FBI lead investigator in the bombing case, Weldon Kennedy, claims he wasn’t even aware of the notebook or the writing found within it. This fact either shows a stunning level of ignorance and possible incompetence by the OKBOMB task force’s supposed leader, or, dishonesty. Kennedy would add “For the life of us, we were never able to pin (the Jacquez sighting) down.” Consider the fact that Weldon Kennedy lied about a significant detail of the investigation in his book, On Scene Commander, where Kennedy wrote that “the case would primarily be based on forensic evidence because there were no eyewitnesses.” Contrast that with the established fact that there were over 24 eyewitnesses in downtown Oklahoma City who saw Timothy McVeigh and a judgment about Weldon Kennedy’s honesty can be rendered.
Ultimately the Jacquez leads were followed up on exhaustively over at least five years with no identification of the suspect being made. One of the obvious problems with the FBI’s seemingly exhaustive investigation was that the focus appeared to be on potential suspects whose actual real names were “Robert Jacquez” or variations thereof when it’s highly probable that the name was just an alias that the mystery man had used. This fact would prove to be the likely reason FBI investigators were stymied when trying to identify the man. Contributing to this failure is the fact that certain leads appear to not have been examined more aggressively: the Rosencrans lead, the notebook found in Nichols’ home, and finally, the fingerprint evidence.
Though Maloney turned over a laminated map with the “Jacquez” fingerprints on it, the FBI doesn’t appear to have compared those fingerprints to the 1,035 fingerprints collected in the case from key locations such as motel rooms. This is known due to the testimony of FBI fingerprint expert Louis Hupp who testified at the Nichols trial. Hupp’s testimony reveals that none of the 1,035 fingerprints collected had been run through the NCIC or FBI fingerprint database for a match. Worse, they failed to check to see if any of the 1,035 fingerprints matched with one another. Doing that would have allowed the FBI to determine if one or more persons were present at multiple locations, placing that person with McVeigh during the bombing conspiracy and confirming that the prints belong to a likely accomplice. Shockingly, Hupp testified that the bombing task force’s leadership had decided that attempting to identify the other fingerprints “would not be necessary.” This failure of diligence is an outrage and can only be explained by two possibilities: incompetence or, the FBI had reason to not want to identify the other suspects. The latter explanation brings with it a host of uncomfortable questions.
The FBI’s failed Jacquez investigation would later cause McVeigh’s execution to be delayed after it was discovered that the FBI had withheld from defense attorneys the full facts concerning the five year manhunt. On May 9th, 2001, the FBI officially disclosed to Timothy McVeigh’s defense attorneys—just six days before his execution date—that it had failed to turn over around 3,000 pages of documents during McVeigh’s trial. A week later, it was reported that many of the withheld documents were “witness statements and photographs relating to a mysterious person known as Robert Jacquez.”
Possible Identification?
At one point during the FBI investigation the Robert Jacquez sketch was compared by FBI investigators to sketches of suspects from a bank robbery investigation called “BOMBROB.” A November 1st, 1995 teletype from the St. Louis field office sent to the director of the FBI and eight field offices details the comparison.
The teletype describes an October 1995 broadcast of “America’s Most Wanted” which featured sketches of bank robbers responsible for a series of bank robberies that were under investigation. Agents assigned to the OKBOMB investigation noted a strong similarity between one of the bank robber sketches and the Jacquez sketch.
The bank robber sketch depicted a suspect from an August, 16th 1995 robbery of a bank in Bridgeton, Missouri. The robbers who had carried out the Bridgeton, MO robbery had left a newspaper clipping about Timothy McVeigh in the back-seat of the drop car they had used for the robbery, further igniting suspicions among the investigating agents. That bank robber would later be identified as Richard Lee Guthrie, founder of a white supremacist terrorist group called “The Aryan Republican Army.”
The investigators asked: was Jacquez the same man being sought in the bank robbery investigation? Take a look for yourself, and ask, are these suspects one and the same?
The November 1st teletype also makes additional comparisons between the “Jacquez” suspect’s distinctive jungle boots—described in detail by Bill Maloney—and the distinctive boots worn by bank robber Richard Guthrie when he purchased a getaway vehicle in Alton, Illinois in December of ’94.
Was “Jacquez” the same person who robbed the bank in Missouri who had left a clipping about McVeigh in the back seat of the robbers’ drop car?
Nearly a year after the November 1, 1995 teletype, the Oklahoma City Bombing task force investigators would continue to examine possible links between Jacquez and the bank robbery gang that Guthrie had belonged to. Examining FBI interviews with one member of the bank robbery gang, Kevin McCarthy, shows that apparent interest. A September 20, 1996 FBI interview by SA Bill Teater shows that McCarthy was asked about “any knowledge he may have regarding individuals involved in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.” SA Teater was the same FBI agent who had interviewed the witnesses at Maloney Real Estate, and was thus the point man in the Jacquez investigation.
During the interview, McCarthy was asked about people he associated with or had seen at Elohim City, a racial separatist compound. Guthrie had visited Elohim City throughout the early to mid 90s and was well known to McCarthy, having participated in numerous bank robberies with him.
During McCarthy’s interview, SA Teater asked McCarthy if anyone he knew had ever traveled to Missouri for the purpose of locating rural property, or if he knew anyone that might have been ex-military. He was shown the sketch of Robert Jacquez and asked if it looked like anyone he knew. Teater asked McCarthy if he knew anyone named “Robert or Bob Jacquez.” The FBI 302 report of the interview says that McCarthy “thought for a few moments and replied that he really could not think of anyone he personally knew by that name” but added that “the name was one he had heard before.”
The most illuminating part of the interview comes from Teater’s line of questioning regarding Jacquez’ appearance. Recall that witness Maloney described Jacquez as dark-skinned and “possibly American Indian” while another witness, Barbara Whittenberg, had said that the man she saw with McVeigh and Nichols on April 15th (speculated to be the same person as Jacquez) was dark skinned and “possibly Hawaiian.” By all accounts the muscular Jacquez figure was not Caucasian. Teater asked McCarthy if he knew anyone matching this description, or if anyone like that had been at Elohim City. McCarthy answered that he did not associate with people matching that description and that “anyone matching that description would not have been welcome at Elohim City.”
Indeed, the bank robbery suspect whose sketch resembled the Jacquez sketch—Richard Guthrie—was a Caucasian. Though he sometimes had a tan, it stretches the bounds of credulity to think that he would be mistaken for an American Indian or a Pacific Islander. Likewise, a person fitting that description would be an unlikely figure to be found among the white supremacists to be found at Elohim City and within McCarthy and Guthrie’s social circle.
Ultimately, Guthrie just doesn’t fit the description of Jacquez in spite of similarities between his sketch and the sketch of Jacquez. For example, Richard Guthrie did not look like a body builder, did not have a “thick neck” or a powerful build. He was 5 foot 7, where Jacquez was described as near 6 feet tall.
After an examination of the facts, it appears that Guthrie can be ruled out as having been Jacquez. Like the Rosencrans lead, the possible identification of Guthrie as Jacquez would become a dead end.
Other Witnesses to the “Jaquez” Suspect
The FBI’s OKBOMB investigation uncovered multiple witnesses whose statements to the FBI indicate that the man Maloney and Davidson saw with McVeigh and Nichols calling himself Robert Jacquez may have been seen by other people in the days and weeks prior to the bombing.
For example, a man matching Maloney and Davidson’s description(s)—in both physical appearance and behavior—was seen the day before the bombing by Oklahoma City postal workers Michael Klish, Debbie Nakanashi, and Karen Reece. Nakanashi told the FBI that the day before the bombing, McVeigh and another man had been at the post office branch across the street from the Murrah building. Nakanashi’s account is important to reference here because Nakanashi’s memory of the man’s behavior and appearance so closely matches that of the man calling himself Robert Jacquez that Maloney and Davidson had encountered just five months prior. Nakanashi told the FBI that the man with McVeigh “walked with a military bearing.” Using words almost identical to those used by Maloney to describe the man, Nakanashi said that “it was obvious to me this other man was the one that was in control of the situation, he was the boss.”
Another witness who may have encountered the enigmatic “Robert Jacquez” was restaurant owner Barbara Whittenberg. Whittenberg was the proprietor of the Sante Fe Trail diner located just off route 77 in Kansas. On Saturday, April 15th, 1995 she served breakfast to Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and a third man who has never been identified. Noting a Ryder moving truck in the parking lot, Whittenberg asked the group if one of them was moving, and where to. The third man replied, telling her “Oklahoma City.” Whittenberg replied that she had relatives in a town south of Oklahoma City, making friendly small talk with the group. According to Whittenberg, the remark immediately stopped the conversation dead in its tracks—“McVeigh looked at him and you could feel buckets of ice being poured over our conversation. I got out of it.”
When Whittenberg was shown the “John Doe #2” sketch, she said that the third man she served breakfast to that morning looked different, saying “his face was thinner, his cheekbones more prominent, and his nose wider” than what the sketch depicted. However, when she was shown the sketch of “Robert Jacquez” she made a more positive identification, telling a CNN reporter “Yes. This is the closest picture I’ve seen yet!” Using language almost identical to Bill Maloney, Whittenberg recalled that the man she had seen was “darker skinned” and had a “thick neck,” looking “like a bodybuilder.” She said that the man was “possibly Hawaiian,” accounting for SA Bill Teater using that descriptor when asking bank robber Kevin McCarthy about Jacquez.
It is important to note that Whittenberg’s account of what she had seen appeared in reports from The New York Times in the fall of 1995, the Washington Post in April of 1996, a May 1996 issue of The New American magazine, the June 4th edition of McCurtain Gazette, followed by a citation and quote in the June 23rd 1996 edition of the Kansas City Star. The Associated Press would issue a syndicated report throughout all national newspapers on March 9, 1997, and the same month Whittenberg’s account would feature prominently in a TIME magazine article. Whittenberg’s media exposure, and the thus the exposure of the reality of the third suspect she had seen, was at an apex in 1997. That’s when the death threats started. Yes, death threats.
Whittenberg would later testify in 1997 before the grand jury impaneled to investigate the bombing that she began receiving death threats telling her to keep her mouth shut. At that time she told a Daily Oklahoman newspaper reporter covering the grand jury proceedings that “I’ve started to regret I ever said a thing,” adding, “I don’t do telephone interviews any more. I used to not be that way. I’m sorry.”
Who was this man, described by witnesses as the evident boss of McVeigh? His identity was sensitive enough for FBI teletypes to issue a disclaimer noting that the sketch was sensitive and on a “NEED TO KNOW” basis, to be withheld from newsmedia and other law enforcement agencies and media exposure about the man caused at least one witness to receive death threats. Terry Nichols, too, would express apparent fear concerning the identification of these other suspects.
Nichols Fears for His Life, Stonewalls
Additional confirmation that this Jacquez figure was a sensitive suspect emerges after an analysis of a batch of FBI documents stemming from 2005 interviews with convicted bomber Terry Nichols. In 2005, Nichols was interviewed by the FBI numerous times in relation to explosives and other evidence that he revealed were preserved and buried under his former Herington, Kansas home. Some of the revelations gleaned from those 2005 interviews as they relate to Robert Jacquez and John Doe #2 are relevant to the “Robert Jacquez” story but they offer more questions than they do answers.
During the 2005 interviews, Nichols told the FBI where they could locate explosives he said were buried under his former Herington home. During the interviews concerning these explosives, Nichols would tell the FBI that John Doe #2 exists and that he knows his identity, but would not reveal it out of fear for his family’s safety. Nichols said that the man’s name had not been revealed or mentioned by anyone at that time, and implied that the man or those whom he represents presented an immediate threat to his life and that of his family members.
Nichols was equally evasive about the enigmatic Robert Jacquez. Nichols said in his interviews that he had visited Missouri looking to buy real estate, but that only he and McVeigh had been there. Nichols’ description of the visit entirely omits Robert Jacquez from the narrative as if he wasn’t there. Assuming the 302 report is accurate, what prompted Nichols to exclude Jacquez from the narrative? The man clearly exists based on the solid accounts from Bill Maloney, Joe Davidson, and Nora Young. So, too, did the existence of a slip of paper recovered from Nichols’ home with the name “Jacquez” scrawled on it raise serious questions about the likelihood that the man was involved in a criminal conspiracy with McVeigh and Nichols.
Ultimately, what can be concluded based on the witness testimony, polygraph results, and FBI documents is that Robert Jacquez was involved with McVeigh and Nichols—perhaps on more than one occasion—and that for some reason, Terry Nichols is covering for this person in denying his presence. Like John Doe #2, Nichols may be fearful of the man or who he represents, and this may account for his silence on the matter. And so it remains a key mystery in the case whose answers may lie locked away with Terry Nichols.
Who was the man who called himself “Robert Jacquez,” seen with Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in November 1994? What became of the fingerprint evidence that Maloney turned over to the FBI and why wasn’t it compared to the fingerprints collected in the case? Was the man spotted by Maloney and Davidson the same man seen with McVeigh the day prior to the bombing by Debbie Nakanashi? Was it the same man spotted with McVeigh and Nichols by Barbara Whittenberg on April 15th? Why was Nichols so evidently fearful concerning these suspects? Why did the FBI enact such secrecy surrounding the Jacques sketch, and fear subsequent media coverage of the suspect? Just who the hell was Robert Jacquez?
Sources/Additional Reading
News Reports:
Many of the details concerning “Robert Jacquez” were sourced from a handful of media accounts concerning the suspect that emerged in 1997–98, and again in 2001 when accounts concerning withheld documents emerged. Here is a suggested reading list for students of the case curious about this suspect:
“Report: FBI Looking for Man Seen With Bombing Suspects.” Associated Press, 9 Mar. 1997. [link]
“FBI Searches For Third Man.” CNN, 9 Mar. 1997. [link]
“FBI Reportedly Looking For Man In Bombing.” Associated Press, 10 Mar. 1997. [link]
“3rd Man Sought in Bomb Probe.” Associated Press, 10 Mar. 1997. [link]
“Man Linked to McVeigh Nichols During Land Inquiry Is Sought.” Buffalo News, 10 Mar. 1997. [link]
“Mystery Man Linked to McVeigh Broker Believes Trio Sought Hideout.” Cincinatti Post, 10 Mar. 1997. [link]
“Report: FBI Searching for McVeigh Cohort.” Daily News [Los Angeles], 10 Mar. 1997. [link]
“FBI Reportedly Seeks Man Seen with McVeigh, Nichols.” Dallas Morning News, 10 Mar. 1997. [link]
“FBI Looking for Man Who Sought Hideout With Suspects in Blast.” Houston Chronicle, 10 Mar. 1997. [link]
“FBI Seeks Man With McVeigh.” Spokane Spokesman-Review, 10 Mar. 1997. [link]
“Man Linked to McVeigh, Nichols During Land Inquiry Is Sought.” The Buffalo News, 10 Mar. 1997. [link]
“FBI Seeks Suspects’ Companion.” The Salina Journal, 10 Mar. 1997. [link]
“Who Is Robert Jacquez?” TIME, 17 Mar. 1997. [link]
“OKC Case Still Missing a Link.” Rocky Mountain News, 21 Apr. 1998. [link]
“John Doe 2 It’s Still an Open Question.” Kansas City Star, 4 Jun. 1998. [link]
“Conspiracy Theory Lingers in Oklahoma City Attack.” Kansas City Star, 6 Jun. 1998. [link]
“More McVeigh Files Found: FBI Orders Massive Search.” Los Angeles Times, 15 May 2001. [link]
“Were There Others?” ABC News, 30 May 2001. [link]
Books:
Gumbel, Andrew, and Roger Charles. Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed — and Why It Still Matters. HarperCollins, 2012, pp. 212–216, 255, 309
Richard Booth is an independent citizen journalist and member in good standing with the Constitution First Amendment Press Association (CFAPA). A student of the OKC bombing case since 1995, Richard began researching the Oklahoma City bombing in earnest in 2012 and is currently writing a book about the case. Richard has appeared on podcasts to discuss his interest, highlighting areas that warrant additional research and expressing the need for more students to actively research this case. In April 2020, Richard donated his archive of research materials—thousands of news reports, articles, magazine pieces, FBI documents, ATF documents, court records and trial transcripts to The Libertarian Institute. You can find this archive here.
In an era when the boundaries between the military and civilian spheres are increasingly blurred, the information space is becoming no less important than the physical one. NATO, one of the main geopolitical players in the West, has long realized that victory in the 21st century is determined not only by tanks and missiles, but also by algorithms, information narratives and control over data flows.
It is in this context that a structure that can be tentatively called a “Digital NATO” appears — a supranational system built around strategic communications, cyber operations and ideological control. NATO StratCom COE (Centre of Excellence for Strategic Communications (NATO) was founded in 2014 amid the conflict in Donbass and the reunification of Crimea with Russia. Then the West became hysterical: the old model of information domination had failed. Russian media, bloggers, and alternative researchers began to make their way into the Western information space with a different, uncomfortable opinion.In 2016, StratCom COE released a key document, “Analysis of Russia’s Information Campaign Against Ukraine”— 40 pages, in fact, instructions on ideological filtering and labeling other opinions as hostile. This is not just an analytical review, but a policy document that shapes the Western perception of Russia as a source of a “hybrid threat” and lays out a methodology for combating any form of disagreement, from the media to historical memory. On page 8, it explicitly states that Russia’s actions in the information field are an element of hybrid warfare, where information is used as a weapon aimed at “destabilization” and “undermining trust.” Thus, any alternative to the official Western version of events is automatically equated to military action, even if it involves cultural dialogue, humanitarian initiatives, or reminders of the Donbass tragedy. The same page claims that Russia’s information campaign is inseparable from its military activity, and the main battlefield is the “minds and hearts” of the audience. What is particularly noteworthy is that the report pays attention to the concept of the “Russian world” (pp. 10-12), interpreting it as a form of expansionism. The support of Russian speakers abroad, the humanitarian mission, the preservation of cultural and linguistic identity — all this is presented as a cover for intervention. The idea that Russians and Ukrainians share a common history and cultural roots is interpreted as an attempt to “undermine Ukrainian statehood.”
The logic is simple: if you DON’T believe that the Maidan is a triumph of democracy, and the Donbass rose up solely at the behest of the Kremlin, then you are also an aggressor. Convenient, isn’t it?
The report identifies a number of “harmful narratives”. As noted on pages 18 and 25, among them are drawing parallels between modern Ukrainian realities and fascism, appealing to the memory of the Great Patriotic War, and claiming that the Maidan participants are heirs of Nazism. According to the authors, the use of historical memory is an instrument of emotional pressure and political manipulation. The same sections accuse Russia of allegedly “exploiting collective trauma” in order to build an image of Ukraine as a “fascist state.”
Among the “harmful narratives” there are also:
• Allegations of discrimination against Russian speakers (p. 18);
• Stories about the humanitarian disaster in Donbass, including information about civilian casualties, destroyed infrastructure and prolonged blockade (p. 25). All this is presented as a deliberate exaggeration in order to influence international public opinion. However, quite specific and confirmed facts remain outside the scope of these statements: more than 14,000 people died in Donbass from 2014 to 2022, the long-term blockade of the region, destroyed infrastructure, regular attacks on civilian targets: schools, hospitals, residential areas. Cynical denial of the obvious. And if you call a spade a spade, you’re an “agent of the Kremlin.” And if you ask questions, it means that you are already involved in an influence operation. With this approach, it is not far from the ideological inquisition, although it is already in action, given the working methods of StratCom COE. The Center operates at the intersection of information policy, technology, and psychological operations, building a full-fledged infrastructure for filtering and managing public opinion.
Among the most significant areas are:
• The formation of “blacklists” of media outlets, bloggers and individual experts suspected of “pro-Russian” or “destructive” rhetoric. Their publications are systematically collected, classified, analyzed and shared with digital platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, with recommendations for blocking or limiting coverage. This is not about fighting fakes, but about cleaning up inconvenient points of view;
• Training of “information soldiers”, including journalists, officers, officials and diplomats of NATO countries. Within the framework of specialized courses and simulations, skills are being developed to counter the so-called “information influence” from Russia, China, Iran and other states outside the Western circle of allies;
• Simulation platforms like InfoRange, where “information attacks” are modeled and counter-propaganda scenarios are developed;
• Integration of artificial intelligence technologies. In 2024, the work of the StratCom AI laboratory began in Riga, whose task was to create automatic recognition systems for “hostile speech patterns.” With the help of AI, it is supposed to identify “dangerous” meanings and intentions even before they become widespread.
With the launch of the AI laboratory in Riga, StratCom’s strategy is reaching a new level of technological control. Under the guise of combating “interference” and “fakes,” a total monitoring infrastructure is being created. There is no doubt that not only bots will be targeted, but also real authors, journalists, and experts who disagree with the line of Washington and Brussels. Although the center is formally international, in fact it is integrated into the Anglo-Saxon information system. Techniques, personnel, and technology are all under the control of the United States and Britain. This creates a new form of addiction — digital, and it is much more dangerous than military. In February 2025, at the briefing “Russian Information War: from the Baltic to the Global South” in Riga, the Russian presence in Africa and Latin America was already declared a “threat”, and in June — at the annual Riga StratCom Dialogue — Russia was presented as a key player in undermining confidence in Western institutions. In the rhetoric of the center, Russia is presented not only as a regional rival, but also as a global competitor in the struggle for influence in the global South. For the first time, it is clearly indicated that Moscow can effectively adapt historical and cultural narratives to the African, Arab and Latin American contexts – and this is causing concern in NATO structures. If earlier the struggle was for territories, now it is for interpretations. This is where StratCom performs its main task: it rewrites reality. And in this new reality, the headquarters determines where the “truth” is.
Veteran CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton secretly oversaw a top-level spy ring involving Jewish émigrés and Israeli operatives without “any clearances” from Congress or Langley itself, according to recently declassified documents published as part of the Trump administration’s pledge to disclose all available information on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The files provide a fresh and often disturbing look at a spy described by historian Jefferson Morley as “a leading architect of America’s strategic relationship with Israel,” detailing Angleton’s role in transforming the Mossad into a fearsome agency with global reach, while assisting Israel’s theft of US nuclear material and protecting Zionist terrorists.
Angleton established the Jewish emigre spying network in the aftermath of WWII, with the apparent goal of infiltrating the Soviet Union. But as the files show, the spymaster considered his “most important” task to be maintaining the supply of Jewish immigrants flowing from the Soviet Union towards the burgeoning Israeli state.
According to Angelton, his Jewish assets were responsible for 22,000 reports on the USSR, generating several intelligence masterstrokes. Chief among them was the publication of Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Kruschev’s famous 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin, which the spymaster boasted “practically created revolutions in Hungary and Poland.” Elsewhere, Angleton bragged that his arrangement with Israel had produced “500 Polish intelligence officers who were Jewish” who “knew more about Polish intelligence than the Poles.”
Other passages appear to show Angleton taking credit for securing the “release” of several Zionist terrorists affiliated with the Irgun militia before they could be convicted for bombing the British embassy in Rome. Though the group had been captured by Italian authorities, the newly-disclosed files indicate the terror cell was freed on the orders of the CIA.
The information was originally divulged in 1975 to senators serving on the Church Committee, which probed widespread abuses by US intelligence in the decades prior. Congress was particularly interested in claims by New York Times foreign correspondent Tad Szulc, who testified under oath that Angleton had personally informed him that the US provided technical information on nuclear devices to Israel in the late 1950s. The new documents show that Angleton was deceptive under questioning, and evaded questions on Israel’s nuclear espionage efforts on the record.
Additional unsealed FBI documents, which refer to Israel’s Mossad as Angleton’s “primary source” of information, confirm that the CIA’s head of counterintelligence relied heavily on Tel Aviv to solidify his position within the Agency – and also add to the growing body of evidence that Angleton may not have been operating with US interests in mind throughout his 21-year tenure.
Other newly declassified files from the FBI have shown that Angleton maintained a wildly lopsided relationship with the Bureau, which saw federal agents deferring to the CIA counterintelligence chief after they caught him surveilling the correspondence of huge numbers of Americans. The files show Angleton openly admitting he would have been fired if Langley caught wind of his leaks to the Bureau.
A side-by-side analysis of the now-unredacted Church Committee files compared with their previously-released versions from 2018 demonstrates that even after 70 years, Washington felt compelled to conceal details of its real relationship with Israel’s founders. Over a dozen references to “Israel,” “Tel Aviv,” or descriptions of figures as “Jewish,” which were scrubbed from the 2018 release, can now be viewed on the National Archives site.
The documents reveal that Angleton repeatedly lied to multiple Congressional bodies, including the Church Committee, which investigated CIA abuses, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which probed the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Angleton was similarly evasive when interrogated over Israel’s nuclear weapons program, and about CIA knowledge or complicity in the scheme.
Those documents also reveal that Angleton’s CIA counterintelligence staff ordered Lee Harvey Oswald’s removal from federal watchlists six weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, despite his classification as a high security risk. The surveillance of Oswald was personally overseen by a member of Angleton’s intelligence network of Jewish emigres, Reuben Efron, a CIA spy from Lithuania. Angleton had placed Efron in charge of an Agency program called HT/Lingual which intercepted and read correspondences between Oswald and his family.
Numerous historians have questioned why the CIA counterintelligence chief insisted for decades on personally overseeing what he described as the “Israeli account.” Though several off-the-record interactions remain impossible to parse, the documents show that when grilled about his “unusually close” connections to the Israeli Mossad, Angleton acknowledged forming an “arrangement” in which, “in most simplistic terms, [the Israelis] were informed that we would not work with them against the Arabs, [but] that we would work with them on Soviet bloc Intelligence and communism.”
Freeing Zionist terrorists
One of the earliest instances of Angleton’s cooperation with Zionist elements came as Zionist militants embarked on a terrorist campaign to pressure the British colonial authorities to leave Mandate Palestine.
In October 1946, three months after they bombed the British administrative headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, members of the right-wing Irgun militia planted explosives in the British embassy in Rome in a failed bid to assassinate the UK’s ambassador to Italy.
According to Angleton, after the Irgun “blew up the British embassy in Rome” in 1946, the CIA intervened to ensure they escaped Italy without prosecution.
“We had the members of the group, and then we had the dilemma again as to whether we turned them over to the British authorities,” noted Angleton, who had served as counterintelligence chief for the Italian branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor. “And we were in a position to make the decision one way or the other. And eventually we came down on the side of releasing them.”
A secret deal with the Mossad
As Washington sought to manage the political ruptures caused by the creation of Israel, and monitor the wave of Soviet migrants pouring into the self-proclaimed Jewish state, Angleton framed his takeover of “the Israeli account” as a convenient way for US intelligence to kill two birds with one stone.
“The other side of the Israeli problem was that you had thousands coming from the Soviet Union and you had the Soviets making use of the immigration for the purpose of sending illegal agents into the West and breaking down all the travel control, identifications and so on. And so there was both a security problem and a political problem.”
To manage these “problems,” the US and Israelis brokered a deal involving the secret exchange of “papers and signals, communications intelligence, [and] the other products of intelligence action,” Angleton stated. The spy chief claimed the only records of the 1951 arrangement held by the US side would be in the possession of the Agency, and admitted US Congress had been left in the dark, telling senators, “I don’t think there were any clearances obtained from the Hill.”
Asked by one legislator how it was “possible for succeeding directors of the intelligence agency to understand what the agreements were between” US and Israeli intelligence, Angleton responded: “Very simple. They saw the production to begin with. And they met with directors or the head of Israeli intelligence. And they met with Ambassadors and prime ministers. And they were very much involved.”
Grooming Zionist spies “outside the structure” of the CIA
Angleton was especially protective of what he called “the fiduciary relationship” with Tel Aviv, assembling a close-knit clique of Jewish Americans with dubious loyalties to manage it as World War Two drew to a close. “I started from the south side with two Jewish men who worked with me during the war,” he explained. Having “sent them over as ordinary people under cover” to get their bearings in newly-formed Israel, Angleton “brought over six others and put them through some months of training, outside of the structure” of the CIA.
“To break down the fiduciary relationship – which is after all a personal business – all the men I have had, were men who stayed in it and came back to headquarters and went back to Tel Aviv, they went to the National Security Council, and went back to Tel Aviv, et cetera.”
“It was probably the most economical operation that has ever been devised in the U.S. Government,” Angleton crowed. “I don’t think there was [sic] more than 10 people that were hired in the same process.”
Having trained these spies “outside of the structure” of the CIA, it’s unclear how Angleton ensured they remained faithful to US national security objectives, or whether he ever intended to.
Enabling Israeli theft of US nuclear material, spying on America
Angleton’s role in enabling Israel’s wanton theft of nuclear material from an American facility is one of the more shocking episodes in the US-Israeli relationship. The scene of the crime was the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, or NUMEC, a uranium processing facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania owned by a Zionist financier named David Lowenthal. In 1965, Zalman Shapiro, a fellow Zionist hired by Lowenthal to run the plant, illegally diverted hundreds of kilograms of nuclear fissile material to Israel. Posing as a scientist, the notorious Mossad spy Rafi Eitan visited NUMEC three years later to continue the heist.
As Jefferson Morley documented in his biography of Angleton, “The Ghost,” the late CIA counterintelligence chief made sure the CIA looked the other way as Israel constructed its first nuclear weapon out of the stolen fissile material. According to Morley, “Angleton, it is fair to say, thought collaboration with Israel was more important than U.S. non-proliferation policy.”
A 1977 investigation by the US Government Accountability Office found that the CIA withheld information about the NUMEC nuclear theft from the FBI and Department of Energy, and “found that certain key individuals had not been contacted by the FBI almost 2 years into the FBI’s current investigation.”
The latest batch of Church Committee files add new detail about Angleton’s compromising of US national security to benefit Israel, and his attempts to cover up his betrayal.
During his testimony before the Committee, Angleton was pressed about media reports alleging that he and his counterintelligence unit provided Israel with technical support for constructing nuclear weapons. He strenuously denied the charges, insisting the CIA had never played any role in providing Tel Aviv with nuclear materials. However, when questioned about whether “Israeli intelligence efforts” were ever conducted in the US “aimed at acquiring… nuclear technology,” Angleton equivocated.
First, he blustered, “there have been many efforts by many countries to acquire technical knowledge in this country, and that doesn’t exclude the Israelis.” Asked if CIA counterintelligence had “certain knowledge” of Israeli agents “trying to acquire nuclear secrets in the US,” Angleton pleaded, “Do I have to respond to that?”
The Committee then went “off record” at the senators’ request, making Angleton’s responses impossible to scrutinize.
In a secret 1975 memorandum to the FBI, the ousted CIA counterintelligence chief disclosed that he had “avoided any direct answers” during his Senate testimony on Israel’s spies carrying out “intelligence collection” to gather “nuclear information” in the United States.
Just days later, a Bureau report on “Israeli intelligence collection capabilities” revealed Angleton entertained “frequent personal liaison contacts” with Mossad representatives at Israel’s Washington DC embassy between February 1969 and October 1972. This “special relationship” involved “the exchange of extremely sensitive information.”
Further, the 1975 FBI memo on Angleton disclosed the Israeli embassy’s establishment of a “technical intelligence network” seven years earlier which was directed by an Israel scientist who worked on Tel Aviv’s nuclear program. This may explain why Angleton was so cagey under Senate questioning.
“Israeli matters” trigger Angleton’s downfall
The Church Committee files show Angleton bristled at then-CIA Director William Colby’s efforts to apply a modicum of transparency to the Agency’s activities, especially as they related to Israel. The spymaster warned that if the USSR ever caught wind of Langley’s use of the self-proclaimed Jewish state as a de facto halfway house for communist turncoats, they would almost certainly end their policy of encouraging Eastern European Jews to migrate to Israel:
“This idea of opening the doors and letting the light in, and breaking down compartmentation, and breaking down the need to know, would inevitably put in jeopardy the immigration, if the Soviets should learn the extent of the activities,” Angleton stated.
Colby fired Angleton in 1974 after the New York Times revealed that he devised an illegal program of domestic spying targeting antiwar American dissidents. In his testimony, Angleton framed their clash as an interpersonal conflict, describing Colby as “not my cup of tea professionally or in any other way.”
Yet Angleton also acknowledged to Senate that a “dispute in connection with these Israeli matters” between himself and Colby contributed to his departure from the Agency. Was this a reference to the former spook’s involvement in Israeli theft of US nuclear secrets, enabling Israel to acquire the bomb?
Whatever the case, it was clear why Angleton would be remembered more fondly in Israel than inside the country he ostensibly served.
On December 4, 1987, the director of Israel’s Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence services gathered in secret on a hillside in Jerusalem to plant a tree in honor of Angleton. They were joined there by five former Israeli spy chiefs and three former military intelligence officers.
Despite attempts to keep the ceremony under wraps, two local reporters managed to evade the cordon to record the ceremony for the former CIA counter-intelligence director, who had died seven months prior. Together, the Israeli spooks laid a memorial stone that read, “In memory of a dear friend, James (Jim) Angleton.”
When we speak of the devastation in Gaza, the blame does not rest solely on the generals and politicians of the occupying power. The tragedy is sustained by the international system that arms, trains and protects it. And Britain, far from being a neutral observer, is among the most significant enablers of this machinery of destruction.
For more than 22 months, the Gaza Strip has been subjected not to war, but to genocide. Entire families have been wiped out, refugee camps turned into mass graves, and civilian infrastructure systematically destroyed. The International Court of Justice has already confirmed that there is a “plausible risk of genocide” — yet Western governments continue to provide weapons, surveillance systems and diplomatic cover.
Britain’s historic and present responsibility
Britain’s complicity is not new. From the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which laid the foundations for the settler-colonial project, to today’s arms shipments and political protection, the United Kingdom has been central to the dispossession of Palestinians. The government in London cannot claim ignorance: under international law, providing material support to a state committing war crimes or genocide makes the supplier complicit in those crimes.
This is not about maintaining a “strategic ally.” It is about directly enabling bombardment, mass displacement and collective punishment of two million besieged Palestinians.
Evidence of involvement
The evidence is clear and overwhelming:
Data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that the UK exported key components for F-35 fighter jets — including radar and targeting systems — worth over £17 million in 2023 alone.
Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) estimates that British-made parts account for around 15 per cent of every F-35 jet currently bombing Gaza.
Even after the UK government announced in September 2024 that it was suspending 30 export licenses, human rights groups documented new shipments, including more than 8,600 rounds of ammunition and 150,000 bullets in the following months.
Palestinian and international human rights organisations brought a case before the UK High Court, arguing that such exports breach international law. Yet in June 2025, the court dismissed the case, claiming that arms licensing falls outside judicial review — effectively granting the government a free hand in supplying a military accused of genocide.
Such facts leave little room for ambiguity. Britain is not merely arming a strategic partner; it is aiding and abetting grave breaches of international humanitarian law.
Silencing solidarity
The British government has also moved to suppress those who expose this complicity. Campaign groups such as “Pal Action” have been targeted with bans, activists have been arrested, and even banners confiscated. But repression cannot erase reality. The blood of civilians testifies to the fact that this is not a conflict between equals, but a massacre sustained by Western capitals.
A moral and legal imperative
As Palestinians living in the UK, we speak not only with the voice of memory and history, but also with the authority of law and morality. International law is explicit: states that knowingly provide weapons used in the commission of genocide share responsibility for that crime. Silence, therefore, is not neutrality. It is complicity.
Britain’s record will be judged harshly. Just as the Balfour Declaration is remembered as a colonial betrayal, today’s arms exports will be recorded as enabling one of the most documented genocides of the modern era.
The call to conscience
Yet Britain is also home to countless free voices: campaigners, lawyers, journalists and politicians who understand that what is unfolding in Gaza is not distant, but deeply tied to Britain’s own decisions. They know that complicity today will stain this country for decades to come.
The choice before Britain is stark: continue to arm and shield a regime accused of genocide, or align with international law and the universal values it claims to uphold.
Until justice prevails
Our struggle is not simply to lift a siege, but to end decades of settler-colonialism and military occupation. Freedom will not be gifted; it will be won. And as Palestinians, in Gaza, across the diaspora, and here in Britain, we carry the same message passed down from one generation to the next: never accept injustice, and never let the flag of freedom fall.
The Washington Post is giving me a déjà vu feeling about the JFK assassination. After publishing an extraordinary article detailing how recently revealed records of the CIA disclose that it has been lying continuously about the George Joannides matter for more than 60 years, the Post has now followed up with an editorial emphasizing how important it is for government institutions to begin telling the truth so that we can renew our trust in government. Otherwise, the Post suggests, people will continue to have paranoid delusions that give rise to conspiracy theories.
What?
It has just been revealed that the CIA has lied about a critically important aspect of the Kennedy assassination. Oh well, ho hum. We all know that the CIA lies. Golly, if only the CIA would start telling the truth. Then we no longer would have all these silly conspiracy theories.
Why the seemingly blasé attitude toward the CIA’s lies regarding Joannides? My hunch is that it’s because long ago the Post subscribed to the lone-nut theory of the assassination — a theory to which it has obviously remained wedded regardless of the overwhelming circumstantial evidence of guilt on the part of the national-security establishment, including the evidence establishing the fraudulent autopsy that the military conducted on JFK’s body on the very evening of the assassination. As the Post writes in its editorial, “When Oswald killed Kennedy…”
That’s got to explain the lack of interest in following up on why the CIA has lied about Joannides for so long. In other words, the Post could have written an editorial calling on the CIA to come clean — to explain why it has lied about Joannides for so long. Okay, sure, the CIA officials who began the lying in 1963 are all dead. But somehow the instruction to continue the lying about Joannides was transmitted from CIA generation to CIA generation. How did that happen? Why did it happen? Who are the people in the CIA today who received that instruction? What was told to them?
The Post could be leading the way in demanding answers from the CIA. Rather than simply exhorting the CIA to tell the truth in the future, it could be calling on Congresswoman Luna to subpoena CIA officials to explain under oath the reasons for the lies surrounding Joannides. Isn’t that the moral and ethical duty of the press?
My opinion is that the basic problem is that by steadfastly hewing to the official lone-nut theory of the assassination, the Post, as well as much of the other mainstream press, simply cannot bring itself to think the unthinkable — that the lone-nut theory of the assassination is simply wrong — that the assassination was, in fact, a regime-change operation orchestrated and carried about by the U.S. national-security establishment. After all, what the Post cannot deny is that the 60 years of CIA’s lies about Joannides is a puzzle piece that fits perfectly within the overall mosaic of a national-security state regime-change operation.
The reason that the CIA’s attitude seems like déjà vu all over again for me is that we saw this same phenomenon take place back in the 1990s. On November 8, 1998, the Post published a story about how the Assassination Records Review Board had determined that there had been two brain exams as part of the JFK autopsy. You can read the story here.
What was that significant? Well, one reason is that the military pathologists claimed that there was only one brain exam, which meant that they were doing exactly what those CIA officials have been doing. They were intentionally, knowingly, and deliberately lying! Another reason is that the second brain exam necessarily involved a brain that belonged to someone other than Kennedy. Isn’t that something worth investigating? The Post article states “The central contention of the report is that brain photographs in the Kennedy records are not of Kennedy’s brain and show much less damage than Kennedy sustained when he was shot in Dallas and brought to Parkland Hospital there on Nov. 22, 1963…. ‘I am 90 to 95 percent certain that the photographs in the Archives are not of President Kennedy’s brain,’ [Douglas] Horne, a former naval officer, said in an interview.”
Now, wouldn’t you think that that would be enough for a mainstream paper to send an investigative reporter to get to the bottom of all this? After all, an allegation that the military is lying about something that is quite important — the fraudulent autopsy of a president — is a fairly serious accusation. Isn’t that worth checking out? Isn’t that the job of an independent press?
Apparently not because the Post, as far as I know, did not launch any investigation into the matters that it itself detailed in that 1998 article, just as it is showing no proclivity toward doing insofar as the Joannides lies are concerned. After publishing that article in 1998, they apparently just dropped the matter, just as they are apparently now ready to drop the Joannides matter.
Moreover, don’t forget: Someone had slipped a provision into the JFK Records Act that prohibited the Assassination Records Review Board from reinvestigating any aspect of the assassination. Surely, the Post knew that. So, given that the ARRB was prohibited from getting to the bottom of the two brain exams and the rest of the fraudulent autopsy, shouldn’t that have motivated the mainstream press, which was not operating under such a prohibition, to undertake such an investigation. Obviously not.
When the Post talks about the distrust of government among the American people, it conveniently avoids another critically important point — that the American people have an equal distrust in the mainstream press. I wonder why.
Why am I convinced that Jeffrey Epstein was part of the deep state — that is, with Mossad, the CIA, or both? Simply because of the plea bargain he received in 2008. In my opinion, there is simply no way that wealthy, prominent, influential men could have pressured a U.S. Attorney to give Epstein that plea bargain. The plea bargain was so super-sweet that there is only one entity that would have had the power to secure it — the same entity that I have long contended is actually running the federal government — the national-security establishment, which consists of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
Keep in mind that U.S. Attorneys are not like state District Attorneys. U.S. Attorneys don’t have to answer to the voters. Although they don’t have lifetime appointments, like federal judges do, their term in office is essentially the same as the president. They are very powerful people within their particular jurisdictional realm.
The U.S. Attorney in Miami had Epstein dead to rights. Any federal prosecutor could have easily secured multiple convictions against him for sexually trafficking many underage girls. A federal judge would undoubtedly have sent him to prison for the rest of his life.
Instead, he managed a super-sweet plea bargain in which he was permitted to plead guilty to a relatively minor prostitution charge in state court, not federal court. He served out a 13-month jail sentence and in the county jail, not the state penitentiary. He was also permitted to leave the jail every morning and return at night. And his co-conspirators were shielded from prosecution in Florida.
Again, in my opinion, only the national-security branch of the federal government wields that much power. Ever since the Kennedy assassination, nobody in the federal government — including the executive, legislative, and judicial branches — has dared to buck the deep state.
It is my opinion that that the deep state is looking for a way to secure Ghislaine Maxwell’s early release from prison. If Epstein was, in fact, part of the deep state, it is a virtual certainty that she knows it. But my hunch is that the deep-state officials have assured her that they will manage to get her an early release from prison, so long as she keeps her mouth shut and doesn’t reveal Epstein’s deep-state connection.
Why would they let her serve any time? After all, she’s now been in prison for 5 years. Because sometimes the deep state loses control over events. For example, it was obviously able to control Epstein’s prosecution in 2008 but lost control when federal prosecutors in New York indicted him again in 2019. Epstein, of course, is now dead, but Maxwell is still very much alive. She got convicted in federal court in New York for her role in facilitating and participating in the sexual abuse of underage girls by Epstein. She received a sentence of 20 years. Compare that to the 18-month sentence that Epstein himself received with his super-sweet plea bargain.
At 63 years old, Ghislaine Maxwell has no interest in serving out her entire 20-year prison sentence. After five years in prison, she undoubtedly wants out. My hunch is that she is pressuring the deep state to get her a pardon or a commutation. The implicit threat, of course, is that she’ll disclose what she knows if she isn’t released. Killing her would be an option but would obviously be very problematic, especially given Epstein’s “suicide.” Thus, it is my conviction that the deep state, right now, is putting big-time pressure on President Trump for a pardon or commutation for Maxwell.
A similar thing happened with a deep-state operative and murderer named Michael Townley. Townley is the guy who personally installed the bomb that killed former Chilean official Orlando Letelier and his American assistant Ronni Moffitt in 1976. Townley inserted the bomb in Letelier’s car, which exploded when Letelier and Moffitt were on their way to work in Washington, D.C.
Let me emphasize something important: Townley was a cold-blooded murderer. And this was not the only murder in which he was involved. He was also involved in the murder of the former head of the Chilean armed forces, Gen. Carlos Prats. He was also a key figure in Operation Condor, which arguably was the biggest state-sponsored assassination ring in history.
The mainstream consensus is that Townley was not a U.S. deep-state operative. The consensus is based on the fact that the CIA and Townley denied that he was one of its operatives. Moreover, there have never been any CIA records revealing that Townley was a CIA operative.
But there is one big problem with reaching a conclusion on that basis: The CIA lies. Everyone knows that the CIA lies. Recall, for example, CIA Director Richard Helms committing perjury in sworn testimony before Congress. Recall the sweetheart plea bargain he received that permitted him to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, for which he received a fine. Recall how he was honored by CIA personnel when he returned to CIA headquarters.
Or consider the lies regarding CIA official George Joannides — lies that continued until just recently when they were uncovered. Consider that the CIA gave Joannides a medal for his lies.
Don’t forget also the CIA’s destruction of its MKULTRA files and, more recently, its torture videotapes. If the CIA destroys records, it can also alter, modify, and create records that deliver a false narrative.
We do know that Townley made contact with the CIA and sought employment. The official story is that the CIA rejected him. Thus, Townley ended up going to work for the Chilean deep state after the Pinochet coup in 1973 that the CIA had helped bring about. Specifically, he went to work for a secret Gestapo-like agency called DINA, which was responsible for arresting thousands of people for the “crime” of being socialists, torturing them brutally, raping them, executing them, or permanently disappearing them.
The head of DINA was a Chilean deep-state operative named Col. Manuel Contreras. There is something important to note about Contreras: He was also a paid asset of the CIA.
So, the CIA helped to bring about the coup. The coup leaders established DINA, which rounded up innocent people, tortured or raped them, and executed or disappeared them. DINA’s head was a paid asset of the CIA. Michael Townley went to work for DINA. Perhaps it’s worth noting what CIA asset Contreras stated about Townley: “He was never a DINA agent … instead, a CIA agent since February 1971.”
While most everyone has concluded that Townley wasn’t also working for the CIA, I myself have absolutely no doubts that Townley was a CIA operative. On what do I base my conclusion? Primarily on his plea bargain. Like Jeffrey Epstein, Townley received a super-sweet plea bargain that, in my opinion, only the deep state could have gotten for him.
Remember: This guy had murdered two innocent people on the streets of Washington, D.C. He should have received a sentence of life without parole. Instead, he was permitted to plead guilty to conspiracy to murder and then was sentenced to serve only 10 years. But get this: He was released after having served only 5 years. And get this: He was released into the Federal Witness Protection Program, whereby the feds secured new identities for him and his family so that they could restart their lives anew. To this day, no one except a few feds knows where Townley is living because the federal government continues to protect this cold-blooded murderer. How weird is that? Not weird at all if Townley was, in fact, a U.S. deep-state operative?
To my knowledge, there is no public record of the federal prison in which Townley served those five years, but I have no doubts it was a “Club Fed” — that is, one of the nice, comfortable federal prisons rather than a high-security penitentiary for convicted murderers. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Townley was given the same type of arrangement that Epstein was given with respect to being able to leave the prison every morning and return at night.
So, why did Townley even have to serve 5 years? Because sometimes things get out of the control even for the deep state, and someone has to pay the price. Epstein had to serve 13 months in jail. Townley had to serve 5 years in prison. Ghislaine Maxwell has had to serve 5 years in prison.
But I have no doubts whatsoever that Ghislaine Maxwell will not be serving out her 20-year sentence. The deep state is too powerful, and the deep state can’t afford to let her talk. My opinion is that Ghislaine Maxwell will be receiving a pardon or a commutation before President Trump leaves office.
A few weeks ago I published an article noting that the State of Israel and the Zionist movement that gave rise to it have probably employed assassination as a tool of statecraft more heavily than any other political entity in recorded history. Indeed, their deadly activities had easily eclipsed those of the notorious Muslim sect that had terrorized the Middle East a thousand years ago and gave rise to that term.
The piece had been prompted by Israel’s sudden strike against Iran, capping its reputation as the greatest band of assassins known to history. Even as the Iranian government was intensely focused on the negotiations with America over its nuclear program, a sudden Israeli surprise attack successfully assassinated most of Iran’s highest military commanders, some of its political leaders, and nearly all of its most prominent nuclear scientists. I cannot recall any previous case in which a major country had ever had so large a fraction of its top military, political, and scientific leadership eliminated in that sort of illegal sneak attack.
Less than one year earlier, a series of missile exchanges between Israel and Iran had soon been followed by the death of hardline Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister in a highly-suspicious and never explained helicopter crash. Given subsequent events, I think we can safely assume that he, too, had died at the hands of the Israelis.
Earlier this year, the declassification of a large batch of JFK Assassination files had prompted me to recapitulate and summarize many of my articles of the last half-dozen years on that landmark twentieth century event. I gathered together some of the very considerable evidence that the Israeli Mossad played the central role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 as well as the death of his younger brother Robert a few years later, probably the highest-profile political assassinations of the last one hundred years or more.
The most weighty and authoritative work on the long history of Israeli assassinations is surely Ronen Bergman’s 2018 volume Rise and Kill First, running 750 pages and including a thousand-odd source references, with many of the latter citing official documents never previously made available to journalists. By some estimates, this book documented nearly 3,000 such foreign political killings, a remarkable total for a small country then less than three generations old.
Although the Bergman book was certainly very comprehensive, it was produced under strict Israeli censorship, so the text quite understandably omitted almost any coverage of some of the highest-profile Zionist attacks on Western targets. For example, there was no mention of the unsuccessful but well-documented attempts to kill President Harry Truman, nor the assassination efforts aimed at British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the top members of his Cabinet.
Some of this latter coverage may be found in Thomas Suarez’s 2016 book State of Terror which I would recommend as a very useful supplementary work, though its focus is almost entirely limited to the activities of Zionist groups just prior to the establishment of Israel.
For a broader discussion of the history of Israeli assassinations and closely-related terrorist attacks, especially those targeting Westerners, one of the most useful compilations might be my own very long January 2020 article, providing extensive references to the underlying primary and secondary sources.
That 2020 article had actually been prompted by America’s own sudden assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a shocking development that drew a great deal of media coverage at the time.
I had opened my long discussion by noting that over the last several centuries Western governments had almost totally abandoned the use of political assassinations against the leadership of major rival nations, regarding such actions as immoral and illegal.
For example, historian David Irving revealed that when one of Adolf Hitler’s aides suggested to him that an attempt be made to assassinate the Soviet military leadership during the bitter combat on the Eastern Front of World War II, the German Fuhrer immediately forbade any such practices as obvious violations of the laws of civilized warfare.
For most of American history, a similar attitude had prevailed, but I explained that this began to change over the last couple of decades, mostly in the wake of the 9/11 Attacks.
The 1914 terrorist assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was certainly organized by fanatical elements of Serbian Intelligence, but the Serbian government fiercely denied its own complicity, and no major European power was ever directly implicated in the plot. The aftermath of the killing soon led to the outbreak of World War I, and although many millions died in the trenches over the next few years, it would have been completely unthinkable for one of the major belligerents to consider assassinating the leadership of another.
A century earlier, the Napoleonic Wars had raged across the entire continent of Europe for most of a generation, but I don’t recall reading of any governmental assassination plots during that era, let alone in the quite gentlemanly wars of the preceding 18th century when Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa disputed ownership of the wealthy province of Silesia by military means. I am hardly a specialist in modern European history, but after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War and regularized the rules of warfare, no assassination as high-profile as that of Gen. Soleimani comes to mind…
During our Revolutionary War, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and our other Founding Fathers fully recognized that if their effort failed, they would all be hanged as rebels by the British. However, I have never heard that they feared falling to an assassin’s blade, nor that King George III ever considered using such an underhanded means of attack. During the first century and more of our nation’s history, nearly all our presidents and other top political leaders traced their ancestry back to the British Isles, and political assassinations were exceptionally rare, with Abraham Lincoln’s death being one of the very few that comes to mind.
At the height of the Cold War, our CIA did involve itself in various secret assassination plots against Cuba’s Communist dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders considered hostile to US interests. But when these facts later came out in the 1970s, they evoked such enormous outrage from the public and the media, that three consecutive American presidents—Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan—all issued successive Executive Orders absolutely prohibiting assassinations by the CIA or any other agent of the US government.
Although some cynics might claim that these public declarations represented mere window-dressing, a March 2018 book review in the New York Times strongly suggests otherwise. Kenneth M. Pollack spent years as a CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer, then went on to publish a number of influential books on foreign policy and military strategy over the last two decades. He had originally joined the CIA in 1988, and opens his review by declaring:
One of the very first things I was taught when I joined the CIA was that we do not conduct assassinations. It was drilled into new recruits over and over again.
Yet Pollack notes with dismay that over the last quarter-century, these once solid prohibitions have been steadily eaten away, with the process rapidly accelerating after the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The laws on our books may not have changed, but
Today, it seems that all that is left of this policy is a euphemism.
We don’t call them assassinations anymore. Now, they are “targeted killings,” most often performed by drone strike, and they have become America’s go-to weapon in the war on terror.
The Bush Administration had conducted 47 of these assassinations-by-another-name, while his successor Barack Obama, a constitutional scholar and Nobel Peace Prize winner, had raised his own total to 542. Not without justification, Pollack wonders whether assassination has become “a very effective drug, but [one that] treats only the symptom and so offers no cure.”
Thus over the last couple of decades the American government has followed a disturbing trajectory in its use of assassination as a tool of foreign policy, first restricting its application only to the most extreme circumstances, next targeting small numbers of high-profile “terrorists” hiding in rough terrain, then escalating those same killings to the many hundreds. And now under President Trump, the fateful step has been taken of America claiming the right to assassinate any world leader not to our liking whom we unilaterally declare worthy of death.
Pollack had made his career as a Clinton Democrat, and is best known for his 2002 book The Threatening Storm that strongly endorsed President Bush’s proposed invasion of Iraq and was enormously influential in producing bipartisan support for that ill-fated policy. I have no doubt that he is a committed supporter of Israel, and he probably falls into a category that I would loosely describe as “Left Neocon.”
But while reviewing a history of Israel’s own long use of assassination as a mainstay of its national security policy, he seems deeply disturbed that America might now be following along that same terrible path.
Pollock’s discussion of these facts came in his lengthy 2018 New York Times review of the Bergman book entitled “Learning From Israel’s Political Assassination Program,” and he greatly decried what many have called the “Israelization” of the American government and its military doctrine. President Donald Trump’s sudden public assassination of so high-profile a foreign leader as Gen. Soleimani came less than two years later and demonstrated that Pollock’s concerns were fully warranted and indeed even understated.
As my January 2020 article explained, nothing like this had ever previously happened in peacetime American history, and only very rarely even during wars.
The January 2nd American assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran was an event of enormous moment.
Gen. Soleimani had been the highest-ranking military figure in his nation of 80 million, and with a storied career of 30 years, one of the most universally popular and highly regarded. Most analysts ranked him second in influence only to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s elderly Supreme Leader, and there were widespread reports that he was being urged to run for the presidency in the 2021 elections.
The circumstances of his peacetime death were also quite remarkable. His vehicle was incinerated by the missile of an American Reaper drone near Iraq’s Baghdad international airport just after he had arrived there on a regular commercial flight for peace negotiations originally suggested by the American government.
Our major media hardly ignored the gravity of this sudden, unexpected killing of so high-ranking a political and military figure, and gave it enormous attention. A day or so later, the front page of my morning New York Times was almost entirely filled with coverage of the event and its implications, along with several inside pages devoted to the same topic. Later that same week, America’s national newspaper of record allocated more than one-third of all the pages of its front section to the same shocking story.
But even such copious coverage by teams of veteran journalists failed to provide the incident with its proper context and implications. Last year, the Trump Administration had declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard “a terrorist organization,” drawing widespread criticism and even ridicule from national security experts appalled at the notion of classifying a major branch of Iran’s armed forces as “terrorists.” Gen. Soleimani was a top commander in that body, and this apparently provided the legal fig-leaf for his assassination in broad daylight while on a diplomatic peace mission.
Although Pollock provided some explanations for this shocking transformation in American doctrine, he failed to note what was arguably the most obvious factor. Over the last generation or two, the American government and American political life have been almost entirely captured by what scholars John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt called “The Israel Lobby” in their best-selling 2008 book of that title, and this political and ideological transformation has only further accelerated in the last couple of years, most recently reaching ridiculous, almost cartoonishly extreme levels.
For example, nearly every other country on earth regards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as one of the worst war criminals in modern history, now under indictment by the International Criminal Court for his ongoing genocidal massacre of Gaza’s helpless two million civilians, with an international warrant issued for his arrest. But the American political system is almost entirely under the control of pro-Israel partisans so he was invited in 2024 to give an unprecedented fourth public address to a joint session of Congress, receiving an endless series of standing ovations by the trained barking seals of our national legislative body.
Over the last couple of generations, successful American politicians have increasingly been selected for their unswerving loyalty to the State of Israel and their admiration for all things Israeli, often describing themselves as committed Zionists, followers of a foreign nationalist movement.
As a notable example of this strange pattern, a Republican Gentile such as Rep. Brian Mast had not only volunteered for service in the Israeli military, but then proudly wore his foreign uniform while serving as an elected member of Congress. Perhaps partly as a consequence of this demonstration of his overriding loyalty to a foreign nation, in January he was named chairman of our powerful House Foreign Relations Committee.
In another bizarre twist, foreign students attending American universities have never been punished for denouncing or condemning America or the behavior of the American government, but under the Trump Administration they have been rounded up and deported if they criticized the foreign government of Israel.
So if Israel and the Zionist movement have spent the last one hundred years heavily relying upon political assassinations as a primary geopolitical tool, it is hardly surprising if American political leaders have now increasingly adopted the practice of their Israeli mentors and exemplars and done the same.
This trend was further accelerated by the complete capture of the foreign policy establishment of both of our major political parties by the militantly pro-Israel Neocons. Indeed, as I have noted, the term “Neocon” has largely dropped from usage during the last decade or so because the views and beliefs of almost everyone in DC establishment circles would now fall into that category, a tendency that extends across our entire political ecosphere of elected officials, staffers, think-tanks, and media outlets.
I believe that this new American emphasis on political assassinations has extremely dangerous consequences for the world, consequences that perhaps most analysts have failed to properly appreciate. Israel’s tendency to assassinate the political leaders of those countries it views as rivals or threats has naturally focused upon its own region. But when American leaders have adopted that same mind-set, their targets have obviously been different ones.
Israel’s sudden and largely successful decapitation strike against Iran had heavily relied upon the innovative use of drones. But just a couple of weeks earlier, a somewhat different but equally bold use of drones had been used to hit all of Russia’s interior airbases housing its strategic bomber fleet, successfully destroying quite a number of those nuclear-capable aircraft, one of the important legs of the country’s nuclear deterrent triad. Just before that, there was an attempt to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin with a swarm of drones when he visited the Kursk area on a helicopter tour of that region.
Although the Ukrainian government took full credit for these latter two attacks against Russia, it seems extremely unlikely that they would have undertaken such action without the full support and approval of their American and NATO paymasters, and indeed the Russians claimed to have hard evidence of such involvement. As I noted in an article, the Ukrainian government explained that the planning for the project had begun roughly eighteen months earlier, and that had been exactly the time when New Jersey and parts of the East Coast had reported a mysterious wave of very heavy drone activity, which our government later admitted was testing for a highly classified military project. I think that the very close match of timing was hardly likely to have been coincidental.
The size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal surpasses our own and its large suite of unstoppable hypersonic delivery systems has given it a measure of strategic superiority over America and our NATO allies on both the nuclear and conventional escalation ladders. So the very strong likelihood that America was intimately involved in an attack on Russia’s nuclear triad and an attempt to assassinate Russia’s president seems exceptionally reckless and dangerous behavior. In a recent article, I suggested that Russia should take prompt and forceful action to deter any such future attacks, but this has not yet happened:
A couple of years earlier, I published an article focusing on indications of earlier American attempts to kill President Putin. This came after our bipartisan political and media elites had begun vilifying the Russian leader as “another Hitler,” with leading media figures and top U.S. Senators loudly calling for his assassination. I noted that the Russians seemed concerned that such assassination efforts might even employ novel, biological means:
We should also recognize the reality that during the last seventy years America has maintained the world’s largest and best-funded biological warfare program, with our government spending many tens of billions of dollars on biowarfare/biodefense across those decades. And as I’ve discussed in a long article, there is even considerable evidence that we actually used those illegal weapons during the very difficult first year of the Korean War…
Soon after their invasion, the Russians publicly claimed that the U.S. had established a series of biolabs in Ukraine, which were preparing biological warfare attacks against their country. Last year one of their top generals declared that the global Covid epidemic was probably the result of a deliberate American biowarfare attack against China and Iran, echoing the accusations previously made by those countries.
Russian security concerns over our advanced biowarfare capabilities and the extreme recklessness with which we might employ them may explain the rather strange behavior of President Putin when he met in Moscow for talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz shortly before the outbreak of the Ukraine war.
At the time many observers were puzzled why in each case the two national leaders were seated at opposite ends of a very long table, with Putin blandly suggesting that the placement was meant to symbolize the vast distance separating Russia and NATO’s Western leaders. Perhaps that innocuous explanation was correct. But I think it far more likely that the Russians were actually concerned that the Western leaders meeting him might be the immunized carriers of a dangerous biological agent intended to infect their president.
On the face of it, American attempts to assassinate Russia’s president would make little logical sense and these would obviously be extremely reckless and dangerous. But much the same could be said of American-orchestrated efforts to destroy Russia’s strategic nuclear bomber fleet, yet there seems very strong evidence that both these actions occurred. So we should seek to understand the logical framework, however irrational and unrealistic, under which such American decisions would be made.
I think an important insight may have been recently provided by Alistair Crooke, a former senior MI6 officer and Middle East peace negotiator, with a great deal of expertise and excellent sources in that latter region.
In an interview a couple of weeks ago, he claimed that America had been directly involved in the wave of Israeli assassinations against Iran’s leaders, taking such action despite the fact that we were currently in the midst of crucial nuclear negotiations with that country. Launching a massive assassination attack against the entire leadership of a country with whom you are currently negotiating is obviously an extremely destabilizing action, one that will hardly inspire confidence among other prospective negotiating partners and will surely long be remembered.
But according to Crooke, the logic behind such American action was the widespread belief that the hold of the Islamic Republic upon the 90 million people of that country was quite fragile, and that the successful assassination of most of the Iranian leaders would cause the collapse of the regime, much like the government of Syria had collapsed earlier this year after attacks by armed Islamicist forces based in Idlib. The American government was greatly disappointed when that wave of assassinations failed to trigger such a political collapse and instead redoubled popular support for the ruling regime.
Crooke suggested that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been targeted for death as well, but unlike so many other senior Iranian officials they had been fortunate enough to survive. Indeed, not long afterward, President Trump repeatedly threatened to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei unless he completely acceded to America’s demands regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Offhand, I can’t remember the last time a world leader has publicly threatened to assassinate one of his foreign counterparts in such fashion.
If Crooke’s analysis is correct, similarly mistaken reasoning might help to explain the likely American involvement in the attempt to assassinate Putin a few weeks earlier. Most of America’s political decisionmakers may have convinced themselves that the Russian regime was discredited, unpopular, and fragile, and that the sudden elimination of Russia’s president perhaps combined with a heavy blow to Russia’s nuclear retaliatory arsenal would cause its collapse.
Such an analysis might seem extremely implausible to most observers, but much of America’s leadership seems to exist in an unrealistic propaganda-bubble in which these notions have become widespread.
Consider, for example, estimates of Russian casualties in Ukraine. The Western-funded anti-Putin media outlet Mediazonahas used its considerable resources to continually sweep the Russian Internet in order to compile a running total of verified Russian losses in the Ukraine war, and as of July 2025 had confirmed a total of over 120,000 Russian soldiers killed. This is likely somewhat of an underestimate given that at least some such deaths have escaped public notice, and such totals certainly represent heavy losses in a Russian population of around 140 million.
But our Neocon-dominated American government and its intelligence services have instead accepted without question totally outrageous figures apparently based upon the dishonest claims of Ukrainian propagandists. Back in February, Trump told reporters that Russia had already suffered 1.5 million casualties, an astonishing figure, and just a few days ago, he claimed that almost 20,000 additional Russians had been killed in the month of July alone.
As former CIA officer Larry Johnson noted, journalist Seymour Hersh reported that an intelligence official described for him a destroyed Russian military that had already suffered two million casualties:
“The total now is two million. Most importantly,” the official stressed, “was how this number was described. All the best trained regular Army troops, to be replaced by ignorant peasants. All the best mid-grade officers and NCOs dead. All modern armor and fighting vehicles. Junk. This is unsustainable.”
Two million Russian casualties would probably amount to more than 5% of that country’s entire population of military-age males, and such enormous losses could not possibly be kept concealed. Those figures are obviously delusional.
But if America’s political leaders and many of their military advisors accept such fantasies, they could easily convince themselves that a defeated Russia is now ripe for regime-change triggered by Putin’s assassination. They would obviously hope that the replacement might be a new government closely aligned with the West and subservient to its demands, much as had been the case during the 1990s.
Other Neocon analysts have proposed Russia’s dismemberment into several different much smaller states, none of which would be able to resist American pressure and domination, with various such proposed maps floating around.
Thus, America’s likely involvement in assassination efforts against the top leadership of both Iran and Russia was based upon our unrealistic assumptions regarding the weakness of the two regimes, and the belief that elimination of their top leaders would lead to a collapse. Moreover, in each case these attacks rather treacherously occurred in the midst of ongoing negotiations, over Iran’s nuclear program in one case and over Russian willingness to end the Ukraine war in the other. We should also remember that Trump’s earlier assassination of Gen. Soleimani occurred when that latter leader had been treacherously lured to Iraq for peace negotiations.
Unfortunately, countries that are totally delusional on some national security matters are much more likely to be equally delusional on others as well. I have recently discovered that important elements of the American foreign policy establishment have convinced themselves that the government of China is also fragile and weak, and possibly ripe for collapse if it were hit by one or more sharp shocks. A blogpost brought these strange and surprising notions to my attention a couple of weeks ago.
The blogger highlighted a major article in the New Yorker focusing on aspects of a likely future war between America and China, and suggesting that in some respects it might be analogous to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza. Indeed, the subtitle even described Israel’s invasion of Gaza as “a dress rehearsal” for a future American war with China.
China has an enormous military, equipped with some of the world’s most highly-advanced weapons, and these include a full suite of the unstoppable hypersonic missiles that America has so far failed to successfully produce. So the belief that Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Gaza’s helpless, unarmed civilians holds any serious lessons for the course of a future American war with China seems rather strange reasoning indeed.
What’s Legally Allowed in War How U.S. military lawyers see Israel’s invasion of Gaza—and the public’s reaction to it—as a dress rehearsal for a potential conflict with a foreign power like China.
Colin Jones • The New Yorker • April 25, 2025 • 3,300 Words
The rather peculiar tone of that article may have been influenced by a very lengthy report published several months earlier by the Rand Corporation, whose title appeared to raise strong doubts about the military effectiveness of China’s armed forces.
The Chinese Military’s Doubtful Combat Readiness The People’s Liberation Army Remains Focused on Upholding Chinese Communist Party Rule, Not Preparing for War
Timothy R. Heath • The Rand Corporation • January 27, 2025 • 15,000 Words
However, after carefully reading that Rand study, I concluded that the title was somewhat misleading. The researcher correctly noted that China gave no indications of preparing to wage war against Taiwan, America, or any other country, and much unlike the U.S. had avoided involvement any military conflicts for the last half-century. But lack of interest in starting wars is quite different than lack of military effectiveness if attacked or sufficiently provoked, and conflating the two probably reflected the ideological climate found at most American think-tanks based upon the influence of their funders.
Finally, the lengthiest and most astonishing think-tank report of all was published just a couple of weeks ago by the Hudson Institute, one of our most unswervingly Neocon research organizations. This book-length study argued that China’s Communist government might be ripe for collapse and casually suggested that American military forces should be prepared for deployment inside China in order to seize crucial military and technological facilities and then reconstruct the government of that enormous country after the downfall of its current regime.
China After Communism Preparing for a Post-CCP China
Miles Yu et al. • The Hudson Institute • July 16, 2025 • 65,000 Words
The blogger quoted a couple of the paragraphs from the executive summary of this remarkable document:
While the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has weathered crises before, a sudden regime collapse in China is not entirely unthinkable. Policymakers need to consider what might happen and what steps they would have to take if the world’s longest-ruling Communist dictatorship and second-largest economy collapses due to its domestic and international troubles.
With chapters written by experts in military affairs, intelligence, economics, human rights, transitional justice, and constitutional governance, this report examines the initial steps that should be taken in the immediate aftermath of the CCP regime’s collapse and the long-term trajectory China might take after a stabilization period. Drawing on historical analysis, strategic foresight, and domain-specific expertise, this anthology describes these challenges as an exercise in possibilities. The different chapters explore how a single-party system collapses in key sectors of the country and how political institutions transform, as well as China’s unique political, economic, and social situation. Taken together, they assess the daunting tasks of stabilizing a long-repressed country after it has collapsed, in addition to the forces shaping China’s future. In so doing, the authors hope to offer policy recommendations for managing the risks and opportunities of a transition.
Having carefully read the entire report, I found it just as astonishing as was suggested by those paragraphs.
Over the last half-century, China has certainly been the world’s most successful major country, experiencing perhaps the highest sustained rate of economic growth in all of human history and now possessing a real economy far larger than that of the U.S.
Indeed, if we exclude the service sector, whose statistics are easily subject to manipulation, China’s real productive economy is now actually larger than the combined total for America, the EU, and Japan, while certainly growing much more rapidly. Meanwhile, America has experienced decades of stagnation, with heavy financialization replacing our once enormous real industrial strength. Moreover, in many technological sectors, China has now become the world leader, and it is near the very top in most of the others.
Earlier this year I published a lengthy comparative analysis of China and America, whose conclusions were hardly favorable to the latter:
American Pravda: China vs. America A Comprehensive Review of the Economic, Technological, and Military Factors
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 13, 2025 • 14,100 Words
The following month I summarized much of this same material in a lengthy interview with Mike Whitney:
One of the main authors of that Hudson Institute report was lawyer and conservative columnist Gordon G. Chang, probably best known as the author of the 2001 book The Coming Collapse of China, and a quarter-century of absolutely contrary real-life trends seems to have hardly changed any of his views.
The Hudson Institute is a leading DC think-tank, quite influential in mainstream political circles, and a report with five co-authors that runs 128 pages must surely carry considerable weight in establishment circles. So when it suggests that the Chinese government is fragile and might soon collapse, those policy makers hostile to China are likely to take such views quite seriously.
Suppose that a leading Chinese think-tank with close ties to the PRC government published a weighty report predicting that America might soon collapse, then went on to argue that Chinese military forces would need to be deployed in our own country to seize our key military and technological assets and also establish a new government organized along Chinese lines. I doubt that most American political leaders or ordinary citizens would view such Chinese proposals with total equanimity, and indeed the blogger quoted a shocked Western pro-China business executive who succinctly summarized some of the striking elements in that Hudson Institute research study:
… which provides detailed operational plans for inducing Chinese regime collapse through systematic information operations, financial warfare, and covert influence campaigns, followed by detailed protocols for U.S. post-collapse management including military occupation, territorial reorganization, and the installation of a political and cultural system vassalized to the U.S.
Rand and Hudson are two of our leading mainstream think-tanks and the New Yorker is one of our most prestigious media outlets. Taken together those major articles and reports could easily convince the ignorant and suggestible ideologues in our government that the Chinese military was weak and the Chinese government fragile and ripe for collapse.
If delusional beliefs regarding the fragility of the Iranian and Russian governments had already led to American assassination attempts against their top leadership, similar reasoning might easily result in targeting those of China as well, especially President Xi Jinping, widely regarded as the strongest Chinese leader in decades. And given all of the recent American assassination projects, the Chinese government might certainly have itself reached such conclusions.
Xi’s surprising absence caused some discussion in the media. I initially paid little attention to this issue, but then some commenter suggested an obvious explanation: Both Xi and Putin were concerned about the possible risk of American assassination.
Brazil is located within the Western Hemisphere, a region under full American military domination. Given the extremely reckless and unpredictable behavior of the American government, with President Trump having publicly threatened to assassinate Iran’s top leader just a couple of weeks earlier, both China and Russia may have believed that some risks should best be avoided.
Suppose an errant missile struck down an incoming presidential plane, with no conclusive means of proving the source, or an aircraft were destroyed by some more sophisticated methods. Over the years, Xi and Putin had both met on numerous occasions with Iranian President Raisi, with whom they had developed an excellent working relationship, and surely his 2024 death in a mysterious helicopter crash while returning from a foreign trip would have concentrated their minds.
Any such “conspiratorial” explanation has naturally been entirely avoided by the media. For example, a lengthy article late last month in the Wall Street Journal described how Xi had drastically reduced his foreign travel over the last year or so, noting that a China-EU summit originally set for Brussels was moved to Beijing after the Chinese explained that Xi had no plans to visit Europe. Since the end of 2024, Xi’s only foreign travels have been to Russia and to several countries in South-East Asia. Unlike Europe or Latin America, none of these countries nor the travel routes to reach them would be likely venues for serious American attempts at assassination.
When major countries develop a well-deserved reputation for assassinating the leaders of other major countries, often even doing so in the midst of international negotiations, such behavior may obviously have serious consequences. Back in 2017, President Xi was quite willing to visit Mar-a-Lago for face-to-face negotiations with President Trump, but I very much doubt the Chinese leader will be taking any trips to our own country in the foreseeable future.
In 1943, the U.S. Army Air Force began flying bomber missions deep into Germany. Bomber Generals thought they didn’t need fighter escorts because their bombers could defend themselves. The Army Air Force had substantial numbers of long-range P-38 fighters but sent them to the Pacific and Africa so they could prove fighter escorts were unneeded. This was a disaster as bombers were slaughtered. The US Army Air Force lost 5,548 heavy bombers during the war and over 50,000 airmen over Europe. The United States 8th Air Force in England lost more men than the U.S. Marine Corps in the Pacific theater.
“’Black Week’: The Darkest Days for the US Army Air Forces”; John Curatola; The National WWII Museum; October 5, 2023; https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war…
“Command Decision”; 1948; https://ok.ru/video/278508866211 ; great movie, but the plot was spun into a lie that bloody bomber missions were needed to prevent the production of far superior German jet fighters. These raids were failed attempts to cripple regular fighter production.
Despite Israel’s formidable military capabilities in the Middle East, it undoubtedly cannot establish regional dominance—a status implying absolute superiority over all adversaries and the voluntary submission of neighboring states.
Netanyahu’s bold claims of transforming Israel into an unshakable regional ruler sound like a fantasy detached from reality. His ambitions are not strategic calculations but dangerous illusions, ridiculed by history and debunked by the very logic of Middle Eastern conflict.
The Bloody March of the “Invincible” Hegemon
After Hamas’s successful October 2023 attack, Israel responded with relentless slaughter, attempting to erase Palestinians from the political map. Human rights advocates and experts unanimously labeled it genocide. Then, it methodically decimated Hezbollah’s leadership in Lebanon—through airstrikes, exploding phones, and other covert warfare tactics. It bombed Yemen to suppress the Houthis and struck Syria under the pretext of destroying weapons, though in reality, it sought to crush any resistance to its influence.
Then came Iran’s turn. Israel’s unprovoked attacks were not just strikes on nuclear facilities, but an attempt to:
– Sabotage U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, leaving Tehran with no diplomatic options.
– Decapitate Iran’s elite—killing generals, scientists, and diplomats to cripple its ability to respond.
– Drag the U.S. into a major war, shifting the burden of its adventurism onto Washington.
At best, Israel hoped to push the Iranian regime to collapse. But all of Netanyahu’s “bold strategist” efforts ended in obvious failure. The Iranian people rallied even more firmly around their government, and hatred for Israel’s bandit-like actions only grew. This reaction among ordinary Iranians is widely reported by diplomats and global media, including in the U.S. The exception is the Israeli press, which Netanyahu has heavily censored under an endless-seeming wartime regime.
Hegemon? Or Hostage to His Own Delusions?
If each of these actions brought temporary success, does that mean Israel has become the region’s unshakable master? If a hegemon is a force no one can resist, does Israel fit that definition? And crucially: Should neighbors bow their heads, acknowledging its “natural” superiority, as small nations do before great powers?
Reality only laughs in response. Israel’s might is not a sign of dominance, but a desperate attempt to suppress growing resistance. Each new attack breeds new enemies; each bombing creates new avengers. Netanyahu’s hollow “victories” are Pyrrhic—they don’t consolidate power but only rock the boat he himself sits in.
The idea of Israeli hegemony is a doomed utopia. Because true strength lies not in aerial terror but in the ability to negotiate—something neither Israel nor its prime ministers, including the latest failure Netanyahu, have ever learned.
Israel and the Illusion of Regional Dominance
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has demonstrated an impressive ability to survive and strengthen amid hostile surroundings. Relying on cutting-edge military technology and unwavering Western (especially U.S.) support, the country has gained significant influence in the Middle East. Yet, the dream of regional leadership remains unattainable—not due to a lack of strength but because of a lack of legitimacy, recognition from neighbors, and a coherent strategic vision.
With a $27.5 billion budget, Israel boasts one of the world’s most powerful militaries: a nuclear arsenal, advanced missile defense, elite special forces, and cyber warfare units. Its per capita military spending is among the highest globally, and overseas operations—like assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists or striking Syrian facilities—showcase its formidable capabilities.
But military might does not translate into political dominance. Operation Rising Lion in 2025—a joint U.S.-Israel strike on Iran’s nuclear sites—exemplified this paradox. Despite tactical success (temporarily destroying centrifuges in Natanz and the underground Fordow facility), the operation was a strategic failure. Iran not only quickly repaired the damage but, as Tehran announced, accelerated its nuclear program, enriching uranium to 90%. Meanwhile, Iran retaliated with effective missile strikes on Israeli bases and the U.S. Al Udeid base in Qatar.
Why Can’t Israel Become a Hegemon?
Several glaring reasons stand out:
The Demographic Time Bomb – The Arab population within Israel and in occupied territories (Gaza, West Bank) continues to grow, threatening the Jewish character of the state.
The Palestinian Wound – The unresolved Palestinian issue undermines Israel’s international reputation and unites the Arab world in solidarity with Palestinians. Even Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has repeatedly emphasized this.
Geopolitical Isolation – Even normalization with the UAE and Bahrain hasn’t changed the fundamental reality: the Arab world is unwilling to accept Israel as a legitimate regional leader. Powers like Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia see it as a rival, not a partner.
No Unifying Ideology – Unlike Iran’s “Shiite resistance” or Turkey’s Ottoman nostalgia, Israel lacks a regional vision. Its policy revolves around security and deterrence, not constructive engagement.
True hegemony requires not just military superiority but voluntary recognition. Yet, Israel remains an “outsider” in the region—due to its occupation of Palestinian lands, blockade of Gaza, and reliance on U.S. support, which is seen as dependence on an external power. Even technological marvels like the Iron Dome don’t negate its vulnerability to mass rocket attacks. And with 30% of its military budget coming from U.S. aid, its strategy is predictable.
Israel’s “security through superiority” approach has reached its limit. Operations like *Rising Lion* only accelerate arms races and consolidate enemies. Without a political settlement with Palestinians and normalized relations with neighbors, Israel is doomed to remain a fortress—not a leader.
The Alternative?
Shifting from intimidation to diplomacy. Creating regional security structures where Israel is an equal partner, not an occupier. For now, Netanyahu’s dream of hegemony remains a utopia—because force can be bought, but respect cannot.
Israel will not become a hegemon because it lacks not just military power but legitimacy. Its security depends not on strength but on political reconciliation with neighbors, including Palestinians. The world must realize: instead of blind support for Israel, diplomacy and dialogue are needed. Only this can break the cycle of violence and achieve lasting peace.
Viktor Mikhin, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Middle East Expert
Some well-meaning people (as below) are keen to point to ‘anti-Zionism’ in Haredi communities in occupied Palestine. The hope is that they might help to dismantle the Jewish state from within. But we should beware the false hope that this brings.
The anti-Zionism which was almost universally shared by Hasidic groups in 1947 has been subject to considerable dilution and indeed reversals. Some groups like the Bobov maintain a refusal to serve in the IDF and appear to have been more militant in this than the other large Hasidic sects.
On the other hand, the three largest Hasidic courts: Ger, Belz, and Viznitz, have, in July 2024 “instructed their members to continue” to “report at the enlistment centers after receiving pre-draft evaluation orders.” All four of these sects have adherents who live in illegal settlements. There is even a Bobov cluster in the illegal settlement of Beitar Illit, and the Bobov Rebbe has recently made a “triumphant visit to Israel”.
In addition Ger, Belz and Viznitz are closely associated with two ultra-orthodox parties the Agudat Yisrael, which is half of a coalition known as United Torah Judaism, which is, in turn, part of the current Netanyahu regime. We can safely conclude that all of these notionally anti-Zionist sects are Jewish supremacists.
Meanwhile one of the largest groups known as Chabad, has shifted from an anti-Zionist position in the 1920s to become an ultra-Zionist sect which has enthusiastically taken part in the genocide in Gaza. This sect, has over 5,000 branches worldwide, and more than 150 outposts in the UK.
But surely there are ‘genuine’ Anti-Zionist Hasidim?
Well, the main candidate for that accolade is the Satmar.
Satmar is the largest Hasidic sect that still professes to be anti-Zionist. However, after the launch of Al Aqsa Flood one of the leaders (there are two rival factions) of Satmar condemned the participation of the anti-Zionist group Neturei Karta in demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinians. Neturei Karta appears to take some inspiration from the previous Satmar Rebbe, but there are apparently some contradictions within the Satmar camp. Among the rebukes from Rabbi Yekusiel Yehuda Teitelbaum, one of the two Satmar Rebbes, based in Williamsburg, New York, was: “Unfortunately, we see how far they have strayed from the path… They are walking around the world together with the Arabs, with those who shout without any shame and support the murders, they walk with them in broad daylight with the Shtreimel and the gown and shout together with the haters of Israel and murderers of souls. This is a terrible desecration of the name of heaven, to strengthen murderers in the name of the Holy Torah and in the name of heaven.” Obviously, the anti-Zionism of this strand of Satmar, at least, does not extend to supporting the liberation of Palestine or support for Palestinian resistance.
Bibi thinks he’s accelerating towards some kind of victory. But he’s actually zooming off a cliff. As the reality of the Gaza genocide sinks in, the people of the region, and the world, will find a way to excise the Zionist cancer from West Asia and the planet. It could come through the ongoing Resistance strategy of imposing death from a thousand cuts, as the world collectively withdraws support from Israel and throws its weight behind Palestine. But we might also see nukes going off in Occupied Palestine, or the release of biological weapons targeting Ashkenazi Jews. By now, people are angry enough to try just about anything.
Israel’s genocide strategy is accelerationist in the sense of “let’s make things worse in hopes that it will somehow magically make things better.” The original accelerationists were left-wingers who wanted to intensify the ravages of techno-capitalism in hopes of provoking revolution. In recent decades the alt right has appropriated the concept to mean “let’s burn down society so our ethnonationalist utopia can emerge from its ashes.” Israel, for its part, wants to burn down West Asia, and with it the world, so Biblical prophecy can be fulfilled as a Jewish Messiah arises to rule the world from a rebuilt blood sacrifice temple in Jerusalem.
This kind of millennialist messianic madness isn’t new. Historian Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium gives us the pro-Jewish version, casting Christians as the main villains and Jews as innocent scapegoats. But since Christian and Muslim millenarianists agree that Jesus, the Prince of Peace and avatar of pure spirituality and universalist brotherly love, is the one true Messiah, whereas Jews loathe Jesus and yearn for a bloody Jewish conquerer to subjugate, exterminate, and enslave all non-Jews under a global Jewish dictatorship, it’s easy to understand why the Jewish version of messianic millenarianism is even more toxic than the Christian cults analyzed by Cohn.
About 375 years ago, Zionism was born in the ravings of the lunatic satanist Shabtai Tzvi as polished by his publicist, Nathan of Gaza. Together, the pair convinced the plurality of European, North African, and West Asian Jews to at least provisionally accept Tzvi as the Messiah who would lead them to conquer the Holy Land and following that, the world. While Tzvi’s career culminated ignominiously in the propitious year 1666, when he led his followers into nominal conversions to Islam in a successful attempt to convince the Ottoman sultan to spare his life, Tzvi’s brand of satanic antinomian Zionism sparked the movement that unleashed genocide on Palestine in 1948 and is accelerating it today.
Tzvi’s movement crashed and burned. Unsurprisingly, it elicited “persecution” of Jewish communities. (Naturally enough, Christian and Muslim rulers were wary of maniacal outbreaks of Jewish fanaticism, especially since the fanatics’ goal was to conquer and exterminate Christians and Muslims and enslave the survivors.)
There have been countless similar cases of Jewish excesses leading to “persecutions.” When Jewish predation (or parasitism if you will) reaches a certain point, the victims have nothing to lose and rise up in pogroms. If usurers who are also tax collectors and blackmailers and sellers of alcohol, drugs, and whores reduce whole communities to penury, those communities have been known to respond, naturally enough, with torches and pitchforks. Throw in the minoritarian but very real practice of black magic using the blood of Christian children, among other abominations, and you have a perfect blueprint for becoming the world’s most unpopular minority.
When Bibi’s genocidal plan to conquer West Asia river-to-river fails, and Jews return to the status they have always enjoyed (barring a brief post-World War II interlude) as the most hated people on the planet, there will doubtless be wailing and gnashing of teeth. But maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe tribalist Jews are actually masochists who love being hated, and who torment the goyim precisely so they can find themselves “persecuted.” That’s what one of my favorite ex-Israelis, Alon Mizrahi, suggests in his latest Substack note:
In case you were wondering what the Israeli plan was, let me share with you that plan in great detail: it doesn’t exist.
There is no Israeli plan. There is no future arrangement they seek to achieve, or a finite situation.
Their plan is to keep escalating until they are forced to stop either by a devastating war, crippling sanctions, internal collapse, or a civil war (preferably: all at once).
That is the plan. Believe me: this, and only this, is the plan.
–
Zionists are notoriously braindead, souldead, and deluded, but they know that they cannot take over the Middle East and subjugate all of humanity to their rule, which is the only way they could censor ‘criticism of Israel’ and contain resistance forever. They know it’s impossible (unless god steps in and intervenes on their psychopathic behalf).
Their plan is not to achieve this; the plan is to die or get arrested trying. It is not a plan, but a yearning that cannot be controlled to fail in something big and then mourn the destruction and failure, like Ashkenazi Jews love to do so much.
They made mourning and complaints against humanity the center of their culture and identity, and that’s precisely the mental space they want to return to. This is the only space where they will feel safe and at home: when they are hated and everything they built has been destroyed. For them, a scenario like this is the ultimate proof that they are really god’s chosen.
I know it sounds psychotic, and it is. Nevertheless, that’s the collective yearning: to try big, to fail big, and to fall back to the comforting sense of persecution and hate.
–
This is why they’re doing all these counterintuitive things (from a self-preservation point of view). They want to be stopped. They long to be vilified and hated. They relish that hatred. It comforts and soothes them. When they are hated, in their mind, they become eternal Jews, fulfilling the decrees of an ancient Jewish existence.
They don’t hate being hated. They love it. Once you realize this, things will start making sense to you.
–
God bless Alon Mizrohi for escaping from the Israeli prison, and the Jewish-tribalist mind-prison. Like Gilad Atzmon and Miko Peled, he’s living proof that being born Jewish in Israel doesn’t necessarily prevent a person from uttering prophetic truths.
On 19 July, the Mail on Sunday revealed that Inter-Mediate, a shadowy firm founded by Jonathan Powell, now National Security advisor to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, brokered the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Damascus and London.
This included a heavily publicized meeting between UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Syria’s self-appointed President Ahmad al-Sharaa, two weeks earlier. The outlet also exposed how the British state-funded Inter-Mediate operates a dedicated office in Syria’s Presidential Palace.
Britain’s opposition Conservative party has demanded a formal inquiry into Powell’s use of Inter-Mediate “to run back channels to terrorist groups” and the conflict of interest created by his unelected role.
As Starmer’s national security advisor – described as wielding “more influence over foreign policy than anyone in government after the prime minister himself” – Powell operates entirely outside parliamentary accountability. A Whitehall source told the Mail on Sunday:
“These are essentially outsourced spies and spooks undertaking ‘back channel’ discussions with political leaders and armed groups to reach negotiated settlements.”
Terrorists to technocrats
Inter-Mediate’s central role in assisting former Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader Sharaa’s rise to power in Damascus was first revealed in May by Independent Arabia. This followed disclosures from former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford (2011 – 2014), that in 2023 a British “non-governmental organization” sought his personal assistance in transforming HTS – in particular Sharaa, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad Julani when he was an ISIS chief – from “terrorists” into politicians. While Ford did not name Inter-Mediate, Independent Arabia did – and mainstream media ignored it entirely.
Now that Inter-Mediate’s embedment with Damascus’s post-Bashar al-Assad government has been confirmed, western media has belatedly begun describing Syria’s new rulers as comprised of barbarous extremists linked to Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Yet few are willing to interrogate the far graver implications of a British intelligence-linked firm enjoying intimate access to Syria’s seat of power – and the extraordinary leverage that affords London over the HTS-led administration and its leadership.
Compounding this is the deeply suspicious timing: Powell assumed his advisory role just days before HTS violently seized Damascus. Starmer immediately declared that Assad’s ouster heralded “a more active role” for Britain in West Asia and dispatched top diplomats to meet with HTS officials. The media acknowledged these summits were completely illegal, as HTS was a proscribed terror group under British law.
Despite the occupation state routinely executing highly destructive airstrikes against government and military infrastructure since former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s fall, HTS appears undeterred. We are thus left to ponder whether the Al-Qaeda-rooted government’s brutal internal repression, and concerted inaction over Tel Aviv’s military bombardments and incursions into its territory, are ultimately directed by MI6.
‘Deny responsibility’
Inter-Mediate’s website offers few clues to its real agenda. It lists a cadre of former western diplomats and military officials as staff and board members, and vaguely claims to facilitate “backchannels with hard-to-reach conflict actors” where “direct negotiations are impossible or inadvisable.” It boasts of creating space for political solutions “in some of the world’s most intractable conflicts.”
Syria was quite some “intractable conflict” – not least because Assad’s “popular” and sovereign government steadfastly refused to relinquish power to mass-murdering CIA and MI6-backed foreign elements that invaded the country in 2011.
Leaked emails of former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton indicate Inter-Mediate was active in Damascus from the first stages of the foreign-fomented “crisis.” In March 2012, Clinton’s senior aide Jake Sullivan contacted her, announcing Powell had “launched a new NGO that has already initiated some very interesting work below the radar.”
An attached email from Powell noted Inter-Mediate had “[set] up secret channels between insurgents and governments” in several countries, was preparing to start work in Burma, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, and sought to pitch its services to senior US State Department officials.
He added his firm “work[ed] closely” with the British Foreign Office, National Security Council, and MI6. At this time, it was well-understood in Washington that Syrian “insurgents” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda, among other ultra-extremist entities.
The evidence suggests Inter-Mediate’s relationship with the forces that became HTS dates back over a decade, and that London’s project to replace Assad with a compliant Al-Qaeda-linked regime has been in motion ever since. Its operational office inside Syria’s palace is not a recent development, but the culmination of years of quiet penetration. Nor is Inter-Mediate the only British intelligence cutout embedded in West Asia’s corridors of power.
As The Cradle has previously documented, Lebanon’s security and intelligence apparatus is heavily penetrated by the British, to the extent that Foreign Office contractor Torchlight maintains a dedicated office within Beirut’s Military Intelligence Directorate.
Leaked documents related to this infiltration noted London’s presence was a highly effective means of “rapidly developing relationships of trust” with the agency’s high-ranking staff, and ensuring they were “unlikely to say ‘no’” to further involvement of British personnel and technology in the Directorate’s sensitive operations.
Other leaked files related to the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), a British clone of the US CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), reveal the organization maintains offices in Lebanon’s parliament building.
An official review of WFD’s activities explicitly states its “central rationale” is to conduct “controversial” projects overseas that London “could not or would not wish to undertake directly,” therefore limiting “damage to official government-to-government relationships,” while “avoiding the danger” of “British government presence [being] interpreted as foreign interference.”
“[WFD’s] arm’s length relationship … provides the [Foreign Office] with the best safeguard … the less the [Foreign Office] seeks to exercise control the more it can deny responsibility … The Foundation provides a necessary and valuable instrument over and above those which the [Foreign Office] can provide for itself.”
Powell’s warpath
The Mail on Sunday’seditorial accompanying the Inter-Mediate exposé highlights another key concern: the outsized power wielded by former UK prime minister Tony Blair-era figures in Starmer’s government. Powell is not alone – Peter Mandelson, now the UK’s ambassador to Washington, is another. The editorial bluntly states that these Blairites “are the real forces in British diplomacy,” while Lammy plays “an effectively ceremonial role,” executing policies scripted by Powell and others behind the scenes.
While the pair were said to maintain “formidable private networks they are able to mobilize” to influence British government action and policy, “some within Downing Street” were reportedly “growing increasingly wary about the influence of these smooth Blairites.” As one official put it, “at what point does ‘experience’ and ‘guidance’ become ‘control’?”
That question also applies to Inter-Mediate’s relationship with the new Syrian government. Is Powell, via his company and government position, finally realizing Blair’s long-standing dream of reshaping West Asia in Britain’s image? The former prime minister’s Institute for Global Change has openly called for regime change in Iran and boasts of nurturing anti-government networks across the region.
Powell’s history is instructive. In September 2002, he pressed the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee to exaggerate Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to justify the illegal Anglo-American invasion six months later.
He believed it a “bit of a problem” that the assessment did not conclude Iraq posed an urgent, imminent military threat, insisting its wording be changed to ensure maximum impact on media reporting, and public perceptions. A recent profile of Powell suggests he remains committed to Blair’s mission:
“The historical record shows [Powell] had doubts about Iraq’s WMDs, but thought Saddam Hussein had to go ‘because he was a ruthless dictator suppressing his people’. This was, as Blair named it, ‘liberal interventionism’, which called for the west to ‘get actively involved in other people’s conflicts’ … [Powell] has the same instincts today. After Iraq, and Afghanistan, he still wants to save the world.”
If Starmer’s unelected security chief is indeed scripting foreign policy through Inter-Mediate, then Britain is no longer merely meddling in West Asia but is also governing it by proxy. And if Powell’s loyal Al-Qaeda client in Damascus is the new face of “liberal interventionism,” it is clear the colonial playbook has not just returned – it never left.
By Miko Peled | MintPress News | September 20, 2021
One of the great tragedies of Palestine is that almost every day there is a commemoration of one massacre or another, the death of a child or destruction of a home or village, leading one to think that the Palestinian narrative is one of death and destruction, which is what Israel wants people to think. But the truth is that this is not the case. The Palestinian narrative is one of a glorious history with periods of great sadness and tragedy. It is the Zionist story that is full of killing, stealing and destruction and not, as they try to sell it, one of creation and growth.
September 16, 2021, marked 39 years since the massacres at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. As people remember and mourn the thousands of unarmed civilians who were butchered and the countless who survived suffering terrible injuries and emotional scars, we must also remember the man that stood behind this bloodbath.
This was a man whose complicity even the Israeli authorities could not ignore, the former general and renowned war criminal Ariel Sharon. And although he was momentarily penalized and banished from politics, he very quickly returned, and for a quarter of a century, he was the most powerful and influential man in Israeli politics. … continue
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William Maloney and Joe Davidson were working at Maloney’s realty office on the morning of November 2nd, 1994 when three men in a white late 70’s model Monte Carlo pulled into the parking lot. One man remained in the vehicle while the other two got out and went inside.“The theory there was that Timothy McVeigh was searching for a place to perhaps have a hide-out and Robert Jacquez was utilized to perhaps obtain property in Missouri. It’s very remote terrain, it’s terrain familiar — there are a lot of right wing groups around there, from Elohim City Oklahoma to other groups in Arkansas to the Ozarks in Missouri which would be the perfect type spot.”
Unlike the other sketches produced for the task force, this one was not widely circulated and appears to convey a level of sensitivity and significance that is uncommon in the bombing case. One source told this writer that Associated Press Washington Bureau Chief John Solomon interviewed a senior Customs Agency rep at OKC for the investigation, and that he told Solomon that the FBI were not real concerned about John Doe #2 reports, but they were really worried about John Doe #3, or “Robert Jacquez,” getting media attention. This is obvious enough from the bureau’s unusual disclaimer that is plastered all over November 1995 teletypes concerning the suspect. The notion that Jacquez could have been connected to some sort of sensitive operation comes to mind when you consider the unusual level of secrecy surrounding the sketch, and FBI investigators’ worry over the suspect receiving media attention.
The Manhunt for “John Doe #3”
The November 1st teletype also makes additional comparisons between the “Jacquez” suspect’s distinctive jungle boots—described in detail by Bill Maloney—and the distinctive boots worn by bank robber Richard Guthrie when he purchased a getaway vehicle in Alton, Illinois in December of ’94.
Aletho News 