On 23 August 2025, award-winning science journalist Robert Whitaker, founder of the evidence-based Mad in America website, published a very important article:
I summarize here Bob’s detailed article, adding my own thoughts and explanations about the issues.
On July 21, the FDA convened a panel on antidepressants in pregnancy, with a focus on possible harms to the fetus from exposure to the drugs.
The panelists’ brief presentations, and their plea for informed consent, did not sit well with medical organizations. They issued statements denouncing the panel as biased and misinformed; declared that the evidence showed that SSRIs and SNRIs are effective and safe treatments for prenatal depression; and claimed that the real concern was untreated depression. Major media echoed uncritically this flawed and erroneous expert consensus in their reporting on the panel.
The professional organizations betrayed the public’s right to know. They were putting their guild interests – protecting their prescribing practices and belief in the efficacy and lack of harms of antidepressants – ahead of their duty to provide an honest basis for informed consent. As detailed below, they misled the media, and the media in turn misled the public, in both cases very seriously so.
One of the panelists, Michael Levin, concluded that since serotonin is important for embryonic development, “manipulating its use by cells with SSRIs is very, very likely to cause certain kinds of defects.”
Animal experiments have proved him right. Fetal exposure to SSRIs leads to altered brain development, numerous risks to fetal health, and deficits in behavior after birth. At birth, fetal SSRI exposure in rodents is associated with low birth weight, persistent pulmonary hypertension, increased risk of cardiomyopathy, and increased postnatal mortality. After birth, such exposure is associated with delayed motor development, reduced pain sensitivity, disrupted juvenile play, fear of new things, and a higher vulnerability of affective disorders (such as anhedonia-like behavior). These behaviors are regarded as signs of anxiety and depression in animals.
With the animal studies showing also an increased risk for miscarriage, pre-term birth, and congenital malformations, the first wave of studies in humans focused on these concerns, in addition to low birth weight and persistent pulmonary hypertension. This research produced an abundance of findings that the risk of such adverse events is elevated with fetal exposure to SSRIs in comparison to healthy controls.
A fair number of studies tell of how in utero exposure to SSRIs alters brain development in humans and lead to other harms. For example, a study by Kaiser Permanente of Northern California of 82,170 pregnant women showed that if the depression was treated with counseling, the risk of a pre-term delivery was reduced by 18%, whereas treatment with an antidepressant increased it by 31%. In both cases, there was a dose-response relationship.
Another harm is the neonatal abstinence syndrome, which is common, e.g. it occurred in 30% of 60 newborns exposed to SSRIs in utero. Researchers have published an extensive list of abstinence symptoms, which includes jitteriness, poor muscle tone, weak cry, abnormal crying, respiratory distress, seizure, abnormal behavior, sleep abnormalities, poor feeding, vomiting, uncoordinated sucking, and lethargy. In a study using the World Health Organization’s database for adverse drug effects, researchers classified 84% of the reported abstinence symptoms as serious.
The Doubt Industry at Work
The rodent studies, which were not confounded, clearly showed how fetal exposure to SSRIs regularly leads to maladaptive adult rodents. Correspondingly, in comparison with healthy controls, studies of children exposed in utero to SSRIs show an elevated risk of getting diagnosed with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and affective disorders.
In a 2025 study, one of the FDA panelists, Jay Gingrich, and colleagues reported that prenatal exposure to SSRIs leads to a hyperactive amygdala both in mice and humans, which made both species more fearful and depressed as adolescents. Maternal depression could not explain these effects. Gingrich said at the FDA hearing that “these kids look pretty normal throughout early childhood, and then when they hit adolescence, their rates of depression really started to go up, which is what we see in our mouse studies.”
Bob Whitaker explains that studies in humans have produced inconsistent results. This is not surprising. When research results are threatening for a profession, researchers with guild or financial conflicts of interest always produce an avalanche of substandard studies casting doubt on the issues or denying them.
Maternal depression is known to confer developmental risks on children, and these researchers have therefore sought to account for this confounding factor by using statistical adjustments. Statistical adjustments are highly bias-prone, and in many of the studies Bob reviewed, the authors had not described their approach in sufficient detail nor whether the factors they controlled for had been published in a protocol before they looked at the data. Such studies can therefore be “torture your data till they confess” exercises.
A commonly used adjustment method is logistic regression, but what is little known is that the more baseline variables we include in a logistic regression, the further we are likely to get from the truth. This was documented in an excellent PhD thesis.
The Howl of Outrage
The same day the FDA had its panel meeting, or a couple of days later, leading medical organizations spread seriously misleading information.
The American Psychiatric Association wrote to the FDA that it was “alarmed and concerned by the misinterpretations and unbalanced viewpoints shared by several of the panelists…This propagation of biased interpretations at a time when suicide is a leading cause of maternal death within the first postpartum year could seriously hinder maternal mental health care. The inaccurate interpretation of data, and the use of opinion, rather than the years of research on antidepressant medications, will exacerbate stigma and deter pregnant individuals from seeking necessary care.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists stated that the panel was “alarmingly unbalanced” and did not adequately acknowledge the harms of untreated mood disorders in pregnancy. They claimed that SSRIs in pregnancy are a critical tool in preventing the potentially devastating effects of untreated anxiety and depression.
They also claimed that “Robust evidence has shown that SSRIs are safe in pregnancy and that most do not increase the risk of birth defects. However, untreated depression in pregnancy can put our patients at risk for substance use, preterm birth, preeclampsia, limited engagement in medical care and self-care, low birth weight, impaired attachment with their infant, and even suicide…Unfortunately, the many outlandish and unfounded claims made by the panelists regarding SSRIs will only serve to incite fear and cause patients to come to false conclusions that could prevent them from getting the treatment they need.”
The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine stated they were “alarmed by the unsubstantiated and inaccurate claims made by FDA panelists concerning maternal depression and the use of SSRI antidepressants during pregnancy” and strongly supported the use of SSRIs.
They claimed that “Untreated or undertreated depression during pregnancy carries health risks, such as suicide, preterm birth, preeclampsia, and low birth weight…the available data consistently show that SSRI use during pregnancy is not associated with congenital anomalies, fetal growth problems, or long-term developmental problems.”
The National Curriculum in Reproductive Psychiatry was deeply concerned that some panelists “presented misleading or stigmatizing information about psychiatric treatment during pregnancy, undermined the scientific consensus, and failed to appropriately center the well-being of pregnant individuals.”
As shown in Whitaker’s article, virtually all statements were false, but they were propagated and enforced in major media, which did not investigate the issues at all.
The Los Angeles Timeswrote that the panel spread misinformation about the drugs’ use in pregnancy and that healthcare providers had said that the risks of not treating depression in pregnancy far outweigh those of SSRIs.
The New York Timeswrote that the panel was alarmingly biased against antidepressant use and did not adequately acknowledge the harms of untreated perinatal mood disorders in pregnancy.
NBC News accused the panel of promoting misinformation, “according to several psychiatrists who tuned into the meeting.”
National Public Radio talked about misinformation alarming doctors and claimed that
Well-controlled studies had not found the risks highlighted by the FDA panel.
Total Moral Meltdown
Those who spread misinformation were professional organizations riddled with conflicts of interest and – to paraphrase Lenin – their useful idiots among journalists.
There is nothing that hurts like the truth about healthcare. For the unborn child, fetal exposure to SSRIs only provides a tally of harms. Adam Urato, in his remarks at the FDA hearing, put it into a haunting perspective: “Never before in human history have we chemically altered developing babies like this, especially the developing fetal brain, and this is happening without any real public warning. That must end.”
An earlier Mad in America report on prenatal screening for depression showed that task forces set up in the UK, Canada, and the US all struggled to find evidence that screening plus treatment with antidepressants provided any benefit to the mother.
I describe in my freely available books, with numerous references to solid science, what the facts are:
As explained by psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff at the FDA meeting, meta-analyses of placebo-controlled trials have consistently shown that the benefit of treating depression with antidepressants is so small that it lacks clinical relevance. It is therefore impossible that the risks of not treating depression in pregnancy “far outweigh those of SSRIs.”
Antidepressants double the risk of suicide. Depression in pregnancy should therefore be treated with psychotherapy, which will not harm the fetus. The panel members spoke of treating depression with non-drug alternatives but the media did not find this essential information important. In the absurd world of psychiatry, unfortunately, “treatment” is synonymous with drugs.
All the claims above about the wonders antidepressants can achieve for the mother and the newborn are wrong.
Antidepressants are being increasingly used in children and adolescents, although they drive some of them to commit suicide and don’t work for them.
Even the unborn are being harmed on a large scale. Will this madness ever stop?
Dr. Peter Gøtzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, once considered the world’s preeminent independent medical research organization. In 2010 Gøtzsche was named Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen. Gøtzsche has published more than 97 over 100 papers in the “big five” medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine). Gøtzsche has also authored books on medical issues including Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister recently declared unwavering commitment to the vision of a “Greater Israel”. He explicitly links Israel’s future to a project that extends beyond its current borders into neighbouring Arab lands. As the Israeli street has decisively turned towards to the right, the remarks of Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving leader, carried unusual weight. The significance of these remarks was underscored by the US President Donald Trump’s earlier comment that Israel is “too small”; a suggestion that its borders must expand. This is a view that is often reflected in the thinking within decision making circles in Washington.
Regional responses to Netanyahu’s remarks have been swift. Governments condemned his framing of the “Greater Israel” project as both a historic and spiritual mission, calling it a direct assault on their sovereignty and international law. Statements issued whether individually or collectively urged a firm Arab and international response. The most recent Arab League summit, meanwhile, approved the creation of a “Joint Arab Security Coordination Room,” led by Baghdad, to counter terrorism and organised crime. While modest in scope, this move hinted at a growing recognition of the need for collective Arab security mechanisms.
Netanyahu’s declaration underscored a threat that Arab states have long tried to downplay. It is one of three realities. In particular, it highlights the need for a thorough reassessment of the current framework of Arab national security, amid a series of recent developments and shifting regional dynamics.
The second reality is the Israeli strikes against Gaza and Iran, as well as its operations in Lebanon and Syria, which reflect a number of facts. Israel have laid bare the depth of its intelligence and cyber capabilities, which it has used perfectly to conduct espionage and infiltrate the countries of the region. Israel has clearly crossed a red line by killing a huge number of innocent people especially in Gaza, but also in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen. By so doing, it has stripped away any remaining illusions, about its intentions, exposing a policy making elite whose actions reflect a deeply rooted hostility toward Arabs, Muslims and Christians in the region. Israel has also concentrated efforts to weaken these countries, not only by destroying their offensive and defensive militarily capabilities, but also by stoking domestic divisions inside these countries. In Lebanon, the US urged the Lebanese leadership to withdraw Hezbollah’s weapons, potentially igniting a major conflict in the country. Also in Syria, Israel backed the Druze in Suwaida in south Syria, putting them under its protection, and targeting the Syrian military around Suwaida. And in Iran, Israel could not hide its support of any efforts to change the Iranian system. All these facts support the first reality of Netanyahu’s declaration about a “Greater Israel”.
The American and Western commitments to guaranteeing Israel’s position and to supporting its interests in the region, which has been well documented after October seventh war in Gaza is the third reality. Although Western commitment to Israel’s supremacy and dominance in the region is not new, Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf states, are facing escalating threats from Israel. Since their security and military systems remain tethered to the same Western frameworks that guarantee Israel’s dominance, a dangerous paradox has been created. These three dynamics together raise profound questions about the viability of Arab national security itself.
American and Western commitments to guaranteeing Israel’s military edge codified through legislation, strategic agreements, and vast financial assistance have effectively ensured Israeli supremacy. The historical record underscores this pattern. While no formal defence treaty exists between Washington and Tel Aviv, successive crises from the Iran conflict to earlier regional wars have proven that the US actually treats Israel’s security as its own. Agreements dating back to the Camp David Accords in 1979, followed by the 1981 strategic cooperation pact under Ronald Reagan, institutionalised regular military coordination. By 2016, Washington had pledged $38 billion in military aid to Israel over a decade, the largest commitment to any state in US history covering everything from the Iron Dome missile defence to advanced cyber and artificial intelligence systems. In addition, American military stockpiles are even positioned inside Israel for use in times of war.
The European Union, for its part, maintains a formal partnership with Israel. While Brussels occasionally voices criticism of Israeli settlement policies, the EU nevertheless treats Israel as a strategic partner in technology, research, and security. Cooperative projects under the Horizon research program, Galileo satellite systems, and Europol counterterrorism agreements illustrate this entrenched partnership. NATO, too, while Israel is not a member, has made it a central partner in its “Mediterranean Dialogue” since 1994. From naval operations in the Mediterranean to bilateral defence agreements with countries like the UK and Germany, Israel enjoys deep institutional ties that are exceedingly difficult to suspend, even amid humanitarian crises.
By contrast, Arab defence systems remain structurally constrained. From fighter jets to missile defence and cybersecurity, the overwhelming majority of Arab armies rely on American or European suppliers, contracts, and oversight. Agreements with the US often explicitly prohibit the use of weapons against Israel, while ensuring that Israeli forces retain technological superiority. Gulf states’ air defence networks are tied into Western early warning systems, and even Egypt, the second largest recipient of US military aid after Israel, cannot update or deploy certain strategic systems without Washington’s approval. This interdependence not only erodes Arab strategic autonomy but also grants Washington effective veto power over Arab military responses. In addition, Washington’s strategy of pushing Arab-Israeli normalisation, rooted in economic interdependence and security entanglement, has only deepened this dependency, tying both Arab military capacity and economic systems into frameworks that reinforce Israeli superiority.
The current dilemma is stark; Arab security frameworks remain subordinate to Western systems that are legally and strategically bound to protect Israel’s military edge. Netanyahu’s invocation of “Greater Israel” thus appears to be more than rhetoric, it is a direct challenge to Arab sovereignty. For years, Arab governments have sidestepped the Israeli threat in their national security doctrines, focusing instead on other internal or regional challenges. But recent developments from the war in Gaza to attacks on Iranian, Lebanon, and Syria’s sovereignty, and the explicit articulation of expansionist ambitions have pushed this challenge to the forefront. What is at stake now is not simply how Arab states define threats, but also how they can build independent security structures capable of responding to them. Without such a recalibration, Arab national security risks maintaining a framework designed not to defend against external threats, but to sustain a regional order where Israel’s supremacy is guaranteed. Yet the challenge remains daunting. The intersection of three realities, the unveiling of Israel’s expansionist agenda, the unqualified US Western backing for Israel, and the structural dependence of Arab security systems on Western powers creates a near impossible environment for an independent Arab response.
One of the most useful instruments hidden behind the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of “freedom and democracy” was the Central Intelligence Agency, founded on September 18, 1947, as the successor of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Since its creation, the CIA has carried out countless inhumane operations: assassinations, coups, drug trafficking, support for terrorism, conspiracies. The list of its crimes is endless. But among the darkest and most inhumane chapters of its record lie the notorious “mind control” experiments.
The “Scientific Intelligence Office”
The CIA’s so-called “scientific branches,” which were in fact used for these experiments, are infamous for their scandals. These activities, always cloaked under the veil of “national security” and secrecy, began with the Scientific Branch within the Office of Reports and Estimates. On December 31, 1948—barely a year after the CIA’s founding—this branch was merged with the Nuclear Energy Group of the Office of Special Operations to form the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI).
Of course, these units never pursued “scientific discovery” or any purpose for the benefit of humanity. Their main objective was to develop special interrogation techniques and to transform individuals into instruments who could act against their own will, under CIA command.
Between 1949 and 1950, a program code-named Bluebird was initiated for this purpose. Soon after, it evolved into what became known as Artichoke.
CIA code names often had little apparent connection to the projects’ real purpose, but they frequently carried subtle allusions. The transition from “Bluebird”—a symbol of happiness and hope in English—to “Artichoke,” a vegetable with tightly layered leaves, can be read as a metaphor for gradually peeling away the layers of the human mind.
On August 20, 1951, Project Artichoke was officially launched. It would later evolve into MKUltra, the infamous mind control program that remains one of the CIA’s most sinister undertakings.
The project’s core goal was to test whether a human being could be forced to act against their own will—even against their instinct for self-preservation—in order to serve the CIA’s interests. One CIA document framed the mission with chilling clarity:
“Can an individual be made to perform an act of attempted assassination against a prominent political leader, against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?”
This single sentence demonstrates how the United States treated the human mind as nothing more than a laboratory specimen.
Experiments on subjects involved hypnosis, LSD, morphine addiction and withdrawal, isolation, and electroshock. Some of these methods were even tested directly within the agency itself.
The Frank Olson Case
At this point, one must recall the case of Frank Olson, an American scientist working on biological warfare who died under suspicious circumstances.
In the 1950s, Olson was stationed at Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army facility, and was closely connected to the CIA’s secret projects such as Artichoke.
In November 1953, at a CIA retreat in Maryland, Olson was secretly dosed with LSD. Following this, he suffered severe psychological distress and began questioning the morality of his research, expressing unease over the CIA’s clandestine biological and chemical experiments.
His superiors, alarmed by Olson’s state of mind, quickly decided he had become a liability.
On November 24, 1953, Olson was taken to New York’s Statler Hotel under the supervision of CIA officer Robert Lashbrook. In the early hours of November 28, Olson fell to his death from the 13th-floor window of his hotel room. The official explanation: suicide.
Years later, in 1975, the Rockefeller Commission report revealed that the CIA had conducted LSD experiments on humans, identifying Olson as one of the victims. Public pressure forced a new investigation. In the 1990s, an independent autopsy concluded that Olson had suffered blunt-force trauma to the head before his fall—suggesting he may have been pushed.
Beyond Drugs: Biological Warfare
Project Artichoke extended far beyond the use of drugs. The CIA also explored diseases such as dengue fever and experimented with viruses as potential biological weapons—not to kill, but to incapacitate and disable.
The agency focused its inhumane experiments on the most vulnerable groups within the imperial system: “weaker peoples, the uneducated, refugees, prisoners of war, and defectors.”
Other reports revealed even darker ambitions: creating assassins capable of eliminating political figures—or even U.S. officials themselves—under the program’s methods. This chilling fact showed that the imperial machine was willing to turn against its own citizens if necessary.
Although much about the project remains secret, evidence indicates that these experiments were carried out not only on U.S. soil, but also in Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines—mostly targeting “foreigners.”
The populations of countries under U.S. hegemony were turned into guinea pigs for American laboratories.
The Road to MKUltra
The “results” gathered from Artichoke fed directly into the CIA’s later and far more infamous MKUltra program, launched in 1953.
In 1977, CIA Director Stansfield Turner admitted before a joint U.S. Senate committee that the project’s aim was to study “the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior.”
American journalist Stephen Kinzer, who investigated these secret CIA projects, documented that mescaline—later used by the CIA in its experiments—was first tested on humans at Nazi concentration camps such as Dachau.
In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court revealed that the CIA had indirectly funded 162 different secret projects through contracts with universities, research foundations, and similar institutions. At least 80 organizations and 185 researchers were involved—many of them unaware they were working for the CIA.
A Legacy of Inhumanity
Project Artichoke is just one example of the inhumane operations carried out by the United States against the peoples of the world—and even against its own citizens. While U.S. politicians preached “peace” and “democracy” abroad, their intelligence services were busy developing technologies to enslave, control, and even weaponize human beings as assassins.
37 years ago today, on August 17, 1988, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq died in a mysterious plane crash that eliminated nearly every member of Pakistan’s military high command in a single devastating blow. The crash of Pak-1, a specially configured C-130 Hercules aircraft, near Bahawalpur claimed not only the Pakistani president and army chief but also Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, several senior Pakistani military officers, U.S. Ambassador Arnold Lewis Raphel, and Brigadier General Herbert M. Wassom, head of the U.S. military aid mission to Pakistan.
Zia’s Strategic Legacy: Architect of Pakistan’s Nuclear Ambitions
Before examining the mysterious circumstances of his death, Zia’s foreign policy accomplishments merit recognition. During his rule (1978—1988), Zia transformed Pakistan from a middling regional actor into a regional power with the ability to change the strategic landscape. His most significant achievement was shepherding Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program to near-completion while successfully balancing Cold War pressures.
After India conducted its first nuclear test—codenamed Smiling Buddha—on May 18, 1974, Pakistan moved swiftly toward its own weapons program. In response to this move, then-Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto pledged that his nation would not be left behind.
“We will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own,” he declared. Pointing to the existing arsenals of other faith-based powers, he remarked: “There is a Christian bomb, a Jewish bomb and now a Hindu bomb. Why not an Islamic bomb?”
When Zia took power in 1978, he continued the Pakistani ruling class plan to turn the South Asian nation into a nuclear power. In 1987, Zia told the Carnegie Endowment that Pakistan sought sufficient nuclear capability “to create an impression of deterrence.” His bold proclamation that Pakistan was “a screwdriver’s turn away from the bomb” sent shockwaves across intelligence communities worldwide.
The nuclear program’s success vindicated Zia’s vision. Pakistan conducted its first successful nuclear tests on May 28, 1998, becoming the world’s seventh nuclear power.
Pakistan’s Unpredictable Foreign Policy Under Zia
Zia’s foreign policy demonstrated remarkable strategic acumen. As the primary architect of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he successfully convinced initially reluctant Americans to provide massive military aid. CIA veteran Bruce Riedel emphasized that “the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan was run by Zia, not by us.” Zia rejected President Carter’s initial $400 million aid offer as “peanuts” and ultimately secured $3.2 billion in military and economic aid from the Reagan administration.
Simultaneously, Zia pursued deeper ties with China and maintained complex relationships with Iran despite sectarian pressures. During the Iran-Iraq War, Pakistan officially maintained neutrality while covertly supporting Iran. Zia described Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as “a symbol of Islamic insurgence” in 1979 and was one of the first countries to diplomatically recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran. Pakistan reportedly conducted clandestine arms deals that saw Chinese and U.S. weapons sent to Iran, including Silkworm and Stinger missiles originally intended for Afghan mujahideen, which played a decisive role for Iran in the “Tanker War” against Iraq.
The Fatal Flight: August 17, 1988
The events of that fateful day began routinely. Zia had traveled to Bahawalpur to witness a demonstration of the U.S. Army’s M1 Abrams tank at the Thamewali Test Range. After the successful demonstration, organized by Major-General Mahmud Ali Durrani, Zia and his delegation departed by army helicopter before transferring to the specially configured C-130 for the return flight to Islamabad.
At 3:40 PM Pakistan Time, Pak-1 took off from Bahawalpur Airport with thirty people aboard, including 17 passengers and 13 crew members. The aircraft had been equipped with an air-conditioned VIP capsule where Zia and his American guests were seated, walled off from both the flight crew and passenger sections. For two minutes and thirty seconds, the plane rose into clear skies. Takeoff was smooth and without problems.
At 3:51 PM, Bahawalpur control tower lost contact. Witnesses cited in Pakistan’s official investigation reported that the C-130 began pitching “in an up-and-down motion” while flying low before going into a “near-vertical dive” and exploding on impact. The plane crashed with such force that it was blown to pieces, with wreckage scattered over a wide area. All 30 people aboard died instantly.
Brigadier Naseem Khan, flying a French-made Puma helicopter in the vicinity, was among the first to arrive at the crash site. “I walked all around it,” he later recalled. “The plane had crashed at an almost perpendicular angle. I first spotted the cap worn by Gen Wassom, and then Gen Akhtar Rahman’s peaked cap. Then my eye fell upon a dismembered leg, wearing a black sock and black shoe. I suspected it belonged to Gen Zia.”
The Cover-Up Begins
Pakistan’s board of inquiry concluded that the most likely cause of the crash was a criminal act of sabotage within the aircraft. Investigators suggested that toxic gases rendered passengers and crew unconscious, preventing any distress call from being made. Curiously, despite prior C-130 models being fitted with flight recorders, none was found after the crash.
The American response proved equally suspicious. According to former New York Times South Asia Bureau Chief and Council on Foreign Relations member Barbara Crossette’s investigation, Ambassador Robert Oakley and General George B. Crist of CENTCOM rejected an attempt to have the FBI investigate a crash that killed the U.S. ambassador and an American general. Instead, they arranged for the Pentagon and State Department to hold an inter-departmental inquiry. Both officials later apologized to Congress for this decision.
Within two months of the crash, the American government was alone in promoting the theory that mechanical malfunction brought down the plane. On the other hand, most Pakistanis assumed assassination from the start.
Ambassador John Gunther Dean’s Shocking Revelations
The most explosive allegations about Zia’s death came from an unexpected source. John Gunther Dean, who in 1988 served as U.S. Ambassador to India, was a distinguished diplomat with four decades of service who had held more ambassadorships than most envoys. Dean was uniquely positioned to observe the aftermath of Zia’s death, and what he suspected would end his diplomatic career.
Dean believed the plot to eliminate General Zia bore the hallmarks of Israel, specifically the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. His suspicions weren’t outlandish. Dean had personal experience with Israeli operations. Eight years earlier, while serving as Ambassador to Lebanon, Israelis had sought his support for their local projects, assuming that a fellow Jew would be willing to cooperate with them. When Dean rejected those overtures and declared his primary loyalty was to America, an attempt was made to assassinate him.
On August 28, 1980, Dean, his wife, daughter, and son-in-law narrowly escaped serious injury in a motorcade attack in suburban Beirut. The munitions were eventually traced back to Israel. Dean later discovered the Lebanese group claiming responsibility was an Israeli-created front organization used to carry out Mossad terrorist attacks.
Barbara Crossette’s Investigation
In 2005, after 17 years of silence, Dean finally revealed his suspicions to Barbara Crossette, in what would become a landmark investigation. Crossette’s 5,000-word article “Who Killed Zia?” appeared in the prestigious World Policy Journal, published by The New School in New York City under academic Stephen Schlesinger.
Dean’s theory centered on Israel’s alarm over Pakistan’s nuclear program. A few years before his death, Zia took bold steps to develop a nuclear weapons program. Although his primary motive was balancing India’s nuclear arsenal, Zia promised to share such weapons with other Muslim countries, including those in the Middle East. This possibility created major concerns in the Israeli national security community.
According to journalist Eric Margolis, Israel repeatedly tried to enlist India in launching a joint assault against Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. After careful consideration, India declined. This left Israel in a quandary. Zia was a proud military dictator with very close U.S. ties that strengthened his diplomatic leverage. Pakistan was 2,000 miles from Israel and possessed a strong military, making any long-distance bombing raid similar to the 1981 strike against Iraq’s Osirak reactor virtually impossible. That left assassination as the remaining option.
The Diplomatic Retaliation
Dean chose proper diplomatic channels rather than media disclosure. He immediately departed for Washington to share his views with State Department superiors and other top Administration officials. Upon reaching Washington, Dean was quickly declared mentally incompetent, prevented from returning to his India posting, and soon forced to resign. His four-decade career in government service came to a screeching halt.
Dean was sent to Switzerland to “rest” for six weeks before being allowed to return to New Delhi to pack his belongings and resign. He lost his medical clearance and security clearance because of his views about the crash. The accusation of “mental imbalance” effectively ended any investigation into his allegations.
One might expect such explosive charges from such a solid source would provoke considerable press attention, but the story was instead totally ignored and boycotted by the entire North American media. Stephen Schlesinger, who had spent a decade at the helm of World Policy Journal, saw his name vanish from the masthead shortly after publication, and his employment at The New School came to an end.
Ron Unz observed, with some shock, that the article is no longer available on the World Policy Journal website, though the text remains accessible via Archive.org. Even Dean’s detailed New York Times obituary portrayed his distinguished career in flattering terms while devoting not a single sentence to the bizarre circumstances under which it ended.
Zia’s Legacy Lives On
The patterns established during Zia’s era continue influencing Pakistan’s foreign policy today, often creating tension with traditional allies. Pakistan’s integration into China’s Belt and Road Initiative through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor represents the kind of independent alignment that characterized Zia’s approach to international relations.
However, recent attacks on Chinese nationals working in Pakistan have troubling parallels to the covert plans to potentially target Pakistan’s nuclear program in the 1980s. What was envisioned as a secure trade and energy corridor linking Xinjiang to Gwadar has instead become a flashpoint for insurgency. Baloch separatists, particularly the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), have repeatedly targeted Chinese personnel and infrastructure in a campaign to derail Pakistan’s partnership with China.
These efforts have ranged from the killing of nine Chinese engineers at the Dasu Hydropower Project in 2021, to Operation Dara-e-Bolan in January 2024, and the March 2025 hijacking of the Jaffar Express that left 59 dead. Each new CPEC agreement, including six signed in 2023, has provoked fresh waves of violence, underscoring the project’s vulnerability. Far from isolated incidents, this sustained series of attacks highlights how militant groups and their great power patrons see undermining CPEC as central to weakening the Chinese-Pakistani alliance.
Speculation about Western intelligence support for Balochi separatists has gained currency in recent years. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), with documented ties to Israeli intelligence, launched a Balochistan Studies Project in 2025. This initiative highlighted Balochistan’s strategic importance for monitoring Iran’s and Pakistan’s nuclear program, suggesting Israel’s continued interest in leveraging regional ethnic tensions for broader geopolitical objectives.
The Imran Khan Parallel
The 2022 removal of Prime Minister Imran Khan bears striking similarities to the pressures Zia faced for maintaining independent foreign policy positions. Khan’s insistence on neutrality regarding the Russia-Ukraine conflict angered Washington, just as Zia’s support for Iran during the Iran-Iraq War created friction with Reagan administration officials.
The leaked diplomatic cable published by The Intercept revealed that U.S. State Department official Donald Lu explicitly linked Khan’s removal to his Russia policy. “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister,” Lu stated. “Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.”
Khan was removed through a no-confidence vote on April 10, 2022, exactly one month after the threatening meeting with U.S. officials. The parallel with Zia’s fate thirty-four years earlier is unmistakable: Pakistani leaders who pursue independent foreign policies will face tremendous pressure from Washington and could be unceremoniously removed from power.
Iran-Pakistan Relations: From Conflict to Cooperation
The January 2024 tit-for-tat missile exchanges between Iran and Pakistan initially appeared to represent a dangerous escalation. Iran struck Balochi separatist targets in Pakistani Balochistan on January 16, killing two children. Pakistan retaliated two days later, targeting Balochi militants in Iranian Sistan-Baluchestan province, killing nine people including four children.
However, the rapid diplomatic resolution echoed Zia’s approach to managing regional relationships. Within days, both countries agreed to de-escalate through diplomatic channels. The now-deceased Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian visited Pakistan on January 29, 2024, leading to agreements on enhanced security cooperation and intelligence sharing. This swift return to cooperation reflected the kind of pragmatic diplomacy Zia employed during the Iran-Iraq War.
This move also reflects the new challenge of challenging Judeo-American perfidy with respect to the activation of Balochi militants against the security interests of both Iran and Pakistan. Iran and Pakistan have been increasingly alarmed by the growing nexus between Baloch separatists and Israel, which both states see as a direct threat to their security. As Mansur Khan Mahsud of Pakistan’s FATA Research Centre toldThe Cradle, “During the recent 12-day standoff between Iran and Israel, Tehran noticed a tight-knit connection between Baloch separatists and Israel. Their sharing of intelligence with Tel Aviv led to significant human and infrastructure losses for Iran.”
Tehran has gone further with its accusations, directly implicating Tel Aviv and accusing Israel of recruiting and deploying mercenaries through the Balochistan Liberation United Front (BLUF). Abdullah Khan of the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies warned: “Iran is enhancing its ties with Pakistan in the background of militants’ increased alignment with Israel. Their liaison with Tel Aviv would further crystallize when Iran shifts its policies and takes action against BLA and BLF sanctuaries within its territory. India has cultivated strong ties with both groups, enabling it to serve as a bridge to connect them with Israel.”
The Multipolar Reality
Today’s geopolitical environment increasingly resembles the complex balance Zia navigated during the 1980s. Pakistan’s alignment with China and Iran in various contexts, from CPEC to regional security cooperation against Israel’s Judeo-Accelerationist foreign policy, represents the kind of hedging strategy Zia pioneered.
The emergence of a multipolar world order, with China and Russia challenging American hegemony, provides Pakistan with alternatives to complete dependence on Washington. This mirrors the strategic space Zia created by balancing Cold War pressures while pursuing Pakistan’s independent interests.
The emergence of India as a strategic partner for both Israel and the United States creates new pressure points for Pakistan. This convergence of Israeli and American interests regarding Pakistan mirrors the strategic calculations that may have motivated action against Zia in 1988. Pakistan’s continued opposition to India, combined with its growing alignment with China and Iran, places it squarely in opposition to the emerging U.S.-India-Israel axis.
Just as Zia-ul-Haq’s demise brought one era to a close, the unresolved questions surrounding his death continue to haunt Pakistan’s foreign policy decision-making in a world where old alliances fade and new fault lines emerge.
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.
BY WHITNEY WEBB | UNLIMITED HANGOUT | JUNE 10, 2022
This short excerpt from Whitney Webb’s upcoming book “One Nation Under Blackmail” examines an obscure media profile of Leslie Wexner, Jeffrey Epstein’s mentor, from the 1980s that contains disconcerting revelations about Wexner’s personality and his inner world. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
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 