Project Artichoke: 70 Years Ago, CIA Discussed Hiding Mind-Control Drugs in Vaccines
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 24, 2026
In the 1950s, the CIA brainstormed ways to secretly perform mind control on humans — including concealing drugs in vaccines and widely consumed food products, a newly unearthed CIA document revealed. The Daily Mail first reported the story on Monday.
The seven-page document, “Special Research for Artichoke,” is dated April 23, 1952. It describes a series of ideas for how to develop chemicals designed to alter human behavior and thought.
The proposals contained in the document were part of the CIA’s top-secret Project Artichoke, which ran from 1951 to 1956, according to the Daily Mail.
The document, declassified in 1983, recently circulated on social media. However, it was not published in the CIA’s online reading room until last year.
“Some of the suggestions are controversial,” the document states. The proposals included administering drugs in secret as part of a “long-range approach to subjects.”
According to the document:
“This study should include chemicals or drugs that can effectively be concealed in common items such as food, water, coca cola, beer, liquor, cigarettes, etc.
“This type of drug should also be capable of use in standard medical treatments such as vaccinations, shots, etc.”
CIA experimented on humans as part of Project Artichoke
The document also included a special field of research for “bacteria, plant cultures, fungi, poisons of various types, etc.,” that are “capable of producing illnesses which in turn would produce high fevers, delirium, etc.”
This included “species of the mushroom” that “produce a certain type of intoxication and mental derangement.”
Also among the proposals was a suggestion to research “diet” or “dietary deficiencies” on prisoners and on people undergoing interrogation, including using “specially canned foods having elements removed.”
The document included proposals for both short-term and long-term use on humans. Drugs deemed most suitable for long-term use would be designed to produce an “agitating effect (producing anxiety, nervousness, tension, etc.) or a depressing effect (creating a feeling of despondency, hopelessness, lethargy, etc.).”
According to The Daily Mail, the CIA experimented on humans as part of Project Artichoke. The experiments often involved “vulnerable subjects, including prisoners, military personnel and psychiatric patients.” The experiments were usually performed “without informed consent.”
According to Ben Tapper, a Nebraska chiropractor who was included in the “Disinformation Dozen” list in 2021 for questioning vaccine safety, the document exposes “a disturbing reality that government agencies have historically explored ways to manipulate human behavior through chemical and biological means, including concepts involving food and medical interventions.”
“This is not speculation or conspiracy, and it should deeply concern every American who values bodily autonomy and informed consent,” Tapper said.
Precursor to the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control experiments?
The Daily Mail cited CIA documents suggesting that U.S. intelligence agencies were concerned that enemy nations had developed their own mind and behavioral control techniques. This led the agency to prioritize the development of its own methods.
Project Artichoke “served as a precursor” to the MK-Ultra program, which the CIA launched in 1953. That program “broadened mind-altering experiments on a larger scale,” the Daily Mail reported.
Many of the documents related to this type of experimentation were destroyed in 1973, “leaving the full extent of the research and how far it progressed unknown.”
Naomi Wolf, Ph.D., CEO of Daily Clout and author of “The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity,” told The Defender that the documents further confirm a long history of intelligence agency research targeting human thought and behavior.
“Sadly, it’s long been established that our intelligence agencies, and those of our enemies, have sought to alter human consciousness and behavior, often without the subjects’ consent. The existence of MK-Ultra, the clandestine project into which Project Artichoke evolved, is well documented,” Wolf said.
John Leake, vice president of the McCullough Foundation and author of the forthcoming book, “Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions,” said, “Researchers have long suspected that the Church Committee’s revelation of the CIA’s notorious MK-Ultra mind control experiments, mostly using LSD, had the effect of obscuring the agency’s much larger Project Artichoke.”
Leake cited evidence suggesting that a 1951 mass poisoning in Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, in which 250 residents experienced severe hallucinations and seven people died, was a Project Artichoke experiment. The outbreak was officially attributed to contaminated bread from a local bakery.
Leake said the 1952 document is “consistent with the suspicion that the CIA was seeking to discover mind control methods for even large populations.”
In 2024, a Reuters investigation revealed that the CIA operated a secret propaganda campaign involving vaccines in the Philippines. The campaign attacked what the agency perceived as China’s “growing influence” in the country by targeting the Chinese-made Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine through the use of phony online accounts spreading “anti-vax” messaging.
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda,” said the Project Artichoke revelations “make it clear that the CIA has posed an enormous threat to U.S. citizens, in addition to the horrors it unleashes on non-U.S. target governments and populations.”
Project Artichoke wanted to enlist help from Army’s Chemical Warfare Service
The 1952 Project Artichoke document also included a recommendation to involve the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service in the project’s efforts, citing its experience with “exhaustive studies along these lines.”
This proposal bears a resemblance to recent suggestions that COVID-19 — and the response to the pandemic — were coordinated at high levels of government, military and intelligence agencies.
Last year, former pharmaceutical research and development executive Sasha Latypova and retired science writer Debbie Lerman released the “Covid Dossier,” presenting evidence of the “military/intelligence coordination of the Covid biodefense response in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy.”
According to Latypova and Lerman, “Covid was not a public health event” but “a global operation, coordinated through public-private intelligence and military alliances and invoking laws designed for CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) weapons attacks.”
Leake said “it is far from clear” that the Church Committee hearings of 1975 “put a complete end to CIA covert programs.” He cited the possible laboratory development of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as an example.
“The laboratory creation of SARS-CoV-2 with gain-of-function techniques developed at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the U.S. military’s involvement in developing and distributing of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, should … be regarded as possible outgrowths or even continuations of Project Artichoke,” Leake said.
Experts question similarities between Project Artichoke, COVID vaccines
In a Substack post today, epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher drew a potential connection between Project Artichoke and the development of COVID-19 vaccines. Hulscher cited recent peer-reviewed studies that identified the vaccines’ adverse impact on neurological health and “surging rates of cognitive decline.”
Hulscher wrote:
“Disturbingly, since 2021, over 70% of humanity received a neurotoxic agent masquerading as a ‘vaccine.’ The same goals outlined in the CIA document (vaccines/drugs capable of covertly inducing anxiety, depression, and lethargy) are now being observed in COVID-19 vaccinated populations. …
“… If the CIA was secretly discussing covert methods to alter human behavior in the 1950s, it would be no surprise if similar classified projects emerged in the decades that followed.”
A 2024 paper published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry investigated psychiatric adverse events among over 2 million people in South Korea. The study found that “COVID-19 vaccination increased the risks of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, and sleep disorders while reducing the risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.”
A 2025 study published in the International Journal of Innovative Research in Medical Science found “alarming safety signals regarding neuropsychiatric conditions following COVID-19 vaccination, compared to the influenza vaccinations and to all other vaccinations combined.”
This included increases in schizophrenia, depression, cognitive decline, delusions, violent behavior, suicidal thoughts and homicidal ideation.
“The fact that mRNA vaccines were designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and inflame the brain — or at least, they were known to do so, during their manufacture and distribution — should give us pause in light of this news,” Wolf said.
Wolf said the latest revelations, “while shocking, provide all the more reason for us to be critical of opaque, coercive or untested vaccination programs, additives in food and water, and toxic or opaque geoengineering programs.”
Tapper said the revelations reinforce “the urgent need to protect individual liberty, medical freedom, and ethical boundaries in science and public health.”
“The lesson here is simple: vigilance is necessary when governments claim authority over the human body and mind,” Tapper said.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
The Sordid History of the CIA – Part 2
Tales of the American Empire | February 12, 2026
Tales of the American Empire produces short historical videos about the American empire, like the “Sordid History of the CIA”, which is linked below. Most viewers are interested in the American CIA, so this is another episode about videos detailing the evils of the CIA. Some CIA officers work with murderous dictators and criminal organizations involved in the drug trade, arms dealing, and government contract fraud. These evil deeds are sometimes uncovered by the media but receive little attention.
There are YouTube videos that provide insight into covert CIA operations. This is far too much material to condense into a short video. Here is a quick review of more great YouTube videos about the CIA with a link to them below. If the link no longer works, the content has been removed. Two videos from the first part of this series have since disappeared. They may be found on smaller video hosting websites like Rumble, Bitchute, or Odyssey.
• The Sordid History of the CIA • The 1964 CIA Coup in Brazil • The CIA, Money Laundering, and Organized C… • The CIA’s Cocaine Corridor • The U.S. Plan to KILL Its Own Citizens: Op… • The Empire’s 2021 Coup in Guinea • Hector Berrellez (Unreleased Full Interview) • The CIA in Angola • Story of a Whistleblower Jailed for Exposi… • The 1954 CIA Coup in Guatemala • Part 1: Kevin Shipp, CIA Officer Exposes … • The Empire’s 2009 Coup in Honduras • Max Blumenthal exposes CIA-cartel connections • The CIA Every House Democrat Votes Against Defunding A Cutout Of The CIA
The Dissident | January 18, 2026
Recently, U.S. representative Eli Crane introduced a provision into the recent spending package that would cut funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a cutout of the CIA used to advance regime change abroad.
In response to his “amendment to defund NED” every House Democrat, including progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, and Ilhan Omar, voted against it, along with 81 Republicans, slapping down the amendment 291 to 127.
But what is the NED, the CIA cutout that the Washington uniparty rejected ending funding for?
The NED, which was officially created by Ronald Regan in 1984, was described in 1995 by CIA whistleblower Philip Agee as the CIA’s “sidekick” which functioned as “a mega conduit” for “the millions or the tens of millions that are set aside for the meddling in the internal affairs of other countries”.
Allen Weinstein, the head of the NED, boasted in a interview with the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.
Indeed, the NED has been used for America’s “meddling in the internal affairs of other countries”, playing a role in U.S. coups and coup attempts in Venezuela (2002-2025), Haiti (2004), Ukraine (2014), Nicaragua (2018), Bolivia (2019), Belarus (2020), and Romania (2024).
In 2004, the NED provided funding and training for opposition activists who overthrew Haiti’s democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Mother Jones reported at the time when the coup took place, “several of the people who had attended IRI (International Republican Institute, a subsidiary of the NED) trainings were influential in the toppling of Aristide”.
Mother Jones noted, “In 2002 and 2003, IRI used funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to organize numerous political training sessions in the Dominican Republic and Miami for some 600 Haitian leaders. Though IRI’s work is supposed to be nonpartisan — it is official U.S. policy not to interfere in foreign elections — a former U.S. diplomat says organizers of the workshops selected only opponents of Aristide and attempted to mold them into a political force”.
Similarly, in 2002, the NED, through the IRI, helped support a U.S. backed military coup against Venezuela’s elected president, Hugo Chavez, with Mother Jones noting, “In April 2002, a group of military officers launched a coup against Chavez, and leaders of several parties trained by IRI joined the junta.”
In 2015, the NED gave $300,000 to another one of its subsidiaries the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to meddle in Venezuela’s National Assembly elections of 2015 and swing them to the U.S.-backed opposition through “mobilizing a voter database that identified and targeted swing voters through social media”.
As Jacobin Magazine noted , “indeed, in December 2015, the opposition won a majority in the Venezuelan National Assembly for the first time since Chávez came to power in 1999” adding, “the NDI claims credit for the opposition’s success, writing that this strategy ‘ultimately played an important role in their resounding victory in the 2015 election’ and that a ‘determining factor in the success of the coalition in the parliamentary elections of 2015 was a two-year effort prior to the election”.
Along with this, the NED funded opposition politicians such as Maria Corina Machado, who helped certify the 2002 coup, drove a failed referendum against Chavez in 2004, and “was also one of the political architects of La Salida, the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics”, which- as journalist Michelle Ellner noted, “weren’t ‘peaceful protests’ as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it ‘resistance.’”
Similarly, the NED played a role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine against the country’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, which turned Ukraine into a U.S. proxy state.
As journalist Branko Marcetic reported, “Just two months before they (protests in Ukraine) broke out, the NED’s then president, pointing to Yanukovych’s European outreach, wrote that ‘the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.’ In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported ‘played a big role in getting the protest up and running,’ led by a pro-EU opposition figure. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives.”
The protests were eventually taken over by far-right paramilitary groups, who fired sniper shots at protestors in the Maidan square, a massacre that was falsely blamed on Yanukovych’s forces by the U.S. and used to justify supporting his removal and installing a puppet government.
The real motive behind the coup, as Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko put it was because “The West, however, did not want a Ukrainian president who pursued a multi-vector foreign policy; the West needed Ukraine to be anti-Russia, with clear opposition between Kyiv and Moscow. Yanukovych was open to broad cooperation with the West, but he was not willing to confront Russia and China. The West could not accept this ambivalence. The West needed a Ukraine charged for confrontation and even war against Russia, a Ukraine it could use as a tool in the fight against Russia” adding, “this was why Western politicians, diplomats, and civil society representatives actively supported the Euromaidan as a mechanism for overthrowing Yanukovych, even going as far as providing financial support for the ‘revolutionary’ process”
The NED tried and failed to foment another “Maidan” in Nicaragua from 2014-2018, in an attempt to remove the country’s leader, Daniel Ortega, the head of the Sandinista party, which fought the CIA-backed contras in the 1980s.
When riots broke out in the country in 2018, the outlet Global Americans reported that the NED, “laid the groundwork for insurrection” noting that, “Since 2014, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), … has spent $4.1 million on projects in Nicaragua” adding, “it’s becoming more and more clear that the U.S. support has helped play a role in nurturing the current uprisings.”
The uprising was not peaceful protests but a violent NED backed coup attempt. Journalist John Perry, who reported on the coup attempt from the ground noted , “Public buildings and the houses of government supporters were burnt down by protesters; shops were ransacked; most businesses and all banks and schools were closed. The main secondary school for 3,700 pupils was burnt out twice. The police station was under siege for 45 days, so no police were on patrol. No cars or taxis could use the streets; passing the barricades on foot involved being checked by youths with weapons and on occasion threatened. Dissent was met with violence (before the barricades went up, I took part in a ‘peace’ march which was pelted with stones). At first protesters had homemade mortars, but later many acquired more serious weapons such as AK-47s; paid troublemakers manned the barricades at night-time. A police official captured nearby was tortured and then killed, his body burnt at a barricade.”
Similarly, the NED played a role in the U.S. backed military coup against Bolivia’s elected leader, Evo Morales, in 2019.
The U.S. backed coup was sparked when the Organization of American States (OSA) falsely claimed that Evo Morales stole the 2019 election, which was used to justify a military coup and the installation of a military dictatorship led by U.S. puppet, Jeanine Añez.
As journalist Yanis Iqbal, reported the lie that Evo Morales stole the elected was heavily pushed by the NED writing that, “In 2019, NED ran programmes such as Countering Disinformation in the Political Process, Informing Citizens Via Digital Platforms, Monitoring the National Electoral Process, Promoting an Informed Electorate, Providing Independent Analysis and Information, Providing Independent Political News and Election Information and Stimulating an Informed National Debate” which pushed the lie used to justify the coup, adding, “These NED tactics conclusively point towards a scheme of carefully choreographed propaganda and electoral interventionism which contributed to the 2019 Bolivia coup.”
Similar to the Maidan coup in Ukraine, the NED continued to undermine governments in Eastern Europe, which were seen as too close to Russia.
When protests broke out against Belarus’ Russia-aligned president, Aleksandr Lukashenko in 2020, journalist Alan Macleod reported, “on a Zoom meeting infiltrated by activists and released to the public, the NED’s senior Europe Program officer, Nina Ognianova, boasted that the groups leading the nationwide demonstrations against Lukashenko … were trained by her organization. ‘We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring came out of nowhere — that it just happened overnight,’ she said, noting that the NED had made a ‘modest but significant contribution’ to the protests.”
He added, “On the same call, NED President Carl Gershman added that ‘we support many, many groups and we have a very, very active program throughout the country, and many of the groups obviously have their partners in exile.’ Gershman also boasted that the Belarusian government was powerless to intervene and stop them: ‘We’re not like Freedom House or NDI [the National Democratic Institute] and the IRI [International Republican Institute]; we don’t have offices. So if we’re not there, they can’t kick us out.’”
Similarly, the NED intervened in the 2024 election in Romania to back a judicial coup against the candidate Calin Georgescu, because he was opposed to funding the proxy war in Ukraine (which was in large part sparked by the NED backed coup in 2014).
Romania’s intelligence agencies released an evidence-free report which falsely claimed that a TikTok campaign backed by Russia was supporting his campaign.
As the New York Times noted, “The intelligence documents released publicly by Romania provided no evidence of a Russian role, only the observation that ‘Russia has a history of interfering in the electoral processes of other states’ and vague claims that what happened in Romania was ‘similar’ to well-documented Russian election interference in neighboring Moldova”.
Furthermore, the investigative outlet Snoop reported that the TikTok campaign cited in the intelligence report was actually paid for by the Romanian National Liberal Party, the party opposing Calin Georgescu.
Based on this fabricated report, Calin Georgescu was barred from running in the election, despite winning the first round of the vote.
His opponent, Elena Lascon, said at the time, “Today is the moment when the Romanian state trampled over democracy. God, the Romanian people, the truth and the law will prevail and will punish those who are guilty of destroying our democracy”.
This lawfare campaign was backed by the NED. Journalist Lee Fang uncovered that, “think tanks and civil society NGOs funded by the U.S. – via USAID foreign aid programs, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the State Department – have served as the most vocal voices championing the judicial coup”.
The fact that every House Democrat and many House Republicans voted against defunding the ostensible NGO that has been used by the CIA to back coups around the world – including against democratically elected leaders – that do not bow down to Washington’s demands shows that both parties will continue to keep the deep state’s infrastructure running.
Former Head of Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate: There’s a ‘very significant influence operation by the US’ in Iran
The Dissident | January 14, 2026
Recently, the Israeli newspaper Maariv interviewed the head of the Military Intelligence Directorat in Israel from 2018-2021, Tamir Hayman, who revealed that the United States currently has a “Significant Influence Operation” on the ground in Iran.
In the interview, Hayman said, “If the question is, is there zero operation right now? The answer is no, because there is already an operation. There is currently a very significant influence operation by the US” referring to the current unrest happening in Iran.
He added, “The sequence of news that is received from within Iran, rumors that are coming, videos that are coming, there are many things that are happening that have no explanation. It could be a coincidence, and it could be something else. Simply put, an influence effort is an effort that operates primarily in the cyber realm, and in the realm of local disruption and subversion, and there are some.”
Along with this, Tamir Hayman, acknowledged that U.S. sanctions were the cause of the economic issues that in Iran that sparked the initial protests in Iran which are apparently being exploited by American and Israeli intelligence, saying, “there is the attempt, as we heard tonight from Trump, that this is a path of negotiation with the Americans, that this is really the only thing that can save the Iranian economy, the lifting of sanctions”.
This comment comes at the same time that Tamir Morag, the Diplomatic Correspondent for the Netanyahu-linked Channel 14 in Israel, reported that “foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed.”
American and Israeli officials have been fairly open about the fact that Israeli intelligence is currently operating on the ground in Iran, with the former Secretary of State and CIA director, Mike Pompeo saying, “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also, to every Mossad agent walking beside them” and the Israeli Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu saying, “When we attacked in Iran during ‘Rising Lion’ we were on its soil and knew how to lay the groundwork for a strike. I can assure you that we have some of our people operating there right now”.
But now, Tamir Morag has revealed that there are “very significant influence operations by the US” in Iran, which include “operates primarily in the cyber realm, and in the realm of local disruption and subversion” and according to Tamir Morag, apparent operations to arm protestors in Iran to kill Iranian government officials.
Referring to the protests in Iran, the U.S. government connected private intelligence firm Stratfor, wrote, “the United States may also try to intervene, such as by covertly helping to organize the protesters”, something that is apparently already underway through American “influence operations”.
Kidnapped By the Washington Cartel
By Eric Striker • Unz Review • January 8, 2026
Washington’s snatching of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his visibly brutalized wife, Cilia, has been widely condemned as naked criminality. Supporters of US interventionism have taken to justifying the attack under the guise of the Monroe, or “Donroe,” Doctrine, while leaders of the American left such as Bernie Sanders have largely ignored the moral implications by fixating on the legalistic aspect of the spectacle.
Practically nothing substantial has been presented to the public justifying military intervention in Venezuela. US officials have made half-hearted attempts at blowing the cobwebs off the Reagan-era Cold War boogeyman trope, but the Venezuelan state of Maduro last year spent only 18% of its GDP on public expenditures, making the US (37%) twice as “communist.” It should also be noted that Venezuela’s Communist Party has long been part of the heterogenous US-backed anti-Maduro opposition and is perceived inside the country as a front for the CIA.
The next ginned up fable accuses Maduro, in a Brooklyn federal court case overseen by 92-year-old Zionist Jew Alvin Hellerstein, of being a global cocaine kingpin.
The original Department of Justice case was cobbled together during Trump’s first term but was pursued heavily by the successive Biden administration, which introduced a $25 million dollar bounty in hopes that someone inside the regime would capture Maduro for them. Critics have dismissed the charges as both baseless and hypocritical, pointing out that several current US-installed leaders in Latin America are running actual narco regimes. The well of irony goes deeper: the very Delta Force unit responsible for capturing Maduro is itself a violent cocaine trafficking ring, as journalists documenting JSOC operator’s use of military planes to import millions of dollars worth of cocaine from Colombia to Fort Bragg for both personal use and illicit profit have shown.
The last excuse, tossed to the nihilists in the MAGA base as red meat, is that America wants to steal the oil to make gas prices cheaper. During World War II, the United States strong-armed Venezuelan oil into the hands of American businesses to fuel the Allied war effort, but the 30 to 50 million barrels of oil Trump is demanding for America is only enough to last two months. Venezuela’s low-quality crude requires refining infrastructure that experts believe could cost 10s of billions of dollars in investment and potentially a decade to come to fruition, meaning that the US would have to pay a hefty price to produce the product in order to “steal” it.
Military action for oil makes no sense. For nearly a decade, Maduro’s government has been desperately reaching out to the US to negotiate an end to the devastating sanctions crippling the Venezuelan economy and bring back American oil companies, with extraordinary gestures such as a $500,000 donation to Trump’s 2017 inauguration festivities. These overtures were ignored.
Realist arguments for removing opponents of the American empire from the Western Hemisphere also seem inadequate. Many nations that have strong links to Russia and China, such as Hungary, also have close relations to the Trump administration. Neither Russia or China are interested in or able to meddle in the Western Hemisphere, as the May 2024 8,000 word Sino-Russian joint statement calling for non-interventionism reveals.
The remaining outstanding issue, what separates friend-to-all Hungary from Venezuela and is likely real cause of the conflict is Maduro’s militant anti-Zionism, which has been put into practice through Hugo Chavez-era infrastructure of sanctions-busting trade with Iran, who the Zionist hawks in Washington are trying to isolate further. Venezuela has become an outlier in Latin America, where regimes propped up by the US are rapidly embracing the pro-Israel Isaac’s Accords. What exactly the Israelis want in Latin America remains a matter of speculation, but this question is important enough to compel Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado to repeatedly declare her devotion to the Jewish state and openly plan to make Israel a central focus of her potential future government.
The notion that Trump was settling accounts on behalf of Israel, rather than America, appears to be taken for granted by both Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who cited the security interests of Israel for cause, as well as Maduro’s successor Delcy Rodriguez, who has publicly declared that the president’s kidnapping has “Zionist undertones.”
It is not yet clear if the British and French educated lawyer Rodriguez, the daughter of a communist guerrilla tortured to death by the CIA, is herself an American asset tasked with gradually taking apart the Bolivarian revolution from within, but the decision to keep her in power was made by the same group that murdered her father. The new president was initially purged from Hugo Chavez’s political circle in 2006, only to be brought back by Maduro in 2013 for her magical ability to operate around American sanctions and defeat diplomatic onslaughts.
Delcy’s power within the Maduro government grew after she was able to single-handedly defeat an attempt by the Organization of American States to officially ostracize Venezuela in 2017. She has been able to broker large sanctions violating underground financial transactions on behalf of her country in Europe and, as head of Venezuela’s oil sector, has been actively lobbying the US to return to take it over. She has been criticized in socialist circles for her campaign re-dollarizing the Venezuelan economy, which has exacerbated poverty and inequality in the country. Her links to enemies of Venezuela are an open secret and include secret meetings with mercenary leader Erik Prince even as his outfit was actively trying to overthrow Maduro. Her years of unusual unofficial welcome in Washington and the wealth it has provided some corrupt elements in the world of Chavismo has allowed her to accumulate enough power domestically to, over the years, root out elements suspicious of her rise.
For now, Rodriguez is urging calm and the armed forces appear to be taking her at her word that she is a good faith pragmatist rather than a traitor. The next six months of her presidency will be crucial as a boots on the ground intervention by America continues to loom.
The flood of fake videos on social media of showing celebrations of Maduro’s removal do not reflect the reality on the ground. Approval for Trump’s actions is a minority opinion in both the United States and Venezuela. General sentiment is that the populations of both America and Venezuela will suffer the consequences of yet another Washington military adventure if the Trump administration goes any further.
Supporters of American imperialism — again, a minority opinion — have sought to distance themselves from the spoiled “neo-conservative” brand and argue that this new emphasis on Latin America will be different from the disastrous War On Terror. But interventions of the kind just witnessed with Maduro in the Western Hemisphere have historically fared no better than Iraq.
A case that comes to mind is the 2009 US overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya, who like Maduro, was abducted and taken to face trial in Costa Rica on flimsy drug charges. Successive American backed governments (including an actual cocaine trafficking president Trump recently pardoned) mismanaged Honduras to the point of making it the most violent country in the world. This situation provoked a massive exodus to the US, producing a large percentage of the hundreds of thousands of so-called Northern Triangle illegal immigrants, with Honduras regularly populating the bulk of the notorious migrant caravans. From 2010 and 2020, the Honduran population in the United States increased from 490,000 to at least 1.3 million, and this is only those we know of. More than 10% of Honduras’ population now lives in America, many of them illegally.
The removal of Maduro is a regime change campaign going back 20 years, with the blame for this latest conflict shared by Democrats and Republicans equally. The substance of Washington’s global terrorism is decided by permanent bureaucrats and high finance, with the president only serving to influence the style and execution.
Behind the DOJ’s politicized indictment of Maduro: a CIA-created ‘network’ and coerced star witness
The US Department of Justice indictment of Venezuela’s kidnapped leader is a political rant that relies on coerced testimony from an unreliable witness
By Max Blumenthal | The Grayzone | January 5, 2026
The January 3 US military raid on Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores was followed by the Department of Justice’s release of its superseding indictment of the two abductees as well as their son, Nicolasito Maduro, and two close political allies: former Minister of Justice Ramon Chacin and ex-Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello. The DOJ has also thrown Tren De Aragua (TDA) cartel leader Hector “Niño” Guerrero into the mix of defendants, situating him at the heart of its narrative.
The indictment amounts to a 25 page rant accusing Maduro and Flores of a conspiracy to traffic “thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States,” relying heavily on testimony from coerced witnesses about alleged shipments that largely took place outside US jurisdiction. It accuses Maduro of “having partnered with narco-terrorists” like TDA, ignoring a recent US intelligence assessment that concluded he had no control over the Venezuelan gang. Finally, the prosecutors stacked the indictment by charging Maduro with “possession of machine guns,” a laughable offense which could easily be applied to hundreds of thousands of gun-loving Americans under an antiquated 1934 law.
DOJ prosecutors carefully avoid precise data on Venezuelan cocaine exports to the US. At one point, they describe “tons” of cocaine; at another, they refer to the shipment of “thousands of tons,” an astronomical figure that could hypothetically generate hundreds of billions in revenue. At no point did they mention fentanyl, the drug responsible for the overdose deaths of close to 50,000 Americans in 2024. In fact, the DEA National Drug Threat Assessment issued under Trump’s watch this year scarcely mentioned Venezuela.
By resorting to vague, deliberately expansive language larded with subjective terms like “corrupt” and “terrorism,” the DOJ has constructed a political narrative against Maduro in place of a concrete legal case. While repeatedly referring to Maduro as the “de facto… illegitimate ruler of the country,” the DOJ fails to demonstrate that he is not de jure illegitimate under Venezuelan law, and will therefore be unable to bypass established international legal precedent granting immunity to heads of state.
Further, the indictment relies on transparently unreliable, coerced witnesses like Hugo “Pollo” Carvajal, a former Venezuelan general who has cut a secret plea deal to reduce his sentence for drug trafficking by supplying dirt on Maduro. Carvajal was said to be a key figure in the so-called “Cartel of the Suns” drug network which the DOJ claims was run by Maduro. If and when he appears to testify against the abducted Venezuelan leader, the American public could learn that the “cartel” was founded not by the deposed Venezuelan president or one of his allies, but by the CIA to traffic drugs into US cities.
As sloppy and politicized as the DOJ’s indictment might be, it has enabled Trump to frame his lawless “Donroe Doctrine” as an aggressive policy of legal enforcement, emboldening the US president to levy further threats to abduct or bump off heads of state who stand in the way of his rapacious agenda. This appears to be the real purpose of the imperial courtroom spectacle to come.
Weaponizing the “narco-terror” hoax
The bulk of the case against Maduro rests on the accusation that the defendants “engaged in… drug trafficking, including in partnership with narco-terrorist groups.” According to the DOJ, Maduro conspired with TDA, as well as the Mexican Sinaloa and Los Zetas cartels to traffic drugs between 2003 and 2011. However, these cartels were not designated by the Trump administration as Foreign Terrorist Organizations until February 2025, a move obviously designed to justify Maduro’s kidnapping and juice up his indictment.
In its bid to convict Maduro, the DOJ will undoubtedly struggle to overcome the conclusion reached in an April 7, 2025 memo by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that the Venezuelan leader did not control TDA, which he effectively dismantled through a massive 2023 military-police raid on the Tocorón prison that served as the gang’s base of operations. A report in the State Department-funded outlet InSight Crime also complicates the DOJ’s case, finding that “the few crimes attributed to alleged Tren de Aragua members in the United States appear to have no connection with the larger group or its leadership in Venezuela.”
In fact, many of the supposed crimes for which Maduro is charged took place outside the borders and jurisdiction of the United States. The DOJ alleges, for instance, that in September 2013, “Venezuelan officials dispatched approximately 1.3 tons of cocaine on a commercial flight from the Maiquetia Airport to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.”
In 2018, five British citizens were convicted in a French court for orchestrating the drug shipment with help from gang members from Colombia and Italy – but not Venezuela. At the time of the incident, Maduro’s government acknowledged corrupt lower level Venezuelan officials had allowed the drugs to pass through airport security. Caracas ultimately arrested 25 people, including members of the military and an Air France manager – a salient fact omitted from the DOJ indictment.
The evidence of Maduro’s involvement in the scandal, according to the DOJ, was that the drug shipment took place “mere months after [Maduro] succeeded to the Venezuelan presidency.” No other proof is offered to demonstrate his culpability.
The indictment goes on to allege Maduro “facilitated the movement of private planes under diplomatic cover” to avoid law enforcement scrutiny as they landed in Mexico. Citing coerced testimony from a Venezuelan government defector, it accuses Diosdado Cabello of coordinating a shipment of 5.5 tons of cocaine on a DC-9 jet to Mexico. None of these claims should hold water in a US court.
As public defender and legal analyst Eliza Orlins explained, “Flights that occur wholly within Venezuela do not cross U.S. airspace, do not implicate U.S. customs territory, and do not, standing alone, violate U.S. law. The indictment attempts to bootstrap these domestic movements into U.S. criminal jurisdiction by asserting that the cocaine involved was ultimately destined for the United States. Intent does almost all the work here.”
Because most of the specific incidents cited in the indictment occurred within Mexico under Presidents Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Pena Nieto, the DOJ inadvertently implicates these three pro-US administrations, who shaped their drug policies in coordination with Washington. In fact, the top cop during the first two of these governments, former Federal Intelligence Agency chief Genaro García Luna, was convicted in a US federal court in 2023 for presiding over a multi-million dollar conspiracy with the Sinaloa cartel. Former US ambassador to Mexico Robert Jacobson acknowledged that the US knew all about Garcia Luna’s cartel ties, but insisted, “we had to work with him.”
The Honduran double standard
The DOJ also implicates the pro-US government of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, referring to Honduras as a “transshipment” point “in which cocaine traffickers operating in those countries paid a portion of their own profits to politicians who protected and aided them.” Hernandez was convicted in a US federal court in 2023 of trafficking over 400 tons of drugs to the US, but received a pardon this December from President Donald Trump following a lobbying campaign by top Trump donors seeking business in the deregulated crypto haven of Próspera off the coast of Honduras.
During his January 3 press conference announcing the abduction of Maduro and his wife, Trump aggressively defended his decision to pardon Hernandez, claiming the Honduran ex-president been “persecuted very unfairly.” However, the same DOJ prosecutor who authored the original 2020 indictment of Maduro, Trump loyalist Emil Bove, was responsible for the indictment of Hernandez. In contrast to the case against Maduro, the Hernandez indictment contained concrete evidence of his collaboration with major transnational cartels, including video and photographic exhibits, as Anya Parampil and Alexander Rubinstein detailed for The Grayzone.
Hernandez pleaded his case to Trump in a 2025 letter claiming he’d been subjected to a “rigged trial” and convicted “based on the uncorroborated statements of convicted drug traffickers.”
His questionable claim could also apply to the DOJ’s prosecution of Maduro, as many of the most dramatic allegations contained in his indictment are sourced to a convicted drug trafficker who struck a secret deal with US prosecutors to reduce his own sentence in exchange for testimony against Maduro.
He is former Venezuelan Gen. Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal.
Coerced “star witness” strikes secret deal with US prosecutors
The head of military intelligence under the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez from 2004 to 2011, Carvajal is cited seven times in the January 3 DOJ indictment as a witness to alleged criminal acts by Maduro and his inner circle. Carvajal was first arrested in 2014 in Aruba on drug running charges, but was returned to Venezuela to the chagrin of US authorities. In 2017, as he faced a pair of indictments in the US, the general suddenly turned on Maduro, denouncing him as a dictator. He had openly endorsed the regime change project of US-controlled “interim president” Juan Guaido in 2019, fashioning himself as a courageous defector while proffering his supposed knowledge of the Venezuelan deep state to Washington.
That same year, as Carvajal sought asylum in Spain, the US formally demanded that Madrid him over. Now facing the prospect of extradition, he delivered a series of tell-all interviews to legacy outlets like the New York Times, doing his best to legitimize virtually every charge the Trump administration sought to weaponize against Maduro.
Then-Senator Marco Rubio could not contain his excitement about the prospect of squeezing the Chavista insider for testimony in a future case against Maduro. Carvajal “will soon be coming to the US to provide important information about the #MaduroRegime,” Rubio tweeted on April 12, 2019. “Bad day for the #MaduroCrimeFamily.”
It was not until 2023 that Carvajal was finally extradited and placed on trial in the Southern District court of New York. After he pleaded guilty to “narco-terrorism” this June, the Miami Herald reported that he had struck a plea deal which would grant him “a considerable sentence reduction if he provides ‘substantial assistance’ to US investigations.”
Carvajal’s still-secret plea deal gives away the game he’d played since he first emerged as a defector. His allegations against Maduro had been delivered under duress, all designed to satisfy his would-be jailers in the US. He has since indulged one of Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories by alleging in a June 2025 letter to the US president that Maduro manipulated Venezuela’s Smartmatic voting systems to rig the 2020 US presidential election in favor of Biden.
Carvajal’s shameless pandering to Trump and secret plea deal should obliterate his credibility as a witness against Maduro.
In its January 3 indictment of Maduro, the DOJ claimed Carvajal and Diosdado Cabello “worked with other members of the Venezuelan regime” to “coordinate the shipment” of 5.5 tons of cocaine from Simon Bolivar International Airport to Campeche, Mexico in a private jet in 2006. This incident remains the source of intense intrigue, as the ownership of the DC-9 jet by two shadowy American companies points in the direction of US intelligence.
While details of potential covert US government involvement in the 2006 drug shipment remain murky, it is an established fact that the CIA founded and operated the “Cartel of the Suns” which the DOJ now accuses Maduro, Cabello and other top Venezuelan officials of controlling.
Cartel of the Suns: created by the CIA, weaponized by the DOJ
In the original indictment of Maduro, the DOJ explicitly accused Maduro of leading a narco-trafficking cartel called “Cartel of the Suns,” referencing it over 30 times.
The revised DOJ indictment of Maduro unsealed on January 3 states, “Starting in or about 1999, Venezuela became a safe haven for drug traffickers willing to pay for protection and support corrupt Venezuelan civilian and military officials, who operated outside the reach of Colombian law enforcement and armed forces bolstered by United States anti-narcotics assistance.”
It continues: “The profits of that illegal activity flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military, and intelligence officials, who operate in a patronage system run by those at the top-referred to as the Cartel de Los Soles or Cartel of the Suns.”
The informal network of corrupt military officials was in fact established by the CIA under pro-US Venezuelan governments during the 1980’s and ‘90’s. Americans were introduced to this inconvenient truth not by some dissident muckraker, but by the New York Times, and by Mike Wallace in a 60 Minutes exposé broadcast in 1993.
Three years earlier, US Customs officials in Miami had intercepted a shipment of 1000 pounds of pure cocaine from Venezuela. But they were soon told by higher-ups in the US government the shipments had been approved by Langley. According to the Times, the CIA sought to allow the cocaine to “enter the United States without being seized, so as to allay all suspicion. The idea was to gather as much intelligence as possible on members of the drug gangs.”
“I really take great exception to the fact that 1000 kilos came in, funded by US taxpayer money,” then-DEA attache to Venezuela Annabelle Grimm remarked to 60 Minutes. “I found that particularly appalling.”
To organize the shipments from Venezuela, the CIA recruited generals from the Venezuelan National Guard who were trained by the US. Because officers in the National Guard wore patches on their uniforms bearing the symbol of a sun, the informal drug network was branded as “The Cartel of the Suns.”
In the years after the CIA-run cartel was exposed in US media, it disappeared, only to be revived when the US government began hounding Gen. Carvajal, who may soon appear as its key witness against Maduro. While corruption is still present in the Venezuelan military, there is little evidence of anything resembling a Cartel of the Suns in its ranks.
As Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, told CNN, “Cartel de los Soles, per se, doesn’t exist. It’s a journalistic expression created to refer to the involvement of Venezuelan authorities in drug trafficking.”
A former senior US official echoed Gunson, describing Cartel of the Suns as “a made-up name used to describe an ad hoc group of Venezuelan officials involved in the trafficking of drugs through Venezuela. It doesn’t have the hierarchy or command-and-control structure of a traditional cartel.”
The official told CNN that the DEA or Defense Intelligence Agency had supplied Trump with a “purely political” assessment of the cartel to support his assault on Venezuela.
Discovery granted to the defense in the trial of Maduro and Flores risks severely embarrassing the US government by extracting further evidence of CIA drug running. This may be why the DOJ softened its language about the Cartel of the Suns, referring to it in the January 3 indictment as a mere “patronage network” rather than as a cohesive criminal syndicate, and mentioning it only twice.
During his first appearance in court earlier that day, the kidnapped Venezuelan leader was only able to speak for a brief moment. “I am innocent. I am a decent man. I am President…” Maduro pleaded before being cut off by his lawyer.
Israeli Intrigue in Venezuela?
By W.M. Peterson | Truth Blitzkrieg |January 5, 2026
“The question is: who’s really in charge? I know President Trump appears to be. I’m not convinced that’s the case because remember… you had this giant Israeli flag suddenly appear in the middle of the Republican convention. And certainly in my lifetime… I don’t know of a single instance where either the Democratic or Republican parties held a convention and hoisted a giant foreign flag… I’ve never heard of that before.” — Col. Douglas Macgregor on the Judging Freedom podcast with Judge Andrew Napolitano (Jan. 3, 2026)
Just four days after Benjamin Netanyahu appeared as a guest on Newsmax’s The Record with Greta van Sustern and informed the insufferable newscaster that Iran is “exporting terrorism… to Venezuela. They’re in cahoots with the Maduro regime… this has got to change,” it was announced that U.S. military forces had carried out a large scale operation against Venezuela, capturing President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, who will both “face the full wrath of American justice” after being indicted on drugs and weapons charges in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The capture of Maduro occurred exactly 36 years to the day after US Delta Forces captured Panamanian President/CIA informant Manuel Noriega, and it’s unlikely that Netanyahu’s recent visit to the U.S.– the fifth in 2025 by the international fugitive — and the American operation are unrelated. While talk of ‘stolen oil’ and ‘narco-terrorism’ currently dominates the mainstream discourse, the fact that Israel has been seeking regime change in Venezuela since the days of Hugo Chavez has gone virtually unreported.
Prior to Maduro’s predecessor Chavez winning Venezuela’s 1998 presidential election, relations between the naturally wealthy South American country and Israel had been relatively good. Venezuela voted in favor of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947 — which allocated 55% of historic Palestine to the as-yet-unfounded Jewish state — and two years later voted in favor of Israeli membership to the UN. By the mid 1960s, Venezuela boasted a robust Jewish population equipped with an impressive communal structure of schools, synagogues and cultural centers organized by middle-to-upper-class members of the community. In 1967, Jewish ethnic solidarity inspired a large number of Venezuelan Jews to travel to Israel to fight alongside their co-religionists in the Six-Day War. Following the conflict, a large influx of Sephardic Jews from Morocco arrived and settled in Caracas contributing to the largest Jewish population in Venezuela’s history, numbering 30,000 at its peak, evenly split between Sephardim and Askenazim.
By the mid-2000s, however, relations between Venezuela and the Synagogue began to fray.
The first notable rift occurred in late 2004 following the assassination of Venezuelan state prosecutor Danilo Anderson, who was killed by a car bomb at age 38. 1
At the time of his death Anderson had been investigating more than 400 people suspected of involvement in the Llaguno Overpass shootout and the failed 2002 coup d’état, during which Chavez was ousted from office for two days before being restored to power by popular support and a number of loyal military men. (Accusations of Jewish involvement in the coup were made at the time by pro-government newspaper Diario VEA, and later by Venezuela’s ambassador to Russia, Alexis Navarro.)
Suspicions of a possible Mossad dimension to the assassination plot were already high when Venezuelan authorities received a tip suggesting that weapons and explosives connected to the murder may have been transferred from the Club Magnum shooting range to the Colegio Hebraica Jewish school in Caracas, prompting Chavez to authorize his investigative police force DISIP to conduct an armed raid on the school on the morning of November 29, 2004. Chavez’s investigators intercepted busloads of kids and evacuated 1,500 students from the building while searching for any materials related to Anderson’s assassination. Ultimately nothing of value was found and the incident was loudly condemned by local and international Jewish organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who referred to it in typically melodramatic fashion as a “pogrom.”
Throughout the next two years Chavez’s rhetoric concerning Jewish power and influence became considerably more pointed, especially following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006. It was during this time that Chavez recalled his country’s ambassador to Israel and threatened to sever diplomatic ties with the Jewish state in protest of its military operation, describing it as a “new Holocaust” and “similar or, perhaps worse… than what the Nazis did.” Chavez further inflamed the sensibilities of Jews at home and abroad by traveling to Tehran and affirming that Venezuela would “stand by Iran at any time and under any condition.” 2
In January 2009, Chavez finally made good on his threat when Venezuela severed all diplomatic ties with the Jewish state due to its conduct in the 2009 Gaza War which left 1,400 Palestinians dead and over 5,000 wounded. Once again referring to the violence as a “Holocaust” and a “flagrant violation of International Law,” Chavez expelled Israel’s ambassador to Venezuela and called for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to be tried for war crimes in the International Criminal Court. Shortly thereafter, foreign minister Nicolas Maduro met in Caracas with representatives from the Palestinian National Authority and Venezuela officially recognized the existence of a Palestinian State on April 27, 2009.
By this time Chavez was facing tremendous pressure from the international Jewish cabal and it was clear he had a target on his back. During a nationally broadcast speech in June 2010, Chavez condemned Israel as a “terrorist and murderous state,” and affirmed that “Israel is financing the Venezuelan opposition. There are even groups of Israeli terrorists, of the Mossad, who are after me trying to kill me.” Hugo Chavez died on March 5, 2013 at the age of 58 after a two year battle with cancer. He was succeeded as President of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela by Nicolas Maduro who blamed his predecessor’s death on “a US plot.” 3
“Narco-Terrorism”
For months the Trump administration has been trying to claim that Maduro is responsible for trafficking boatloads of drugs into the United States; using the unfounded claim to justify deadly strikes on more than 30 small vessels in the Caribbean and what Trump referred to as “the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs.” Initially ‘The Donald’ tried claiming the boats were carrying fentanyl and that each extra-judicial U.S. strike would save 25,000 American lives. However, this outlandish conspiracy theory was hampered by the fact that no evidence exists showing that any significant level of fentanyl is produced in South America, as confirmed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
With the fentanyl narrative sinking faster than Maduro’s purported drug boats, the Trump administration pivoted seamlessly to talk of purloined oil and cocaine trafficking. While it’s true Venezuela plays a role in the international cocaine trade, the US doesn’t appear to be a significant destination as no direct trade route via sea is known to exist between the countries. In reality, far more cocaine and fentanyl enters America through Mexico and yet, curiously, socialist president Claudia Sheinbaum’s “narco-government” has thus far failed to register a blip anywhere near as noteworthy as Venezuela’s on Uncle Sam’s regime change radar.
Another overt contradiction in Trump’s ‘war on drugs’ narrative is the federal pardon he granted ex-president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had just recently begun serving a 45-year sentence after being convicted in a New York federal court for drug trafficking and firearms offenses and for receiving millions of dollars in bribes from drug cartels, including a $1 million bribe from Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. Despite having trafficked an estimated 400 tons of cocaine into the United States over a period of 18 years, Hernandez walked out of prison a free man on December 1, 2025, just days before the Honduran general election in which Trump endorsed Nasry Asfura, the candidate from Hernandez’s Honduran National Party, who himself was indicted by authorities in 2020 on charges of money laundering, embezzling public funds, fraud, and abuse of authority.
Trump’s support for Juan Orlando Hernandez and Nasry Asfura shouldn’t raise any eyebrows coming as it does from the man who pardoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard’s handler and is currently engaged in running interference for an international child sex trafficking ring. Indeed, Trump’s entire life has been spent swimming in the same swamp he promised to drain and now he’s being used as a tool for regime change in Venezuela and soon Iran. Disgraced attorney Alan Dershowitz, who staunchly defended Pollard in his 1991 book Chutzpah, recently told the media that “If President Trump wants to be known as the peace president, he has to be in support of regime change.”
I’m familiar with the arguments put forth by starry-eyed MAGA optimists suggesting there’s some America First motivation informing Trump’s decision-making. However, it seems more likely there’s a deeper play involving Israel that’s the driving force behind the conflict. This was hinted at when Fox News published an article claiming Maduro’s Venezuela has become “Hezbollah’s most important base of operations in the Western Hemisphere, strengthened by Iran’s growing footprint and the Maduro regime’s protection” and again when ultra-Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee informed the world that the US overthrow of Maduro was good news for Israel because of his country’s partnership with Iran and Hezbollah. Perhaps this explains why Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez believes the operation was imbued with a ‘Zionist tint’? When viewed in its entirety it’s hard to disagree. Capturing Venezuela’s vast oil reserves might even portend an immediate escalation in the Middle East by diminishing Iran’s primary geopolitical leverage, e.g., blocking the Strait of Hormuz, and I expect to see an escalation on that front in the coming weeks and months.
Whatever the case may be, you can rest assured knowing that the Trump administration is not waging a war on “narco-terrorism,” a completely meaningless propaganda term designed chiefly to promote regime change in Latin America. The illegal narcotics destroying the bodies and minds of Americans young and old are undoubtedly entering the country under CIA and Mossad auspices, just as they were in the 1980s during Iran-Contra when Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton — a “terrific guy” according to Trump — permitted the use of his Mena airstrip for the transport of an extraordinary amount of cocaine into the United States. A highly-placed conspirator within the Iran-Contra nexus was Jewish neoconservative Elliott Abrams (Trump’s US Special Representative for Venezuela from 2019 – 2021), who recently advocated for regime change in Venezuela for the purpose of — among other things — reducing drug trafficking! Abrams, who crafted the 1998 PNAC letter demanding the removal of Saddam Hussein, was convicted in 1991 on two misdemeanor counts for his role in the Iran-Contra affair after entering into a plea agreement to avoid felony charges of perjury.
Evidentially, international gun/drug running isn’t much of a concern for Trump, so long as the perpetrators play for the right team. But hey, MAGA, be of good cheer, your white knight’s attack on Venezuela isn’t without its supporters…
NOTES:
- The Jewish Telegraph Agency reported on December 7, 2004 that Anderson “was assassinated in his car by a remote bomb planted in his cell phone… Comparisons of the style of Anderson’s assassination to Israeli targeted killings carried out by Israeli commandos abounded. In the best-known example, Israelis assassinated Hamas bomb-maker Yehiya Ayyash in 1996 using a booby-trapped cell phone.” ↩︎
- According to the World Conference Against Anti-Semitism, Chavez’s pro-government media published “an average of 45 [anti-Semitic] pieces per month” in 2008 and “more than five per day” during the January 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. In early 2013 dozens of documents were leaked to the press showing that SEBIN, Venezuela’s premier intelligence agency, had been collecting “private information on prominent Venezuelan Jews, local Jewish organizations and Israeli diplomats in Latin America.” ↩︎
- The current leader of Venezuela’s opposition party, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Machado, has said that she is ready to take power. In a recent interview with the newspaper Israel Hayom, Machado was quoted as saying: “Venezuela will be Israel’s closest ally in Latin America. We rely on Israel’s support in dismantling Maduro’s crime regime and in the transition to democracy. Together we’ll lead a global struggle against crime and terror.” ↩︎
Why Didn’t Venezuela Shoot Maduro’s Kidnappers Out of the Sky? Expert Outlines Three Possibilities
Sputnik – 05.01.2026
Glowing MSM reports on the operation to capture Maduro attribute success to the US military’s super-duper high-tech weapons, advanced tactics and painstaking planning. But there are other, potentially far more plausible explanations, says Egor Lidovskoy, director of St. Petersburg’s Hugo Chavez Latin American Cultural Center.
Option #1
“The first option is incompetence on the part of government agencies” and those responsible for Maduro’s protection, specifically in the Defense Ministry Lidovskoy told Sputnik.
Option #2
Maduro’s betrayal is another possibility, perhaps if some officials agreed to collude with the US to give up the president in exchange for promises to profits from oil extraction if and when the Americans arrive in Venezuela.
“We don’t have any evidence that this or that member of Maduro’s government or team betrayed him. We don’t have such facts. Therefore, I think it’s wrong to make unfounded accusations in advance,” Lidovskoy said. Instead, for now, “we must closely monitor what is happening, and based on this, draw conclusions about whether such a conspiracy exists or not,” he suggested.
Option #3
The most provocative possibility is that the kidnapping “was a Trojan Horse operation,” which would remove questions about betrayal and incompetence and explain “many inconsistencies,” Lidovskoy says.
“The gist of this theory is that a US delegation accompanied by armed guards arrived at Maduro’s residence to discuss the parameters of a peace deal at a dinner, to conduct peace talks, to find common ground.”
This would explain the lack of incoming fire by Venezuelan air defenses on US helicopters.
“Once inside, the delegation’s armed guard (revealed to be special forces) shot all of Maduro’s guards – who were unprepared for this – and captured the president. And only when the signal came in that something had gone wrong and the president had been captured did the bombing of Venezuelan bases and key air defense points begin, providing a smokescreen for the US withdrawal,” Lidovskoy proposed.
US Coup Plot Lacks Key Ingredient
The 2026 plot against Maduro echoes the September 11, 1973 overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende in the sense that it’s “a continuation… of US imperialism using unilateral, deadly force against governments that challenge its hegemony in the hemisphere,” but lacks a critical component: betrayal by the military, Venezuelanalysis editor Ricardo Vaz told Sputnik.
“Allende and the Popular Unity were socialists, they prioritized sovereignty over natural resources (copper), and that was a direct challenge to US interests and influence. The same applies to Venezuela and the Bolivarian Revolution,” Vaz explained.
But unlike the Chilean case, where General Pinochet committed the crime of betraying Allende and the constitutional order, and murdering the president, the only “sin” in Venezuela’s case was its “desire to remove the shackles of US neocolonialism, using resources in a sovereign fashion to improve the lives of the majority, driving regional integration away from the US sphere of influence, and ultimately constructing socialism.”
“External pressure might lead to cracks and treason, but that is the primary issue: US imperialism,” Vaz stressed.
Leaders Believe in Bolivarian Revolution, Can’t Be Bought
Unlike past US-backed coups across the region, plotters in Venezuela have not found a base of support in the military to draw from to successfully overthrow the government and install a US puppet regime, renowned international law specialist and UN expert Alfred de Zayas told Sputnik.
“When the US tried to overthrow Hugo Chavez in 2002 and the coup d’etat failed after 48 hours (Chavez had been taken prisoner – but his popularity with the Army was such that the Army succeeded in liberating him), the Venezuelan people remained loyal to Chavez,” Zayas recalled. “I am convinced that the Venezuelan authorities would have remained loyal to Maduro if they had had the opportunity. That is why Maduro was immediately flown out of the country,” he added.
Speaking to Venezuelan government officials repeatedly, including in his capacity as a UN independent expert, and in the years since, Zayas said what stuck out to him about these conversations was their ideological commitment and loyalty “to the tenets of the Bolivarian Revolution,” and the US’s clear inability to easily “buy” them.
“I personally know of several high officials who were approached by CIA operatives with very attractive offers, and they refused to sell out,” Zayas said. What’s more, in his conversations with ordinary Venezuelans, the expert came away with the impression that “the masses hate the United States – the Yankees – and will not accept a US puppet,” seeing US sanctions pressure, not the Venezuelan government, as the source of their troubles.
Cover-Up Is an Indispensable Chronicle of American Overreach
A new documentary about the journalist Seymour Hersh uncovers the pathologies of U.S. imperialism
By Leon Hadar | The American Conservative | January 2, 2026
Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s new film Cover-Up is more than a documentary about the legendary journalist Seymour Hersh—it is an inadvertent chronicle of the pathologies of American empire. As a foreign policy analyst who has long advocated for realist restraint in U.S. international engagement, I find this film both vindicating and deeply troubling. It documents, through one journalist’s extraordinary career, the pattern of deception, overreach, and institutional rot that has characterized American power projection for over half a century.
What makes Hersh’s reporting invaluable from a realist perspective is that it consistently exposed the gap between stated intentions and actual policy outcomes. CIA domestic surveillance, the My Lai massacre, the secret bombing of Cambodia, Abu Ghraib—each revelation demonstrated what realists have long understood: that idealistic rhetoric about spreading democracy and protecting human rights often masks cruder calculations of power, and that unchecked executive authority in foreign affairs inevitably leads to abuse.
The documentary’s treatment of Hersh’s Cambodia reporting is particularly instructive. Here was a case where the American government conducted a massive bombing campaign against a neutral country, killing tens of thousands of civilians, while lying to Congress and the public. This wasn’t an aberration, but the logical consequence of what happens when a superpower faces no effective constraints on its use of force abroad. In exposing the scandal, Hersh also documented how empire actually functions when stripped of its legitimating myths.
Where Cover-Up excels is in revealing the architecture of official deception. Watching archival footage of government officials denying what later became undeniable, one sees the machinery of the national security state at work. These weren’t rogue actors—they were operating within institutional incentives that reward secrecy, punish dissent, and systematically mislead democratic oversight.
From a realist standpoint, this raises fundamental questions about American foreign policy. If our interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere were justified through systematic deception, what does this tell us about the nature of these enterprises? Realism suggests that states act according to their interests, but when those interests must be concealed from the public through elaborate cover-ups, we must question whether these policies serve genuine national interests or merely the institutional imperatives of the national security bureaucracy.
The film’s examination of Hersh’s Abu Ghraib investigation is devastating. What began as a story about individual soldiers torturing prisoners became, through Hersh’s reporting, an indictment of a policy apparatus that had systematically authorized abuse. The documentary shows how torture wasn’t an accident of war. Rather, it was deliberate policy, approved at the highest levels and then denied when exposed.
This validates a core realist insight: hegemonic projects, particularly those involving regime change and nation-building, create perverse incentives that corrupt institutions and individuals. The George W. Bush administration’s Iraq war, launched on false pretenses and executed with imperial hubris, produced precisely the kind of moral catastrophes that realists warned against.
The documentary is less successful in addressing the legitimate controversies surrounding Hersh’s later work, particularly his reporting on Syria and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. As someone who believes the U.S. should be far less involved in Middle Eastern affairs, I’m sympathetic to questioning official narratives. However, the epistemological challenges of relying on anonymous sources while contradicting extensive documented evidence deserve more rigorous examination than this film provides.
This isn’t to dismiss Hersh’s skepticism toward official accounts—realists should always question the state’s narratives about its foreign adventures. But the documentary would have been strengthened by a more thorough engagement with these critiques. Even iconoclasts must be subject to scrutiny, especially when their reporting has significant geopolitical implications.
What Cover-Up illuminates, perhaps unintentionally, is the deterioration of the institutional ecosystem that made Hersh’s journalism possible. The New Yorker’s willingness to support lengthy investigations, to back reporters against government pressure, and to publish material that angered powerful interests—these conditions were products of a specific historical moment. Today’s fragmented media landscape, where institutional backing has weakened and partisan sorting has intensified, makes such work increasingly difficult.
This matters because realist foreign policy critique depends on investigative journalism to pierce official narratives. Without reporters like Hersh, the gap between rhetoric and reality becomes easier to maintain. The decline of this form of journalism coincides with—and perhaps enables—the persistence of failed policies in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and beyond.
The most powerful moments in Cover-Up are the intimate ones: Hersh describing meetings with sources who risked their careers and freedom to expose wrongdoing, the personal toll of challenging the national security establishment, the isolation that comes with being proven right in ways the powerful never forgive. These moments humanize what could otherwise be an abstract discussion of policy failures.
But they also highlight something crucial: Individual courage, while necessary, isn’t sufficient. Hersh exposed My Lai, yet the war continued for years. He revealed CIA abuses, yet the agency faced minimal accountability. He documented Abu Ghraib, yet the architects of the Iraq war faced no consequences. This pattern suggests systemic dysfunction that transcends individual malfeasance.
From a realist perspective, Cover-Up offers a sobering lesson: American foreign policy has been consistently characterized by overreach justified through deception. Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or countless covert operations, U.S. policymakers have systematically misled the public about the nature, costs, and outcomes of military interventions.
This isn’t a partisan critique—the pattern spans administrations of both parties. It reflects structural features of how American power operates: an imperial presidency with minimal congressional oversight, a national security bureaucracy with institutional interests in threat inflation, and a foreign policy establishment committed to global primacy regardless of costs or consequences.
Hersh’s greatest contribution, documented powerfully in this film, was in providing the empirical record that supports a realist critique of American foreign policy. His reporting demonstrated that idealistic justifications for intervention—spreading democracy, protecting human rights, combating terrorism—often mask more cynical calculations and catastrophic failures.
Cover-Up is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand American foreign policy in the post-World War II era. It’s not a perfect documentary—the pacing occasionally lags, and it’s insufficiently critical of some of Hersh’s more controversial recent work—but its core achievement is significant: It documents how one journalist, through dogged investigation and institutional support, repeatedly exposed truths that powerful interests desperately wanted hidden.
For realists who have long argued for restraint in American foreign policy, this film provides historical validation. The pattern Hersh documented—overreach, deception, failure, cover-up—has repeated itself with depressing regularity. The question is whether contemporary institutions still possess the capacity to hold power accountable in the way that Hersh’s reporting once did.
In an era when American foreign policy debates remain dominated by interventionist assumptions, Cover-Up serves as a crucial reminder of where such thinking leads. It deserves the widest possible audience, particularly among those who shape and influence U.S. foreign policy. The lessons it documents remain urgent and, tragically, largely unlearned.
How Intelligence, Politics, and Foreign Interests Shaped America’s Religious Movements
By Freddie Ponton | 21st Century Wire | December 30, 2025
Christianity is back at the centre of American life, but not necessarily in the way most believers imagine. Churches are fuller, Christian language saturates politics, and faith-based identity has become a mobilising force once again. Yet beneath this revival lies a more unsettling reality: for decades, U.S. government agencies have treated religion not as sacred ground, but as strategic terrain.
This is not theory. During the Cold War, the U.S. State Department and intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA, recognised theology, doctrine, and religious institutions as instruments of influence. Faith was studied, guided, and at times quietly reshaped to serve geopolitical aims. The goal was rarely to destroy belief outright; rather, it was to domesticate it, align it, and render it strategically useful.
DOCUMENT: CIA’s use of journalists and clergy in intelligence operations – Select Committee On Intelligence Of The United States Senate One Hundred Fourth Congress, Second Session, July 17, 1996 (Source to download full pdf: US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence)
Initiatives like the Doctrinal Warfare Program illustrate the scale of this engagement. Churches with mass followings, moral authority, and transnational reach were not simply tolerated; they were targeted for influence. Orthodox congregations in the U.S. and abroad were monitored to ensure alignment with Western interests. Catholic seminaries became conduits for doctrinal shaping, funding networks, and leadership development favourable to U.S. objectives. Even Protestant and Evangelical movements, decentralised and spontaneous, were quietly steered through cultural engagement, philanthropic networks, and selective amplification of certain voices.
Sincere people seeking truth, purpose, and transcendence found themselves caught in influence systems they neither designed nor understood. Their worship, community, and faith became tools in a broader psychological and cultural battle they never consented to.
Doctrinal Warfare: When Theology Became a Battlefield
The CIA’s Doctrinal Warfare Program, particularly its work with Roman Catholic institutions, offers a rare glimpse into how intelligence agencies approach faith. Unlike cinematic portrayals of spies manipulating events, this program operated through subtler, more effective channels.
Influence was exerted via:
- Funding pipelines and philanthropic foundations, directing resources to seminaries, clergy travel, and publications
- Theological conferences and academic exchanges, creating opportunities to propagate ideas aligned with U.S. interests
- Publishing houses, journals, and media networks, shaping what doctrines and interpretations were elevated
- Selected intermediaries, often clergy or theologians, who could subtly shift discourse without appearing coerced
The program’s goal was not to dictate belief directly but to frame the boundaries of acceptable belief. Anti-communism, Western liberal ideals, and American exceptionalism were integrated into theological narratives. Over time, certain interpretations were elevated while others, particularly liberationist, socialist, or anti-Western emphases, were sidelined.
This structural influence was not limited to Catholics. Orthodox churches in the diaspora, particularly in Eastern Europe and North America, were monitored for political alignment. Protestant and Evangelical networks, decentralised and emotionally charged, presented different challenges. Leaders resisted hierarchical oversight, yet strategic use of media, donor support, and conferences quietly aligned these movements with larger political and global objectives.
The CIA and allied agencies like the Israeli MOSSAD also monitored global religious developments, from Latin America to Africa, mapping networks of clergy, seminaries, and youth movements. Influence became a form of psychological warfare: it did not coerce, but conditioned; it did not command, but subtly steered. And it thrived where people least expected manipulation, within trusted communities, sacred spaces, and moral authority.
VIDEO: David Wemhoff discusses his book John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition: How the CIA’s Doctrinal Warfare Changed the Catholic Church. (Source: thkelly67 | Youtube)
Calvary Chapel, Charismatic Leaders, and the Power of Movements
Few movements illustrate both the promise and vulnerability of modern American Christianity like Calvary Chapel.
Founded in the mid‑1960s by Chuck Smith in Costa Mesa, California, Calvary Chapel emerged amidst the counterculture and the Jesus Movement. Smith welcomed surfers, hippies, and spiritual seekers alienated by both secular culture and institutional religion. Informal, emotionally open, culturally adaptive—and extraordinarily successful—it grew from a small congregation into a network of more than 1,800 churches worldwide.
Despite the ongoing debate about whether Calvary Chapel was created by individuals controlled by intelligence agencies or by charismatic individuals, the movement demonstrates a lesson intelligence agencies recognised decades ago: youth-driven religious networks are powerful instruments of social, political and cultural influence.
Figures like Lonnie Frisbee, a magnetic and unconventional evangelist, helped ignite the Jesus Movement and played a decisive role in Calvary Chapel’s early expansion. Frisbee’s countercultural persona, preaching on beaches, leading communal outreaches, and drawing thousands of young converts, was a force institutions could admire, attempt to understand, but never fully control.
Similarly, Paul Cain, a prophetic figure in charismatic networks, influenced theological subcultures with a focus on vision, revelation, and spiritual authority. According to reports, Cain was also a consultant to the Paranormal Division of the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI. Like Frisbee, Cain became controversial, not because he was a confirmed intelligence operative, but because charismatic authority challenges hierarchical control, making it both influential and unsettling.
Calvary Chapel and these figures illustrate a key pattern: movements can grow organically, capture attention, and mobilise communities, making them valuable, and sometimes threatening, to political and intelligence structures. While the direct manipulation claims and the CIA militant connection remain debatable, historical examples like the Doctrinal Warfare Program prove that states do seek to shape religious institutions at scale, often through indirect methods rather than overt control, hence the lack of evidence thereof.
From Pews to Power: Evangelical Politics, Israel, TPUSA, and the Cost of Capture
By the late 20th century, Evangelical Christianity had evolved into a political powerhouse. Networks that began as spiritual awakenings now functioned as engines of political mobilisation, with youth-oriented, media-savvy outreach bridging the gap between churches and the political arena.
TPUSA and Charlie Kirk
Organisations like Turning Point USA (TPUSA) drew from these ecosystems, churches, conferences, campus ministries, and donor networks that had been shaped by decades of cultural, doctrinal, and ideological influence. Faith-language blended seamlessly with nationalism, free-market rhetoric, and civilizational anxiety, mobilising millions of voters.
The 2024 U.S. presidential election highlighted the real-world impact: Evangelical networks were decisive in returning Donald Trump to the White House. For believers, this was framed as a moral imperative or spiritual duty. For observers, it revealed how religious movements could be strategically leveraged within political frameworks.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk, co-founder of TPUSA, shocked the nation and intensified national reflection. While there is no direct evidence ( at least not yet), linking churches or religious movements to the attack, the public reaction underscores a critical truth: powerful social networks rooted in faith become conduits of influence, whether intended or incidental.
As unsettling as it may be for the US government, it is worth noting that an intense social-media rift has emerged between TPUSA and podcaster Candace Owens, with competing narratives and accusations fueling distrust of official accounts surrounding the Charlie Kirk killing at UVU. Interestingly, some critics, Candace Owens among them, contend that the assassination of Charlie Kirk carries the hallmarks of a sophisticated intelligence-style operation, raising uncomfortable questions about whether certain figures within TPUSA may have been more deeply entangled in the events than the public has been led to believe. A decentralised, global network of self-styled citizen journalists is currently crowdsourcing footage, timelines, and open-source data, arguing that gaps and inconsistencies warrant deeper scrutiny beyond mainstream reporting. This phenomenon has amplified public pressure on agencies such as the FBI and on TPUSA to clarify unanswered questions and reconcile discrepancies in their account of the events of September 10, 2022.
Much like the unresolved shadows that followed the JFK assassination, Charlie Kirk’s killing has placed intelligence agencies, the military, the FBI, and even foreign actors like Israel at the center of a fraught public controversy, not through proven culpability (at least not yet), but through the swirl of suspicion and unanswered questions that inevitably surround the death of a defining religious and political figure in the American conservative sphere, leaving many to ask whether this is coincidence or something more troubling left unexplained.
Christian Zionism and Israeli Influence
No discussion of modern Evangelical power is complete without considering the strategic relationship between U.S. Evangelicals and the State of Israel.
This alliance is public and well-documented. Evangelical Christians, especially in the United States, became one of the most reliable pro-Israel voting blocs, influenced not just by policy arguments but by theological frameworks, Christian Zionism, which frames Israel as divinely central to biblical prophecy.
Israeli political leaders and advocacy organisations have cultivated this alignment via:
- Pastors’ conferences in Israel
- Evangelical media networks and tours
- Donor networks and lobbying partnerships
Organisations such as Christians United for Israel (CUFI) mobilise millions of voters, influence Congressional votes, and amplify foreign policy priorities. During the Trump administration, these networks helped drive decisions like the Jerusalem embassy relocation, Iran policy shifts, and strengthened U.S.-Israel alignment.
Yet this partnership is not uncontested. Younger conservatives and Evangelicals, particularly those aligned with independent thinkers like Charlie Kirk, increasingly question whether faith-based loyalty to foreign policy interests undermines America-first priorities. This generational tension highlights a growing divergence within conservative Christianity: between inherited religious-political alliances and emerging calls for national sovereignty, prudence, and domestic priority.
Moreover, the case of Turning Point USA illustrates how foreign influence can intersect with faith-based movements to shape political power. TPUSA’s open alignment with pro-Israel advocacy networks, from educational trips and conferences to donor engagement, demonstrates how theological and ideological commitments can be leveraged to advance strategic interests. This organisational alignment and associated messaging reveal a clear pattern of external actors using popular religious and political networks to sway domestic policy and voter priorities in the United States. This dynamic mirrors broader trends seen in movements like Calvary Chapel, where charismatic leaders and faith communities, intentionally or not, become conduits for shaping societal and political behaviour, highlighting how belief can be instrumentalised as a tool of influence. Believers are constantly reminded by pastors such as Garid Beeler, of VISION Calvary Chapel in Irvine, CA, that they need to unconditionally embrace the so-called God’s plan for Israel, which in their eyes legitimises Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and the subsequent genocide, on the basis that the Lord specifically gave the Hebrews the land thousands of years ago.
Believers as Collateral in the Machinery of Influence
The story of institutional capture is not about disloyal Christians or malign churches. It is about power exploiting vulnerability.
The State Department, CIA, and allied actors like Israel did not invent faith crises, but they mastered the art of steering movements. They understood that belief motivates action, doctrine shapes identity, and institutions built on trust are uniquely vulnerable to manipulation.
Jay Dyer’s analysis, which we are featuring today, frames this landscape without demonising believers: faith itself is not the enemy, but it has been treated as a resource, managed, redirected, and at times hollowed out by forces whose goals are strategic, political and financial, rather than spiritual.
If Christianity is to withstand this era with integrity intact, it will require discernment, humility, vigilance, and, of course, the ability to separate the Gospel from the machinery of power. The war was never against believers, but belief, as an institution, has been under attack all the same.
Jay Dyer writes about the historical and geopolitical factors of state and private interference in ecclesial and religious affairs…
Institutional Capture Explained: The State Dept, CIA & Orthodox, Roman Catholic & Protestant Churches
The notion of state interference in the life of the Church is well known to students of Church history: Arian Emperors, Imperial support for iconoclasm, the Frankish and Germanic control of the papacy, as well as the investiture controversy should all come to mind. These famous scandals demonstrate the persistent cunning on the part of the state to install, influence and control religiosity in the realm, and to students of geopolitics this should also come as no surprise. What is odd, however, is that when this concept arises in modern discussions, it is relegated immediately to the domain of “conspiracy theory,” unless of course you are talking about the KGB and NKVD relationship to Russian clerics in the 20th century.
It only turns out to be a “conspiracy theory” when one points to the US State Department, the CIA, various foundations, NGOS and academic institutions (often closely linked to the intelligence apparatus) – all of whom openly seek to alter and change Orthodox theology, as well as the theological positions of the Roman Catholic and Protestant communions. First, it is worth noting that missionary work is a classic espionage cover: Obviously, I don’t mean all missionaries are spies, but that it has famously been a useful cover for espionage work, which is precisely why Russia has recently banned groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientology. These entities can be used as a form of soft power or even more covert intelligence operations. Similarly, classic cover for foreign operations of this sort has used aid organisation cover, such as the Red Cross or USAID.
In fact, even mainline publications regularly report this fact, though it seems to be lost on so many, especially among the intelligentsia who pride themselves on grasping the practicality of realpolitik. Christianity Today writes:
“Many of America’s first spies were missionaries or came from missionary backgrounds. Often enough, they were the only Americans who had lived abroad—not just among locals but as locals. While other American spies learned about the world through books and couldn’t really grasp its full range of quirks and complexities—“like tourists who put ketchup on their tacos,” as Sutton puts it—missionaries spoke several languages and knew the subtle differences between local dialects. They understood local cultures and faiths from the ground up and knew intuitively how to navigate between them. They knew, in short, “how to totally immerse themselves in alien societies.” But they always identified first and foremost as Christians and as Americans, and when they were called to serve the nation, they did not hesitate to do so.”
This was not unique or new; Orthodox monastic spies were also used by British intelligence in the infamous case of “Father Dimitrios”:
“The story of Father Dimitrios, or David Balfour, who turned out to be a British spy in pre-World War II Greece, is a fascinating yet relatively little-known chapter in modern Greek history.”
Father Dimitrios, the monk with the voice of an angel, turned out to be a spy for the British Intelligence Service. That’s a shame because the mission and wartime actions of the British priest could make a nail-biting spy novel or film.
From 1937 to 1939, the English spy, wearing his priest’s robes and his long, bifurcated beard, performed his ecclesiastical duties close to Greece’s royal family. His relations with King George II, the successor to King Paul and Princess Frederica, were especially close. His access to the royal palace undoubtedly gave him access to valuable information.
British Intelligence must have learned a great deal about the Greek royal family during these crucial prewar years. King George II was a paternal first cousin of Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
Members of the royal family often confessed to their beloved priest. At the same time, Balfour, under the cover of Father Demetrios, forged important acquaintances with high-ranking military officers and politicians with the blessings of the palace.
During World War 2, for example, dozens of missionaries were using their clerical cloaks as their espionage cloak, spying for the Allies. Time Magazine explains:
“His [Protestant Missionary Alfred Eddy] most audacious undertaking included a plot to “kill,” as he described it, “all members of the German and Italian Armistice Commission in Morocco and in Algeria the moment the landing takes place.” In a straightforward and matter-of-fact memo, he told OSS head William Donovan that he was targeting dozens of people. He additionally ordered the executions of “all known agents of German and Italian nationality.” Never one to mince words, he called the proposal an “assassination program.”
To orchestrate his bloodthirsty plot, Eddy hired a team of Frenchmen. He planned to frame the executions as a “French revolt against Axis domination.” “In other words,” he explained to Donovan, “it should appear that the dead Germans and Italians were ‘the victims’ of a French ‘reprisal against the shooting of hostages by the Germans and other acts of German terror,” and not an OSS operation.
At about the same time that he was recruiting French hitmen, he wrote to his family about the sacrifices he was making for Lent. He described the Easter season as “abnormal” this year. “I am certainly abstaining from wickedness of the flesh,” he confessed. With his wife thousands of miles away, that was not too difficult. “I haven’t even been to a movie since Lisbon, I don’t overeat anymore, and I allow myself a cocktail at night, but never before work is all done.”
And,
“American intelligence leaders had stumbled upon the fact that missionaries make great spies. They have excellent language skills, they know how to disappear into foreign cultures, and they are masters at effecting change abroad. But while missionary spooks believed that their wartime work was necessary, they also wrestled with the moral ambiguities inherent in their actions.”
This is just one example among countless, but it serves to illustrate the point – in this case, the supposed man of the cloth is engaged in assassination missions. A fortiori, the US Government would also see the power in utilising religion for the promotion of Americanism. During the Cold War this was ramped up to extreme degrees as CIA operatives and strategists like C.D. Jackson allied with media magnate and Skull & Bonesman Henry Luce – of Time Magazine, to recruit various prominent academics and Jesuits like John Courtenay Murray to help ensure the Vatican and in particular the Second Vatican Council, would include in its dogmatic degrees new doctrinal statements that were amenable to Americanism. This unique style of interference was even highlighted by a congressional investigation in 1996 into the CIA’s use of ministers and journalists here (including Peace Corps Volunteers).
This was combined with separate operations from Helliwell, Angleton, Donovan & Colby to utilise Opus Dei, the Vatican Bank and drug running for black operations funding in the now infamous Operation Gladio, which also saw the See of Rome aligning itself with organised crime to supposedly “save the world from communism.” However, as Catholic lawyer David Wemhoff has demonstrated in his masterful and unparalleled 800-page, vastly sourced tome, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life Magazine and the American Proposition, Jackson’s now declassified “Doctrinal Warfare Program” led the Roman Church into the hands of new masters at the US State Department and the CIA.
Indeed, this is precisely why Pre and Post-Vatican 2 popes, from Pius XII to Paul VI to John Paul 2 were meeting with Colby, Kissinger and William Casey on a consistent basis during the Cold War. And, if you are a perceptive reader, you can already piece together the blackmail and compromise operations that the world has seen through the Epstein saga were simply a window into how these institutions were similarly blackmailed and compromised, which is why there have been so many scandals in the Roman Church concerning pedo crimes, and likely relates to why Benedict resigned.
In regard to the Protestant Churches, the Rockefeller family is quite proud of, and openly brags about their influence and dominance of the Protestant religious world, through their donations and tax-free foundation offerings. These offerings, of course, come with strings attached, such as the decision to push the newly formed “social gospel” concept of the early 20th century. Eventually, the Rockefellers were creating entire seminaries and universities dedicated to the promotion of David’s influences from Keynesian/Fabian and Austrian economic theory, as well as Malthusianism and eventually technocracy, through the recruitment of Zbigniew Brzezinski after the publication of his seminal 1970 text, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era.
Few know David Rockefeller himself spent time in intelligence work and transferred this knowledge of networking and banking operations into his business ventures, as he discusses in his Memoirs. In fact, Brzezinski’s book also includes chapters discussing the role of the Post-Vatican 2 Roman Catholic Church in the promotion of Americanism and technocratic hegemony. It should also be noted that the Rockefellers didn’t merely have an interest in steering the Protestant and evangelical churches into liberalism and modernism, but also set their sights on Rome and Orthodoxy, as Wemhoff notes.
For the Orthodox World, the price of siding between two thieves came at a high cost, as the Orthodox England blog notes, concerning the place of the Russian Orthodox Church between the KGB and the CIA. Similarly, it has recently been declassified that the OSS placed pressure on the Patriarch of Constantinople, as the CIA said:
“In an OSS interoffice memo dated March 26, 1942, an intelligence agent named Ulius L. Amoss wrote this to a fellow OSS agent named David Burns:
The Archbishop was extremely pleased at having met and lunched with you. He has told me that the entire facilities of his organisation are at our disposal. He put it in these words: “I have three Bishops, three hundred priests and a large and far-flung organisation. Everyone under my order is under yours. You may command them for any service you require. There will be no questions asked, and your directions will be executed faithfully. Please tell Mr Burns for me that this is so.”
A month later, on April 25, the 56-year-old Greek Archbishop attempted to enlist in the U.S. Army. He was turned down.
A few weeks after that, on May 14, Ulias Amoss, the same intelligence agent who wrote the March 26 memorandum, wrote a letter to Athenagoras, thanking him for the Greek Archdiocese’s ongoing cooperation, saying, in part, “The care with which your Bishops and Priests have cooperated has impressed everyone and the report that, perhaps, as many as a hundred thousand names will be returned to us is astounding.” On the same day, William J. Donovan himself — the head of the OSS — also wrote to Athenagoras, “The reports and descriptions of Greek-American youth of military age so kindly undertaken by you are coming in in splendid volume. The care with which Your Grace has managed this important service is of great interest to our armed services, and I wish to express my deep appreciation for your loyal and patriotic assistance.”
This special relationship with US intelligence never ended and continues to this day as the backdrop to the actions of the Phanar and GOARCH in the US:
“Archbishop Elpidophoros, the head of the Patriarchate of Constantinople’s Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, was the honoured guest at the National Intelligence University in Maryland earlier this week, where he delivered an address to the U.S. intelligence community.
The university brings together faculty and students from all 18 of the nation’s intelligence communities.
As the Greek Archdiocese notes, the Archbishop’s talk on “Russia’s Weaponisation of Religion in the Ukraine Conflict” was the first-ever address from a GOARCH leader to the U.S. intelligence community. At the same time, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has a long history of cooperation with the U.S. intelligence community, as detailed in documents released by the CIA.”
While it may seem like a far-off footnote in a dusty history book on Byzantium or the Borgia Papacy, the reality of state and private interference (and control!) in religion is a stark reality. The goal of the state is the maintenance and projection of power, simply put. Religion is a tremendous force for control and power in the world, both good and evil, but for the state, religion is simply another domain of human culture for the projection of power, and in today’s world, that is most often projected as soft power.
If you have not read Joseph Nye’s famous essay on Soft Power, I recommend it here. Understanding soft power gives a window into the attitude of the power elite and their perspective on religions and sects as tools – pawns on the grand chessboard, to use Brzezinski’s terminology. One need only think of Brzezinski’s own recruitment and usage of what would become Al Qaeda in the Soviet War in Afghanistan in Operation Cyclone – the usage of a radical religious sect for US objectives – as a classic example.
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How the CIA hid their MKULTRA mind-control program
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | September 17, 2021
Back in the early 1990s, I spoke with John Marks, author of Search for the Manchurian Candidate. This was the book (1979) that helped expose the existence and range of the infamous CIA MKULTRA program.
Marks related the following facts to me. He had originally filed many Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests for documents connected to the CIA’s mind-control program. He got nothing back.
Finally, as if to play a joke on him, someone at the CIA sent Marks 10 boxes of financial and accounting records. The attitude was, “Here, see what you can do with this.”
I’ve seen some of those records. They’re very boring reading.
But Marks went through them, and lo and behold, he found he could piece together MKULTRA projects, based on the funding data.
Eventually, he assembled enough information to begin naming names. He conducted interviews. The shape of MKULTRA swam into view. And so he wrote his book, Search for the Manchurian Candidate.
He told me that three important books had been written about MKULTRA, and they all stemmed from those 10 boxes of CIA financial records. There was his own book; Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart; and The Mind Manipulators by Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton. … continue
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