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Uncovering CIA-Funded Experiments On Children In Europe During The Cold War

Was the CIA involved in sponsoring West German pedophilic foster homes overseen by the Social Democratic Party?

By Kit Klarenberg – The Dissenter – January 31, 2022

On January 26, The Dissenter covered how the CIA funded unethical experiments on Danish orphans for at least two decades from the early 1960s onwards.

These grim trials were conducted as part of the mind control program MKULTRA, which was secretly farmed out overseas as it wound down in the United States due to the threat of exposure.

A 1963 CIA Inspector General report shows that the expansion worldwide had unfolded for some time.

“It does not follow termination of covert testing of MKULTRA materials on unwitting U.S. citizens will bring the program to a halt. Some testing on foreign nationals has been occurring under the present arrangements,” the document stated. “Various U.S. deep cover agents overseas would appear to be more favorably situated than the U.S. narcotics agents to perform realistic testing.”

As such, it’s reasonable—and indeed vital—to ask, where else in the world did the CIA support unethical human experiments on vulnerable and defenseless youths?

West Germany, the country forged in May 1949 from the military occupation zones of the U.S., United Kingdom, and France, could be one place where the mind control program expanded.

Helmut Kentler and the Pedagogical Center

At precisely the same time that CIA-directed psychological torment of Danish orphans was underway, authorities in West Berlin were dabbling with something even more diabolical – state-endorsed pedophilia.

Psychologist Helmut Kentler advocated in the 1960s for placing vulnerable youths in the care of pedophiles—on the ostensible basis that “loving environments” would effectively integrate them into society.

An influential figure, Kentler used his extensive political connections to market his ideas directly to lawmakers and state institutions.

Kentler established the Pedagogical Center in February 1965 to conduct various tests and trials. The results were supposed to help educational authorities develop best practices for nurturing the nation’s youth.

Fully endorsed by the city’s Senate and Social Democratic Party (SPD) and West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt, the Center was granted a multi-million dollar budget, along with 37 staff. It was overseen by SPD Senator for Schools and Education Carl-Heinz Evers, who knew Kentler personally. (Brandt later served as West German chancellor 1969 – 1974.)

Children in West Berlin were sent to live with pedophilic foster parents at Kentler’s direction in 1969.

Kentler’s ideas gained increased currency in the wake of incendiary student protests, which erupted across much of the Western world the previous year. These mass actions revitalized the writings of Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, in particular his early 1930s works The Sexual Struggle of Youth and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Reich’s thesis was suppression of sexuality went hand-in-hand with obedience to authoritarianism, as an individual’s perspectives and predispositions were formed during their formative years. The argument went that it was necessary for people of all ages to become sexualized, and embrace their sexuality.

The resurrection of Reich’s ideas was no doubt welcome to West Germany’s occupying powers. The notion Germans were psychologically and genetically disposed towards aggression and dictatorship—and that German society needed to be drastically reordered to blunt these tendencies—was widespread in the aftermath of World War II.

In fact, the U.K. and U.S. had long-pursued wide-ranging social engineering efforts to that end.

A key architect was Scottish-born psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, who played a significant role in the Nuremberg trials. His work The Social Reorganization of Germany argued Germans craved strict order and regimentation delivered by strong leaders, and these inclinations were fostered during childhood. He went so far as to advocate restrictions on which Germans could have offspring as a result.

Cameron’s shaping of post-war Germany is largely forgotten. Strikingly, he is more well known for his contributions to the MKULTRA program. He sought to create a real-life “Manchurian Candidate” for the CIA via various macabre means, such as forcing his patients to listen to hours of audio messages while under the influence of a drug cocktail that left their mind a “blank slate,” onto which new behaviors could be programmed.

The monstrous technique was called “psychic driving.” While it failed to produce remote-controlled humans as hoped, its “primary values” were said to be “penetration of defenses [and] elicitation of hitherto inaccessible material,” which may account for why Cameron’s methods of sensory deprivation and psychological torment were widely practiced on Guantanamo Bay prisoners in the “War on Terrorism.”

The Likelihood That The CIA Encouraged The Kentler Experiments

An independent University of Hildesheim investigation of the Kentler experiments published in June 2020 concluded that a “network” of actors “tolerated, strengthened, and legitimized pedophile positions [and] also arranged and justifed pedophilic assaults in foster homes, shared apartments and other care constellations.” These actors systematically covered up “physical, sexual, or emotional mistreatment of children.”

The fundamental element of this nexus was the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It dominated West Berlin’s assorted political bodies and local governmental departments at every level, and one of the young boys housed with a pedophile claimed the party’s West Berlin branch “deliberately selected” him for the experiment.

Acccording to CIA whistleblower Philip Agee’s 1978 book Dirty Work, Langley played a pivotal role in managing the SPD and shaping its policies throughout the Cold War. He claimed West Germany was “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs, designed to create an internal structure… which would be pro-American and anti-Communist, and to secure commercial interests.”

“The CIA supported not only the CDU (Christian Democratic Union), but also the SPD and the trade unions,” Agee wrote. “The CIA wanted the influence of the two major political parties to be strong enough to shut out and hold down any left opposition… [those] movements had to be discredited and destroyed.”

CIA units involved were “charged with special responsibilities for making contact with organizations and people within the political establishment,” such as the SPD and its elected representatives. “All information collected” was then used “to infiltrate and manipulate these organizations.”

Such penetration surely accounts for the SPD repudiating its radical Marxist roots in 1959 and abandoning all commitments to challenging capitalism.

As Agee described, during this period the CIA worked “systematically” to ensure “socialist parties of the free world [toed] a line compatible with American interests.”

Did the Agency moreover sanction if not outright encourage the Kentler experiments? Was Kentler a “U.S. deep cover agent overseas,” in the CIA Inspector General report’s phrase?

Whatever the truth of the matter, that document also called for MKULTRA experiments to be conducted in dedicated operational settings with strengthened “structure and controls.”

Foster homes and orphanages may have represented ideal environments from the CIA’s perspective. This certainly seems to have been the case in Denmark, as its central population register meant children experimented on could be tracked over the course of many years.

At the very least, it strains credulity to believe the CIA was not well-aware of what Kentler advocated. In fact, one of the Pedagogical Center’s key founders and planning committee members was James B. Conant, the first U.S. Ambassador to West Germany and adviser on educational issues in West Berlin from 1963-1965.

Conant was invited to join the center by Mayor Brandt, and the CIA-connected Ford Foundation. A 1983 National Academy of Science obituary records Conant “played a critical role in rallying support for this project,” eerily adding, “he unquestionably had an influence on adjustments that have been made in German education.”

European Countries Should Seek Answers

It was not until several years after Kentler’s death in July 2008 that his work and legacy was critically examined.

Shockingly, multiple contemporary obituaries paid positive tribute to the psychologist. Berlin daily newspaper Tageszeitung, which avowedly provided a figurative soapbox and megaphone to pedophiles and pro-pedophile organizations, deemed Kentler a “meritorious fighter for a permissive sexual morality.”

In fact, the University of Hildesheim’s probe represented the first truly extensive insight into Kentler’s experiments. It exposed how the psychologist’s narrative of events—that he had sought to place at-risk youths in caring environments in the sincere but dangerously misguided hope it would be beneficial for them, and these trials were short-lived and limited in scope—was completely false. Nonetheless, this was for many years accepted and endorsed even by critical media outlets and academics.

Hildesheim’s report showed facilitating abuse of foster home residents, vulnerable or not, was always Kentler’s primary objective, and the management of pedophile-run accommodations of this type continued until at least 2003.

That year, the foster home of Fritz H (a pseudonym) was closed, having opened 30 years ago. In that time, 10 youths passed through its doors, some simultaneously. Fritz was said to have “constantly and proactively” looked for new foster subjects all along, in a manner that was “unusual”.

Two children, who spent time in Fritz’s home, “impressively” reconstructed their experiences to University investigators, reporting “opaque and incomprehensible procedures, massive experiences of violence and abuse in many instances, and [the] strong influence” of Kentler on the residence.

Among documents related to Fritz’s foster home, a “large number of strong signals in the record,” such as a psychologist’s report, proof of completed legal proceedings regarding child abduction and child sexual abuse, a critical assessment by the Health Office, and an autopsy after the unexplained death of a child in Fritz’s custody, were identified, which should have prompted officials to critically reassess his suitability as a foster parent.

Instead, Fritz was regarded as a “robust and immune figure,” and the West Berlin Youth Welfare Office even defended him. There is no reason to believe he was alone.

West Germany was dotted with shared pedophile-run accommodations, where “sexual transgressions and assaults took place” for decades throughout the Cold War.

Another victim interviewed by the university was placed in a foster home run by West Berlin’s District Office in the early 1980s as a youth. He testified to his adoptive father’s “sexual transgressions and assaults,” child pornographic material he found in the man’s possessions, and letters he wrote to authorities about the monstrous conditions in which he lived. No authorities took action.

Those tasked with administering these vile experiments were allowed to commit awful crimes against vulnerable children for many decades. They benefited from a strict code of silence on the part of officials. A similar dynamic existed in Denmark, where authorities shredded records related to CIA experiments on orphans after learning the criminal conspiracy was finally being scrutinized by outsiders (decades after the fact).

An urgent need exists for potential CIA connections to the Kentler scandal to be independently investigated. Moreover, all European countries should work to uncover which abusive experiments or programs involving children were supported by the agency during the Cold War.

April 28, 2024 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular | CIA, Human rights | Leave a comment

China calls for ‘international investigation’ into Nord Stream attack

RT | April 27, 2024

China’s deputy envoy to the UN has called for an international probe into the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, adding that Russia would be involved in such an investigation.

“With the situation standing where it is, one cannot help but suspect a hidden agenda behind the opposition to an international investigation, while lamenting the potential cover-up and loss of quantities of compelling evidence,” China’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, Geng Shuang, said on Friday, according to the Xinhua news agency.

“We reiterate our call for the early launch of a UN-led international investigation to bring the truth to light for the international community,” Geng continued, adding that Western nations should “actively communicate and cooperate with Russia and jointly investigate the incident.”

Nord Stream 1 and 2 each comprised two separate pipelines, linking Russia and Germany. Three out of the four lines were destroyed in a series of explosions near the Danish island of Bornholm in September 2022, severing Germany’s energy ties to Russia and leaving its gas-dependent economy reliant on more expensive American liquefied natural gas.

Germany, Sweden, and Denmark all opened investigations into the attack, but Sweden and Denmark closed their inquiries in February. Swedish investigators published no conclusions, while the Danish team concluded that “there was deliberate sabotage,” but declined to blame the attack on anyone.

China and Russia have demanded an international investigation into the bombings since last year. However, the UN Security Council rejected a Russian request for such a probe last March, with Washington’s deputy envoy to the UN, Robert Wood, accusing Russia of trying to “discredit the work of ongoing national investigations.”

On Saturday, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry appeared to reject Geng’s proposal, telling Russia’s TASS news agency that an “investigation is already being conducted by the German Public Prosecutor General’s Office.”

Absent any official conclusions, two competing theories about the bombings have emerged. According to reports in the Western mainstream media, a team of Ukrainian commandos used a rented yacht to transport explosives to the blast sites, with the CIA and European intelligence agencies being made aware of the plot several months beforehand but ultimately failing to stop it.

American journalist Seymour Hersh has said that US President Joe Biden ordered the CIA to blow up the pipelines. Citing sources in the intelligence community, Hersh has claimed that CIA divers working with the Norwegian Navy planted remotely-triggered bombs on the lines in the summer of 2022, using a NATO exercise in the region as cover.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that he “fully agrees” with Hersh’s conclusions. Russian Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov, who is leading Moscow’s investigation into the blasts, said last month that “everyone knows perfectly well who did it,” and that “the tracks undoubtedly lead beyond the Atlantic,” – an apparent reference to the US.

April 27, 2024 Posted by aletho | War Crimes | China, CIA, Germany, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

Final Nail in America’s Coffin?

By Ron Paul | April 22, 2024

When future historians go searching for the final nail in the US coffin, they may well settle on the date April 20, 2024.

On that day Congress passed legislation to fund two and a half wars, hand what’s left of our privacy over to the CIA and NSA, and give the US president the power to shut down whatever part of the Internet he disagrees with.

The nearly $100 billion grossly misnamed “National Security Supplemental” guarantees that Ukrainians will continue to die in that country’s unwinnable war with Russia, that Palestinian civilians will continue to be slaughtered in Gaza with US weapons, and that the neocons will continue to push us toward a war with China.

It was a total victory for the war party.

The huge spending bill is all about politics for Biden, yet so many Republicans simply went along with it. The last thing the people running Biden’s White House want to see as a close election approaches are ads blaming Biden for “losing Ukraine.”

The US and its allies have already sent over $300 billion to Ukraine and the country is still losing its war with Russia. Nobody believes another $60 billion will pull a victory from the jaws of defeat. But this additional money is meant to keep up appearances until November at the expense of Americans who are forced to pay for it and Ukrainians who are forced to die for it.

Speaker Johnson could not have passed these monstrosities without the full support of House Democrats, as the majority of Republicans voted against more money for Ukraine. So in the worst example of “bipartisanship,” Johnson reached across the aisle, stiffed the Republican majority that elected him Speaker, and pushed through a massive gift to the warfare/(corporate) welfare state.

After the House voted to send another $60 billion to notoriously corrupt Ukraine, Members waved Ukrainian flags on the House Floor and chanted “Ukraine, Ukraine.” While I find it distasteful and disgusting, in some way it seemed fitting. After all, they may as well chant the name of a foreign country because they certainly don’t care about this country!

Along with sending $100 billion that we don’t have to fund more overseas war, Speaker Johnson threw in another version of the Tik Tok ban, which gives Joe Biden and future presidents the power to shut down websites at will by simply declaring them to be “foreign adversary controlled.”

Not to be outdone, the US Senate on that same day passed the extension of Section 702 of the FISA Act, which not only allowed the government to continue spying on us without a warrant, but also contained new language massively expanding how they can spy on us.

Many conservative voters are asking what the point of Republican control of the House is if the agenda is determined by Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is even reported to have bragged to his colleagues about how easily Speaker Johnson gave Democrats everything they wanted and asked for nothing in return.

What is the silver lining in all this bad news? Most Republicans in the House voted against continuing the Ukraine war. That’s a good start. Our ideas are growing, not only across the country but even in the DC swamp. Take courage and don’t give up! Work for peace!

April 22, 2024 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Wars for Israel | CIA, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

The CIA Wants More Power to Spy on Americans!

By Judge Andrew Napolitano | April 11, 2024

Americans need to be aware of the unbridled propensity of federal intelligence agencies to spy on all of us without search warrants as required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

These agencies believe that the Fourth Amendment — which protects the individual right to privacy — only regulates law enforcement and does not apply to domestic spying.

There is no basis in the constitutional text, history or judicial interpretations for such a limiting and toothless view of this constitutional guarantee. The courts have held that the Fourth Amendment restrains government — all government. Last week, the CIA asked Congress to expand its current spying in the United States.

Here is the backstory.

When the CIA was created in 1947, members of Congress who feared the establishment here of the type of domestic surveillance apparatus that the Allies had just defeated in Germany insisted that the new CIA have no role in American law enforcement and no legal ability to spy within the U.S. The legislation creating the CIA contains those unambiguous limitations.

Nevertheless, we know that CIA agents are present in all 50 statehouses in the United States. They didn’t arrive there until after Dec. 4, 1981. That’s the date that President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which purports to give the CIA authority to spy in America — supposedly looking for narcotics from foreign countries — but keeps from law enforcement whatever it finds.

Stated differently, while Reagan purported to authorize the CIA to defy the limitations imposed upon it by the Constitution and by federal law, he insisted on a “wall” of separation between domestic spying and law enforcement.

So, if the CIA using unconstitutional spying discovered that a janitor in the Russian Embassy in Washington was really a KGB colonel who abused his wife in their suburban Maryland home, under E.O. 12333, it could continue to spy upon him in defiance of the Fourth Amendment and the CIA charter, but it could not reveal to Maryland prosecutors — who can only use evidence lawfully obtained — any evidence of his domestic violence.

All this changed 20 years later when President George W. Bush demolished Reagan’s “wall” between law enforcement and domestic spying and directed the CIA and other domestic spying agencies to share the fruits of their spying with the FBI.

Thus, thanks to Reagan and Bush, and their successors looking the other way, CIA agents have been engaging in fishing expeditions on a grand scale inside the U.S. for the past 20 years. Congress knows about this because all intelligence agencies are required by statute to report the extent of their spying secretly to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

This, of course, does not absolve the CIA of its presidentially authorized computer hacking crimes; rather, it gives Congress a false sense of security that it has a handle on what’s going on.

What’s going on is not government lawyers appearing before judges asking for surveillance warrants based upon probable cause of crime, as the Constitution requires. What’s going on is CIA agents going to Big Tech and paying for access to communications used by ordinary Americans. Some Big Tech firms told the CIA to take a hike. Others took the CIA’s cash and opened the spigots of their fiber-optic data to the voracious federal appetite.

If government lawyers went to a judge and demonstrated probable cause of crime — for example, that a janitor in the Russian Embassy was passing defense secrets to Moscow — surely the judge would have signed a surveillance warrant. But to the government, following the Constitution is too limiting.

Thus, by acquiring bulk data — fiber-optic data on hundreds of millions of Americans acquired without search warrants — the government avoids the time and trouble of demonstrating probable cause to a judge. But that time and trouble were intentionally baked into the Fourth Amendment so as to keep the government off our backs.

Not to be outdone by its principal rival, the FBI soon began doing the same thing — gathering bulk data without search warrants.

When Congress learned of this, it enacted legislation that banned the warrantless acquisition of bulk data. Apparently, Congress is naive enough to believe that the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, their cousin with 60,000 domestic spies, will actually comply with federal law.

Last week, that naivete was manifested front and center when the CIA sent a letter to both congressional intelligence committees addressing its spying on foreign persons and the Americans with whom they communicate, and asking to expand that reach inside the U.S.

The timing of the CIA’s letter coincides with a decision Congress must make in the next 10 days — whether to reenact Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, allow it to expire on April 19 or expand it as the CIA has requested. Section 702 permits warrantless spying on foreigners and the Americans whom intelligence agencies suspect communicate with them. Section 702 is an unconstitutional free pass for domestic spying.

So, notwithstanding the persistent efforts of members of Congress from both parties to limit and in some cases to prohibit the warrantless acquisition of bulk data by the CIA from Americans, the practice continues, the CIA defends it and presidents look the other way.

In 1947, Congress created the CIA monster, which today is so big and so powerful and so indifferent to the Constitution and the federal laws its agents have sworn to uphold that it can boast about its lawlessness, have no fear of defying Congress and always escape the consequences of all this largely unscathed. Even President Harry Truman, who signed the 1947 legislation into law, later acknowledged as much and condemned what the CIA had become.

I suspect the CIA and its cousins will get away with this because they spy on Congress and possess damning personal data on members who regularly vote to increase their secret budgets.

When will we have a government whose officials are courageous enough to uphold the Constitution?

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO

April 11, 2024 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties | CIA, FBI, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Occupied Nation: How the CIA Created Modern Germany

The sprawling U.S. embassy in Berlin. [Source: spiegel.de]

By Kit Klarenberg | CovertAction Magazine | April 9, 2024

On February 4th, The Economist published a devastating analysis—or perhaps, “pre-mortem”—on the collapse of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) under Olaf Scholz’s stewardship. Elected in what the Western media contemporaneously branded a “shock” result in September 2021, hopes for his coalition government in many quarters were high. Today, he enjoys the worst approval ratings of any Chancellor in modern history, and national opinion polls place SPD approval at 15% or lower.

The Economist frames Scholz’s collapsed fortunes, and the prospects of his party’s imminent extinction as a serious force within German politics, as a microcosm of Berlin’s declining economic and political clout more widely. It notes that the nation’s finances have gone “limp” during his tenure, with business-sector confidence collapsing, and record inflation destroying citizens’ incomes and savings. Other sources have detailed the country’s “deindustrialization,” Politico coining the nickname, “Rust Belt on the Rhine.”

In keeping with those meditations on Germany’s ever-worsening woes, The Economist’s bleak diagnosis made no mention of how Western sanctions imposed on Russia in February 2022 created Berlin’s crisis. Scholz was a prominent cheerleader for the Biden administration’s push to “make the Ruble rubble.” Now that effort has so spectacularly backfired that it can no longer be ignored or spun otherwise; Newsweek admits “any realistic war game could have easily predicted” the sanctions would not only fail, but boomerang on the sanctioners.

Those few analysts who predicted the invasion of Ukraine well in advance universally failed to anticipate Berlin would support and facilitate any U.S. counterattack, particularly in the financial sphere. They believed Germany possessed the requisite autonomy and sense not to commit willful economic suicide in service of Empire. After all, the country’s stability, prosperity and power were heavily dependent on cheap, readily accessible Russian energy. Voluntarily ending that supply would be inescapably disastrous.

For this failure, they can be forgiven. Berlin, particularly in the wake of reunification, has successfully presented itself to the world as sovereign, led by sensible people acting in the best interests of their nation, and Europe. In truth, ever since 1945, Germany has been a heavily occupied nation, drowning under the weight of U.S. military installations, and its politics, society and culture aggressively shaped and influenced by the CIA.

This unacknowledged reality is amply spelled out in Agency whistleblower Philip Agee’s 1978 tell-all book, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe. Comprehending who is truly in charge in Berlin, and what interests Germany’s elected representatives are actually serving, is fundamental to understanding why Scholz, et al., so eagerly embraced the self-destructive sanctions. And why the facts of Nord Stream 2’s criminal destruction can never emerge.

“Enormous Presence”

Following World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s undisputed military and economic superpower. As Agee wrote, the overriding aim of U.S. foreign policy thereafter was to “guarantee the coherence of the Western world” under its exclusive leadership. CIA activities were accordingly “directed toward achieving this goal.” In service of the Empire’s global domination project, “left opposition movements had to be discredited and destroyed” everywhere.

After West Germany was forged from the respective occupation zones of Britain, France and the U.S., the fledgling country became a particularly “crucial area” in this regard, serving as “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs” in Europe and elsewhere. Domestic Agency operations in West Germany were explicitly concerned with ensuring the country was “pro-American,” and structured according to U.S. “commercial interests.”

In the process, the CIA covertly supported the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and SPD, and trade unions. The Agency “wanted the influence of the two major political parties to be strong enough to shut out and hold down any left opposition,” Agee explained. The SPD had a radical, Marxist tradition. It was the only party in the Reichstag to vote against the 1933 Enabling Act, which laid the foundations for Germany’s total Nazification, and led to its proscription.

Newly reinstituted following the war, the SPD maintained its revolutionary roots until 1959. Then, under the Godesberg Program, it abandoned any commitment to challenging capitalism in a serious way. It stretches credibility to suggest the CIA was not expressly responsible for neutering the party’s radical tendencies.

In any event, effective control of West German democracy ensured that Washington’s “enormous presence” there–which included hundreds of thousands of troops and almost 300 separate military and intelligence installations—was not challenged by those in power, irrespective of the party to which they belonged, despite a majority of the population consistently opposing U.S. military occupation.

This presence in turn granted the CIA “a number of different covers to work behind,” according to Agee. The majority of its operatives were embedded within the U.S. military, posing as mere soldiers. The Agency’s biggest station was an army base in Frankfurt, although it also boasted units in West Berlin and Munich. U.S. operatives were “highly qualified technicians who tap telephones, open mail, keep people under surveillance, and encode and decode intelligence transmissions,” working “all over the country.”

Dedicated divisions were charged with “making contact with organizations and people within the political establishment,” such as the SPD and its elected representatives. All the intelligence collected was “used to infiltrate and manipulate” the same organizations. The CIA, moreover, collaborated “very closely” with West German security services in many domestic spying efforts, the country’s assorted intelligence agencies conducting operations at the Agency’s direct behest, “often [to] protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”

“Discredit and Destroy”

Intimate bedfellows as they were, there were nonetheless “difficulties” in the CIA’s relationship with its West German counterparts, per Agee. The Agency never fully trusted their protégés, and felt a pronounced need to “keep an eye” on them. Still, this lack of faith was no barrier to the CIA partnering with the BND, West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, to secretly purchase Swiss encryption firm Crypto AG in 1970. Perhaps this was done to “protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”

Crypto AG produced high-tech machines through which foreign governments could transmit sensitive high-level communications around the world, safe from prying eyes. Or so they thought. In reality, the clandestine owners of Crypto AG, and by extension the NSA and GCHQ, could easily decipher any messages sent via the firm’s devices, as they themselves crafted the encryption codes. The connivance operated in total secrecy for decades thereafter, only being exposed in February 2020.

The full extent of the information collected via Crypto AG—along with key national competitor Omnisec AG, which the CIA also owned—and the nefarious purposes to which it was put is unknown. It would be entirely unsurprising though if the harvested data helped inform CIA operations to “discredit and destroy” left-wing opposition in West Germany and beyond, efforts that no doubt continue to this day.

The Cold War may be over, but Germany remains heavily occupied. It hosts the largest number of U.S. troops of any European country, despite an overwhelming majority of the population supporting their partial or total withdrawal in the years following the Berlin Wall’s collapse. In July 2020, then-President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 12,000 soldiers of the 38,600-strong contingent still there.

While intended to punish Germany for greenlighting the now-destroyed Nord Stream 2, polls indicated most Germans were only too happy to say “auf wiedersehen.” In all, 47% were in favor of them leaving, while a quarter called for the permanent closure of all U.S. bases on their soil. Yet, just two weeks after entering the White House, Joe Biden reversed his predecessor’s policy, returning 500 soldiers who had departed.

The President also scrapped plans to relocate the Stuttgart-based U.S. Africa Command, which effectively embeds Washington in the armed forces of 53 countries across the continent, elsewhere in Europe. Research shows the Command’s training programs have precipitated a significant rise in the number of military coups in Africa. As Agee attested, U.S. military bases are a hotbed of CIA spies. Berlin therefore must remain “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs” within and without the country, whether Germans like it or not.

April 10, 2024 Posted by aletho | Deception | CIA, Germany, United States | Leave a comment

Sy Hersh: US Warning of Terrorist Attack in Russia Had ‘Urgent’ Mark, Didn’t Mention Crocus

Sputnik – 03.04.2024

WASHINGTON – The US warning about an imminent terrorist attack at a concert venue in Russia was marked “urgent,” but contrary to media reports did not identify Crocus City Hall as the target, Pulitzer Prize-winning US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his new article, citing a US official familiar with the matter.

The CIA allegedly provided the warning to Russian intelligence before the concert at the Crocus City Hall marking it “urgent,” meaning that the data in it “was credible and near term,” Hersh quoted the official as saying.

“The highly secret report on the attack in Moscow was prepared by the Counterterrorism Center at CIA headquarters and delivered to the terrorism division of the Russian Federal Security Service located in the old KGB building in Moscow. Separate briefings were presented in person by the FBI officer at the embassy. This is an established relationship,” the official said.

The warning, however, did not mention Crocus City Hall near Moscow and only said that an attack was being planned at some “public gathering,” according to the official.

The information provided by the official is contrary to a Washington Post report published on Tuesday claiming that Crocus City Hall was specifically identified in the warning as the target of a terrorist attack.

On March 22, several armed men broke into Crocus City Hall, a major concert venue just outside Moscow, and started shooting at people. They also started a fire in one of the auditoriums, which was full of people ahead of a concert. The attack left 695 casualties, including 144 dead, according to the latest data from the Russian Emergencies Ministry.

The four main suspects in the case — all of them citizens of Tajikistan — tried to flee the scene in a car but were detained and charged with terrorism. Russian authorities believe the perpetrators planned to flee to Ukraine, where a safe haven had been arranged for them. An investigation is underway.

Later in March, The New York Times reported, citing European and US security officials, that the US intelligence agencies did not provide the Russian side with all the information they had about the threat of a terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall in the Moscow Region out of fear that Russian authorities might learn about their intelligence sources or methods of work.

Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Alexander Bortnikov also said that the information transmitted by the United States on the preparation of a terrorist attack was of a general nature, and the Russian special services responded to it.

April 4, 2024 Posted by aletho | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | CIA, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

US Congresswoman Greene Says CIA Running Conflict Against Russia in Ukraine

Sputnik – 03.04.2024

WASHINGTON – The CIA is directing the conflict against Russia on the ground in Ukraine, US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said in an interview with journalist Tucker Carlson.

“To fund a war, to pay for it, to continue it, to advise it, to have our CIA on the ground over there running that war in Ukraine against Russia — nuclear-armed Russia… that is a complete departure from anything that is Christian,” Greene said on Wednesday.

It is contrary to Christian principles to fund wars all over the world, Greene added.

Fighting a “proxy war” in Ukraine against Russia does not protect the US or serve its national security interests, Greene said. People in the US want to see a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, Greene said.

Officials and media lie every single day by claiming that Russia intends to take over Europe, Greene said. Such a claim contradicts statements made by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Greene said.

In February, US media reported that the CIA created a network of spy bases in Ukraine over the past eight years, including a dozen forward operating bases along the Russian border that engaged in operations against Russia. CIA Director William Burns has personally visited Ukraine at least 10 times since February 2022.

April 3, 2024 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Russophobia | CIA, Russia, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment

Ford Foundation, a CIA Facade: The Beginning

By Eduardo Vasco | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 31, 2024

Researcher Frances Stonor Saunders dedicated an entire book, under the title “Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War”, to the work of the United States government to finance influencers of the non-communist left, mainly in Europe and North America.

Intellectuals, journalists, artists and activists (in addition, obviously, to professional politicians) were financed directly or indirectly by the US Central Intelligence Agency through programs to promote culture and development that were nothing more than a façade for it to pour money into determined sectors, in order to combat the influence of the Soviet Union and what it still represented, in one way or another (the revolution and the fight against imperialism).

The CIA’s “cultural war” strategists were thinking not of modifying the leftist policy they financed, but rather of encouraging an already existing policy. It was a left compatible with its interests, which did not clash with the fundamental policy of imperialism. The objective was to strengthen this policy, make it “hegemonic” within the left, making revolutionary and anti-imperialist politics secondary ─ the final victim of these projects.

In this way, the CIA financed the holding of cultural congresses, exhibitions, concerts and the publication of newspapers, magazines, books and films with the intention of promoting “left-wing” ideas and policies perfectly compatible with its own.

Mainly journalistic and theoretical publications had as a fundamental aspect of their editorial line the fight against Marxist and anti-imperialist ideas.

This type of activity is often called “covert operations”, when the US government uses front organizations to hide the involvement of its agencies in conspiracies and operations around the world. Two of the main organizations that serve as a facade for the CIA to this day are the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, “both of which were conscious instruments of the clandestine foreign policy of the United States, with directors and employees who had close ties to the US secret service. American, or were even members of it” (pp. 156-157).

Created in 1936, the Ford Foundation was the tax-exempt cream of the vast Ford fortune, and had assets totaling more than three billion dollars by the late 1950s. Dwight Macdonald memorably described it as “a vast mass of money, completely surrounded by people who want some.” The architects of the Foundation’s cultural policy after World War II were perfectly in tune with the political imperatives that supported the United States’ massive presence on the world stage. At times, the Ford Foundation seemed to be a simple extension of the government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The Foundation had a history of close involvement in clandestine actions in Europe, working closely with those responsible for the Marshall Plan and the CIA on specific projects. This reciprocity was further amplified when Richard Bissell, a Marshall Plan planner whose signature had provided matching funds to Frank Wisner, joined the Ford Foundation in 1952, accurately predicting that there would be “nothing to prevent an individual from exercising as much influence through his work at a private foundation as he could have through government work.” During his tenure at Ford, Bissell met often with Allen Dulles and other CIA officials, including Tracy Barnes, his former classmate at Groton, in a “reciprocal search” for new ideas. He left suddenly to join the CIA as special assistant to Allen Dulles in January 1954, but not before helping to bring the foundation to the forefront of Cold War thinking.

Bissell had worked directly under Paul Hoffman, who became president of the Ford Foundation in 1950. Having come to the Foundation directly from his position as administrator of the Marshall Plan, Hoffman had taken a thorough immersion course in the problems of Europe and the power of ideas for dealing with these problems. He was fluent in the language of psychological warfare and, echoing Arthur Koestler’s 1950 exclamation (“Friends, freedom has gone on the offensive!”), spoke of “fighting the battle of peace.” He also shared with Robert Maynard Hutchins, a spokesman for the Ford Foundation, the view that the State Department was “subject to so much domestic political interference that it can no longer present a complete picture of American culture.”

In 1952, the Ford Foundation debuted in earnest as a CIA front in the international political-cultural arena. This is when the Intercultural Publications Program was created. It allocated 500 thousand dollars to launch the magazine Perspectives, whose target audience was the French, English, Italian and German non-communist left. Its aim was “less to defeat leftist intellectuals in dialectical combat than to lure them away from their positions through aesthetic and rational persuasion,” according to the program’s head, James Laughlin. The magazine’s policy was not to advertise the American lifestyle. “This omission alone will become the most important element of propaganda, in the best sense,” said one academic at the time. That is, the aim was to convey right-wing politics as something left-wing.

(to be continued)

Eduardo Vasco is a Brazilian journalist specializing in international politics.

April 2, 2024 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Deception, Timeless or most popular | CIA, United States | Leave a comment

The terrorist attack in Moscow: customers, inspirers and perpetrators

By Viktor Mikhin – New Eastern Outlook – 31.03.2024

The terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall (Krasnogorsk) took place on 22 March 2024 at around 20:00 Moscow time. The attack was accompanied by mass shooting and explosions: the attackers opened fire on civilians in the building, set fire to the auditorium, and then left the building. The attack killed at least, 143 people (including three children) and injured 182 others. The concert hall was almost completely destroyed by arson and explosions. The attack was one of the largest terrorist attacks in the history of modern Russia, second only to the terrorist attack in Beslan (2004) in terms of the number of victims. The Afghan branch of the international terrorist organisation ISIL claimed responsibility for the attack, with Washington’s acquiescence.

The United States is trying to convince everyone through various channels that there is no trace of Kyiv in the bloody terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall and that it was committed by the group “ISIL” (“Islamic State”, IS, a terrorist group banned in Russia). The attack was carried out by radical Islamists, but Russia is interested in the customer of the crime, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on 25 March at a meeting on measures taken after the attack. “We know in whose hands this atrocity against Russia and its people was committed. We are interested in who the customer is,” the head of state said. Russia’s special services and law enforcement agencies will have to find answers to a number of questions, he said. “How do radical Islamists, who position themselves as faithful Muslims and profess the so-called pure Islam, commit serious atrocities and crimes in the holy month of Ramadan for all Muslims?” – the president noted.

Putin also said that the terrorist attack was an act of intimidation, which raises the question of who benefits from it. “This atrocity may be just one link in a whole series of attempts by those who have been at war with our country since 2014 at the hands of the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv,” the president said. It is also necessary to answer the question of why the terrorists tried to hide in Ukraine and who was waiting for them there. Putin stressed that the investigation should be objective. “Despite our universal pain and sorrow, compassion and legitimate desire to punish all the perpetrators of this atrocity, the investigation must be conducted with the highest degree of professionalism, objectivity, without any political bias,” the president concluded.

After a thorough and comprehensive in-depth analysis of the events that took place in Moscow, it is possible, in the author’s opinion, to consider the following scheme for the murder of numerous Russian civilians during the concert in the Crocus City Hall. It can be assumed that the direct inspirers and customers of such a terrorist attack are the intelligence services of the American CIA and the British MI6. And since they are state services, the US and the UK are behind them. This is the simple and direct logic of human thinking without any echo. It is these two states that, having sent the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv against Russia, are trying, in their own words, to inflict colossal damage that could lead in the future to the disintegration of our homeland into parts ruled by the USA and Great Britain.

If we look at the history of the use of the policy of terrorism, the assassination of leaders and ordinary politicians and the practice of killing civilians by the US government services, the Americans have been using them for a long time and on a large scale. It is enough to recall the US use of nuclear weapons against civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the use of chemicals on a large scale in Vietnam and Syria.

We can recall the fate of two of our excellent TASS journalists, Vitaly Petrusenko and Sergei Losev, who worked together for a long time in the USA, where they were poisoned and died of heart attacks. When they returned to the USSR, they knew about their poisoning, as V. Petrusenko told the author in detail, and they knew about their imminent death. Petrusenko died at the age of 52, Losev at 61. Both were authors of 5 books exposing the nefarious policies of the USA, and in particular wrote in detail about the state conspiracy to assassinate the then US President John F. Kennedy.

One can also recall the assassination by the CIA of numerous foreign politicians who did not agree with the White House’s policy of imposing its domination and right to plunder on all the peoples and countries of the world. For example, about 30 attempts were made on the life of the leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, but all in vain. And finally, the permission to destroy the leader of a foreign country was given to the CIA by the President of the USA. A very famous Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara, was murdered by the CIA.

On 17 January 1961, on Washington’s orders, Patrice Lumumba, the deposed prime minister of the Congo and a famous fighter against colonialism, was brutally murdered. This was followed by a series of assassinations and coups d’état on the African continent, which continue to this day, with the CIA’s sinister hand at work. We can also remember our own time, when the leader of the Libyan Jamahiriya, Muammar Gaddafi, was brutally murdered. The video of this assassination and the angry reaction of the then US Secretary of State, H. Clinton, went round the world. Shamelessly, with her eyes wide open and her saliva spurting, she shouted with joy at the top of her voice: ‘We did it’. The unjustified attack on Iraq and the assassination of its president, Saddam Hussein, were also carried out according to the model of the CIA in cooperation with the British MI6.

It is quite obvious that the client of the criminal attack on Crocus City Hall is also London and its notorious Secret Service MI6, which has not changed its plans to assassinate foreign leaders for several centuries. The famous expression, often attributed to A.V. Suvorov, is well known: “the Englishwoman is shitting again”. For several centuries, Britain has been “shitting” everywhere and all the time, on all those it wants to bend to its will. If, as they say, the British have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies and only permanent interests, then the best, most effective and most permanent tool is a policy of shitting all over the world. One of the most important features of British foreign policy towards its adversaries is that it involves other countries, other forces, in the defence of its interests and seeks to minimise its involvement in the conduct of military operations, especially against a strong adversary. The Moscow attack, allegedly carried out by other interested forces, clearly fits into this strategy, although the CIA undoubtedly knew about it and warned Moscow in a ‘friendly’ manner.

No sooner had the bastards shot Russian civilians attending the concert than US officials started pointing the finger at ISIL, as if they had ordered such a scenario. And indeed, they did. True, the “professionals” of the CIA did not have enough knowledge about what ISIS is (although they themselves created this terrorist organisation) and how it operates. The terrorist act was committed on Friday, which is known to be a holy day for Muslims, created by Allah for prayer and rest, and certainly a faithful Muslim will not commit unjust acts on this day. A Muslim who dies for the sake of his ideals and faith will never take money. But here were the dirty mercenaries whom all Muslim countries, parties and organisations have shunned. Moreover, the ideological Muslim terrorists of ISIL are not running anywhere, they are sacrificing their lives.

Once again, Washington has been “sitting in a puddle” with its clumsy and crude statements, which nobody in the world believed. Moreover, if the Americans knew about the planned terrorist attack, they should have passed on the details of this crime to the Russian FSB, with which the CIA has an agreement on the exchange of information on terrorist actions. This was not done, and Moscow was merely informed of the desire of some hostile forces to carry out a terrorist attack. Very “valuable information”. Moreover, even such information leads to the suspicion that Washington planned the terrorist attack in Moscow in advance and knew about it.

It also raises the suspicion of a clearly planned terrorist action, which is clearly beyond the power of those scoundrels who were merely its executors. All this was done at a high professional military level and the roles in it were planned and defined in advance. And even an escape plan was worked out, whereby the scum drove to the Russian-Ukrainian border, where a window was organised for them to cross into Ukrainian territory.

If we analyse the testimony of the detained scum about how they were found and how they communicated with each other on the Telegram social network, we can clearly see the handwriting of Ukrainian neo-Nazis and their special services. And here we see Ukrainian neo-Nazis technically preparing this terrorist act, which clearly fits into their strategy of destroying the peaceful Russian population. Suffice it to recall the constant shelling of our peaceful towns and villages by Ukrainian neo-Nazis using Western weapons. The neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which has been defeated on the battlefield, is increasingly resorting to terrorist methods. Everything, as they say, fits together.

The organisers of the terrorist attack on the Crocus Town Hall hoped to sow panic and discord in society, but they were met with the unity of all Russians and the rejection of their terrorist methods of intimidation. Moreover, against the backdrop of the terrorist attack, Russian society showed real cohesion, solidarity and determination to resist the evil of terrorism.

March 31, 2024 Posted by aletho | Deception, War Crimes | CIA, UK, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment

How America’s top spymaster sees the world and why that is rather disappointing

By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | March 30, 2024

William J. Burns has published a long piece in Foreign Affairs under the title ‘Spycraft and Statecraft. Transforming the CIA for an Age of Competition‘. This is an essay likely to be read with great attention, maybe even parsed, not only by an American elite audience, but also abroad, in, say, Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi, for several reasons. Burns is, of course, the head of the CIA as well as an acknowledged heavyweight of US geopolitics – in the state and deep-state versions.

Few publications rival Foreign Affairs’ cachet as a US establishment forum and mouthpiece. While Burns’ peg is a plea to appreciate the importance of human intelligence agents, his agenda is much broader: In effect, what he has released is a set of strategic policy recommendations, embedded in a global tour d’horizon. And, last but not least, Burns is, of course, not the sole author. Even if he should have penned every line himself, this is a programmatic declaration from a powerful faction of the American “siloviki,” the men (and women) wielding the still gargantuan hard power of the US empire.

By the way, whether he has noticed or not, Burns’ intervention cannot but bring to mind another intelligent spy chief loyally serving a declining empire. Yury Andropov, former head of the KGB (and then, for a brief period, the whole Soviet Union) would have agreed with his CIA counterpart on the importance of “human assets,” especially in an age of technological progress, and he would also have appreciated the expansive sweep of Burns’ vision. Indeed, with Burns putting himself so front-and-center, one cannot help but wonder if he is not also, tentatively, preparing the ground for reaching for the presidency one day. After all, in the US, George Bush senior famously went from head of the CIA to head of it all, too.

There is no doubt that this CIA director is a smart and experienced man principally capable of realism, unlike all too many others in the current American elite. Famously, he warned in 2008, when serving as ambassador to Moscow, that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” That makes the glaring flaws in this big-picture survey all the more remarkable.

Burns is, obviously, correct when he observes that the US – and the world as a whole – is facing a historically rare moment of “profound” change in the global order. And – with one exception which we will return to – it would be unproductive, perhaps even a little churlish, to quibble over his ideologically biased terminology. His mislabeling of Russia as “revanchist,” for instance, has a petty ring to it. “Resurgent” would be a more civil as well as more truthful term, capturing the fact that the country is simply returning to its normal international minimum status (for at least the last three hundred years), namely that of a second-to-none great power.

Yet Burns’ agenda is more important than his terminology. While it may be complex, parts of it are as clear as can be: He is eager (perhaps desperate) to prevent Washington from ending its massive aid for Ukraine – a battle he is likely to lose. In the Middle East, he wants to focus Western aggression on Iran. He may get his will there, but that won’t be a winning strategy because, in part thanks to multipolar trend setters, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, Iran’s escape from the isolation that the US has long imposed on it is already inevitable.

Regarding China, Burns’ real target is a competing faction of American hawks, namely those who argue that, bluntly put, Washington should write off its losses in Ukraine and concentrate all its firepower on China. Burns wants to persuade his readers that the US can have both its big fight against China and its proxy war against Russia.

He is also engaged in a massive act of CIA boosterism, clearly aiming to increase the clout of the already inordinately powerful state-within-a-state he happens to run himself. And last but not least, the spy-in-chief has unearthed one of the oldest tricks in the subversion and destabilization playbook: Announcing loudly that his CIA is on a recruiting spree in Russia, he seeks to promote a little paranoia in Moscow. Good luck attempting to pull that one on the country that gave us the term “agentura.” Moreover, after the horrific terror attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow, it is fair to assume that Burns regrets having boasted about the CIA expanding its “work” in Russia. Not a good look, not at all.

What matters more, though, than his verbal sallies and his intriguingly straightforward, even blunt aims, are three astonishingly crude errors: First, Burns insists on reading the emerging outcome of the war in Ukraine as a “failure on many levels,” for Russia, revealing its, as he believes, economic, political, and military weakness. Yet, as the acknowledged American economist James K. Galbraith has recently reiterated, the West’s economic war on Russia has backfired. The Russian economy is now stronger, more resilient, and independent of the West than never before.

As to the military, Burns for instance, gleefully counts the tanks that Russia has lost and fails to note the ones it is building at a rapid rate not matched anywhere inside NATO. In general, he fails to mention just how worried scores of Western experts have come to be, realizing that Moscow is overseeing a massive and effective expansion of military production. A curious oversight for an intelligence professional. He also seems to miss just how desperate Ukraine’s situation has become on the ground.

And politics – really? The man who serves Joe Biden, most likely soon to be replaced by Donald Trump, is spotting lack of popularity and fragility in Moscow, and his key piece of evidence is Prigozhin and his doomed mutiny? This part of Burns’ article is so detached from reality that one wonders if this is still the same person reporting on Russian red lines in 2008. The larger point he cannot grasp is that, historically, Russia has a pattern of starting wars on the wrong foot – to then learn, mobilize, focus, and win.

Burns’ second severe mistake is his argument that, ultimately, only China can pose a serious challenge to the US. This is staggeringly shortsighted for two reasons: First, Russia has just shown that it can defeat the West in a proxy war. Once that victory will be complete, a declining but still important part of the American empire, NATO/EU-Europe will have to deal with the after-effects (no, not Russian invasion, but political backlash, fracturing, and instability). If Burns thinks that blowback in Europe is no serious threat to US interests, one can only envy his nonchalance.

Secondly, his entire premise is perfectly misguided: It makes no sense to divide the Russian and the Chinese potentials analytically because the are now closely linked in reality. It is, among other things, exactly a US attempt to knock out Russia first to then deal with China that has just failed. Instead, their partnership has become more solid.

And error number three is, perhaps, even odder: As mentioned above, Burns’ language is a curious hybrid between an analytical and an intemperate idiom. A sophisticated reader can only wince in vicarious embarrassment at hearing a CIA director complain of others’ “brutish” behavior. What’s worse: the tub-thumping or the stones-and-glasshouse cringe? Mostly, though, this does not matter.

Yet there is one case where these fits of verbal coarseness betray something even worse than rhetorical bravado: Describing Hamas’ 7 October assault as “butchery,” Burns finds nothing but an “intense ground campaign” on Israel’s side. Let’s set aside that this expression is a despicable euphemism, when much of the world rightly sees a genocide taking place in Gaza, with US support. It also bespeaks an astounding failure of the strategic imagination: In the same essay, Burns notes correctly that the weight of the Global South is increasing, and that, in essence, the great powers will have to compete for allegiances that are no longer, as he puts is, “monogamous.” Good luck then putting America’s bizarre come-what-may loyalty to Israel first. A CIA director at least should still be able to distinguish between the national interests of his own country and the demands of Tel Aviv.

Burns’ multipronged strike in the realm of elite public debate leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. It is genuinely disappointing to see so much heavy-handed rhetoric and such basic errors of analysis from one of the less deluded members of the American establishment. It is also puzzling. Burns is not amateurish like Antony Blinken or a fanatic without self-possession, such as Victoria Nuland. Yet here he is, putting his name to a text that often seems sloppy and transparent in its simple and short-sighted motivations. Has the US establishment decayed so badly that even its best and brightest now come across as sadly unimpressive?

Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.

March 30, 2024 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular | CIA, Russia, United States | Leave a comment

Ukrainian oligarch possibly involved in terrorist attack as GUR becomes CIA asset

By Lucas Leiroz | March 28, 2024

Investigations into those responsible for the attack on Crocus City Hall remain ongoing. Although it is known that the killers are Islamic radicals from Central Asia, there is still no confirmation as to who the real mastermind of the crime was. However, suspicions of involvement by Ukrainian and Western intelligence agencies are growing more and more. Additionally, there is the possibility that a prominent Ukrainian oligarch is financing such terrorist acts against Moscow.

As well known, there are complex corruption schemes and illicit activities in Ukraine involving local and international agents. Nevertheless, little is known on how deeply connected these criminal networks are with Kiev-sponsored terrorism. Ukrainian oligarchs not only commit tax crimes and money laundering, but use their personal profits to promote terror against the “enemies” of the neo-Nazi regime.

Recently, Russian authorities have been investigating the case of Nikolai Zlochevsky, the owner of the Ukrainian gas company “Burisma”. Zlochevsky has already become widely known around the world for his illicit activities, mainly due to his close relationships with the Biden family – even more especially, with Hunter Biden, son of the American president. Hunter worked at Burisma while living in Ukraine, where he participated in Zlochevsky’s illicit schemes.

Later, Zlochevsky passed a lot of sensitive data about Hunter Biden’s crimes to an FBI informant, generating a public scandal that went viral in the English-language media. The information also confirms that the Bidens’ involvement is not restricted to Hunter, with the American president and other public figures from the Democratic Party participating in illegal Ukrainian business.

However, little has been said in the media so far about the real reason why Zlochevsky and his American partners were protected by Ukrainian authorities despite violating local laws: in exchange for a carte blanche in corruption, Zlochevsky became a sponsor of the Ukrainian war machine. The oligarch has been sending large sums of money to institutions in the Ukrainian military and intelligence sectors for years. His work has been vital, especially in the purchase of drones for the Ukrainian armed forces, for example. The most controversial, however, is the financial support given by Zlochevsky to the secret activities of the GUR (Kiev’s military intelligence).

Zlochevsky has been identified by Russian investigators as one of GUR’s main backers. It is believed that he has already sent a total of 22.5 million US dollars to the agency. State agencies, in theory, should not receive this type of irregular funding, which leads us to believe that this cash is used for parallel, unofficial activities – which, in the Ukrainian case, means real terrorism.

Russian investigators believe, for example, that Zlochevsky’s money was used to finance the terrorist drone operation against Moscow in May 2023. Considering his involvement in the purchase of drones and intelligence networks, it is virtually a certainty for Zlochevsky be involved in the case. Other activities in which GUR is directly involved have also drawn the attention of Russian authorities regarding the possibility of direct financing by Zlochevsky. This is the case with the recent murders and attempted murders of civilians within the territory of the Russian Federation, for example.

The GUR is behind the attacks against journalists Daria Dugina, Vladlen Tatarsky, writer Zakhar Prilepin and other well-known Russian public figures. Certainly, the funding to pay for the complex operations behind these crimes did not come from official sources, but from irregular money, like that which Zlochevsky provides to the GUR. However, it is necessary to remember that the activities of Ukrainian intelligence have never been “autonomous”. Since 2014, the entire Ukrainian state apparatus, including its secret service, has been controlled by American agents. In practice, American intelligence uses its Ukrainian assets as proxies to commit crimes that are previously planned in Washington.

As mentioned, it is not yet known who ordered the terror attack on Crocus City Hall, but there are some points in the case that seem to indicate direct participation by the GUR. This possibility is so plausible that Moscow already reacted immediately to the attack by destroying the Ukrainian intelligence headquarters in Kiev. The attack on Crocus had a high operational cost. The assassins were hired as mercenaries and received their weapons from the hirers. Furthermore, someone paid for their trip to the border in Bryansk. If GUR was involved in this operation, it is very likely that Zlochevsky’s illicit money was used.

Considering that GUR is, in practice, a CIA asset and that it receives illegal funding from Biden-linked Ukrainian oligarchs to promote terror on Russian territory, then there appears to be a very deep international network to be investigated by Moscow in order to discover the real culprits for the Crocus massacre.

Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert. You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram.

March 28, 2024 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, War Crimes | CIA, Democratic Party, Hunter Biden, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: notorious terrorist or American agent?

By William Van Wagenen | The Cradle | March 26, 2024

Ranked second only to Osama bin Laden, the US’s most notorious declared enemy during the so-called War on Terror was Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

But a closer examination of Zarqawi’s life and his impact on events in Iraq shows that he was likely a product and tool of US intelligence.

Neoconservative strategists within the administration of George W. Bush utilized Zarqawi as a pawn to justify the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the American public.

Moreover, he was instrumental in fomenting internal discord within Iraqi resistance groups opposing the US occupation, ultimately instigating a sectarian civil war between Iraq’s Sunni and Shia communities.

Israel’s plan unfolds in Iraq

This deliberate strategy of tension in Iraq advanced Tel Aviv’s goal of perpetuating the country’s vulnerabilities, dividing populations along sectarian lines, and weakening its army’s ability to challenge Israel in the region.

It has long been known that the CIA created Al-Qaeda as part of its covert war on the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s and supported Al-Qaeda elements in various wars, including in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya in the 1990s.

Additionally, evidence points to CIA support for Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups during the clandestine war in Syria launched in 2011 amid the so-called Arab Spring.

Despite this history, western journalists, analysts, and historians still take at face value that Zarqawi and AQI were sworn enemies of the US.

Without understanding Zarqawi’s role as a US intelligence asset, it is impossible to understand the destructive role the US (and Israel) played in the bloodshed inflicted on Iraq, not only during the initial 2003 invasion but in launching the subsequent sectarian strife as well.

It is also essential to understand the importance of current Iraqi efforts to expel US forces and rid the country of US influence moving forward.

Who was Zarqawi?

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was born Ahmed Fadhil Nazar al-Khalaylah but later changed his name to reflect his birthplace, Zarqa, an industrial area near Amman, Jordan. In and out of prison in his youth, he would become radicalized during his time behind bars.

Zarqawi traveled to Afghanistan to fight with the CIA-backed mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. Upon his return to Jordan, he helped start a local Islamic militant group called Jund al-Sham and was imprisoned in 1992.

After his release from prison following a general amnesty, Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan in 1999. The Atlantic notes that he first met Osama bin Laden at this time, who suspected that Zarqawi’s group had been infiltrated by Jordanian intelligence while in prison, which accounted for his early release.

Zarqawi then fled Afghanistan to the pro-US Kurdistan region of northern Iraq and established a training camp for his fighters in the fateful year of 2001.

The missing link

Eager to implicate Iraq in the 9/11 attacks, it wasn’t long before the Bush administration officials soon used Zarqawi’s presence to shroud Washington’s geopolitical agendas there.

In February 2003, at the UN Security Council, US Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed that Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq proved Saddam was harboring a terrorist network, necessitating a US invasion.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “This assertion was later disproved, but it irreversibly thrust Zarqawi’s name into the international spotlight.”

Powell made the claim even though the Kurdish region of Iraq, where Zarqawi established his base, was effectively under US control. The US air force imposed a no-fly zone on the region after the 1991 Gulf War. Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, was also known to have a presence there, a reality that Iran actively acknowledges and remains vigilant about.

Curiously, despite Zarqawi’s base being nestled within the confines of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Bush administration opted for inaction when presented with a golden opportunity to neutralize him.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon drew up detailed plans in June 2002 to strike Zarqawi’s training camp but that “the raid on Mr Zarqawi didn’t take place. Months passed with no approval of the plan from the White House.”

Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, justified the inaction by claiming “the camp was of interest only because it was believed to be producing chemical weapons,” even though the threat of chemical and biological weapons falling into the hands of terrorists was supposedly the most important reason for toppling Saddam Hussein’s government.

In contrast, General John M. Keane, the US Army’s vice chief of staff at the time, explained that the intelligence on Zarqawi’s presence in the camp was “sound,” the risk of collateral damage was low, and that the camp was “one of the best targets we ever had.”

The Bush administration firmly refused to approve the strikes, despite US General Tommy Franks pointing to Zarqawi’s camp as among the “examples of the terrorist ‘harbors’ that President Bush had vowed to crush.”

As soon as Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq had accomplished its initial purpose of selling the war on Iraq to the US public, and after the March 2003 invasion was already underway, the White House finally approved targeting his camp with airstrikes. But by then, the Wall Street Journal adds, Zarqawi had already fled the area.

Singling out Shiites

Then, in January 2004, the key pillar of the Bush administration’s justification for war unraveled. David Kay, the weapons inspector tasked with finding Iraq’s WMDs, publicly declared, “I don’t think they exist,” after nine months of searching.

The Guardian reported that the failure to locate any WMDs was such a devastating blow to the rationale for invading Iraq that now “even Bush was rewriting the reasons for going to war.”

On 9 February, as the WMD embarrassment mounted, Secretary of State Powell again claimed that before the invasion, Zarqawi “was active in Iraq and doing things that should have been known to the Iraqis. And we’re still looking for those connections and to prove those connections.”

Two weeks before, US intelligence had conveniently made public a 17-page letter it claimed Zarqawi had written. Its author claimed responsibility for multiple terror attacks, argued that fighting Iraq’s Shia was more important than fighting the occupying US army, and vowed to spark a civil war between the country’s Sunni and Shia communities.

In subsequent months, US officials attributed a series of brutal bombings targeting Iraq’s Shia to Zarqawi without providing evidence of his involvement.

In March 2004, suicide attacks on Shia shrines in Karbala and the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad killed 200 worshippers commemorating Ashura. In April, car bombings in the Shia-majority city of Basra in southern Iraq killed at least 50.

Regarding the Karbala and Kadhimiya attacks, Al-Qaeda issued a statement through Al-Jazeera strongly denying any involvement, but Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head Paul Bremer insisted Zarqawi was involved.

Zarqawi’s alleged attacks on Iraq’s Shia helped drive a wedge between the Sunni and Shia resistance to the US occupation and sowed the seeds of a future sectarian war.

This proved helpful to the US army, which was trying to prevent Sunni and Shia factions from joining forces in resistance to the occupation.

‘Dividing our enemies’

In April 2004, President Bush ordered a full-scale invasion to take control of Fallujah, a city in Anbar province that had become the epicenter of the Sunni resistance.

Vowing to “pacify” the city, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt launched the attack using helicopter gunships, unmanned surveillance drones, and F-15 warplanes.

The attack became controversial as the Marines killed many civilians, destroyed large numbers of homes and buildings, and displaced the majority of the city’s residents.

Eventually, due to widespread public pressure, President Bush was forced to call off the assault, and Fallujah became a ‘no-go’ zone for US forces.

The failure to maintain troops on the ground in Fallujah had US planners turning back to their Zarqawi card to weaken the Sunni resistance from within. In June, a senior Pentagon official claimed that “fresh information” had come to light showing Zarqawi “may be hiding in the Sunni stronghold city of Fallujah.”

The Pentagon official “cautioned, however, that the information is not specific enough to allow a military operation to be launched to try to find al-Zarqawi.”

The sudden appearance of Zarqawi and other Jihadists in Fallujah at this time was not an accident.

In a report written for the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) entitled “Dividing our enemies,” Thomas Henriksen explained that the US military used Zarqawi to exploit differences among its enemies in Fallujah and elsewhere.

He writes that the US military maintained the goal of “fomenting enemy-on-enemy deadly encounters” so that America’s “enemies eliminate each other,” adding that “When divisions were absent, American operators instigated them.”

The Fallujah Case Study

Henriksen then cites events in Fallujah in the fall of 2004 as “a case study” that “showcased the clever machinations required to set insurgents battling insurgents.”

He explained that the takfiri–Salafi views of Zarqawi and his fellow jihadis caused tension with local insurgents who were nationalists and embraced a Sufi religious outlook. Local insurgents also opposed Zarqawi’s tactics, which included kidnapping foreign journalists, killing civilians through indiscriminate bombings, and sabotaging the country’s oil and electricity infrastructure.

Henriksen further explained that US psychological operations, which took “advantage of and deepened the intra-insurgent forces” in Fallujah, led to “nightly gun battles not involving coalition forces.”

These divisions soon extended to the other Sunni resistance strongholds of Ramadi in Anbar province and the Adhamiya district of Baghdad.

The divisions instigated by US intelligence through Zarqawi in Fallujah paved the way for another US invasion of the restive city in November 2004, days after Bush secured re-election.

BBC journalist Mark Urban reported that 2,000 bodies were recovered after the battle, including hundreds of civilians.

Conveniently, “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was not among the dead,” having slipped through the US cordon around the city before the assault began, Urban added.

Domestic consumption

US military intelligence later acknowledged using psychological operations to promote Zarqawi’s role in the Sunni insurgency fighting against the US occupation.

The Washington Post reported in April 2006 that “The US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” which helped “the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the 11 September 2001 attacks.”

The Post quotes US Colonel Derek Harvey as explaining, “Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will – made him more important than he really is.”

As the Post reports further, the internal documents detailing the psychological operation campaign “explicitly list the ‘US Home Audience’ as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.”

The campaign to promote Zarqawi also proved helpful to President Bush during his re-election campaign in October 2004. When Democratic challenger John Kerry called the war in Iraq a diversion from the so-called War on Terror in Afghanistan, President Bush responded by claiming:

“The case of one terrorist shows how wrong [Kerry’s] thinking is. The terrorist leader we face in Iraq today, the one responsible for planting car bombs and beheading Americans, is a man named Zarqawi.”

Who killed Nick Berg?

Nick Berg, a US contractor in Iraq, was allegedly beheaded by Zarqawi. In May 2004, western news outlets published a video showing Berg, dressed in an orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuit, being beheaded by a group of masked men.

A masked man claiming to be Zarqawi stated in the video that Berg’s killing was in response to the US torture of detainees in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Berg was in Iraq trying to win reconstruction contracts and disappeared just days after he spent a month in US detention in Mosul, where he was interrogated multiple times by the FBI.

On 8 May, a month after his disappearance, the US military claimed they found his decapitated body on the side of a road near Baghdad.

But US claims that Zarqawi killed Berg are not credible. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported at the time, there is evidence the beheading video was staged and included footage from Berg’s FBI interrogation. It was uploaded to the internet not from Iraq but from London and remained online just long enough for CNN and Fox News to download it.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt also lied about Berg having been in US military custody, claiming instead he had only been held by the Iraqi police in Mosul.

But the video cemented in the minds of the American public that Zarqawi and Al-Qaeda were major terror threats.

Such was the impact in the US, that following the video’s release, the terms ‘Nick Berg’ and ‘Iraq war’ temporarily replaced pornography and celebrities Paris Hilton and Britney Spears as the internet’s main searches.

Sectarianism, a key US–Israeli goal

Large-scale sectarian war erupted following the February 2006 bombing of the Shia Al-Askari Shrine in the Sunni city of Samarra in central Iraq, although the full extent was mitigated thanks to religious guidance issued by the highest and most influential Shia authority in the land, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Al-Qaeda did not take credit for the attack, but President Bush later claimed that “the bombing of the shrine was an Al-Qaeda plot, all intending to create sectarian violence.”

Zarqawi was finally killed in a US airstrike a few months later, on 7 June 2006. An Iraqi legislator, Wael Abdul-Latif, said Zarqawi had the phone numbers of senior Iraqi officials stored in his cell phone at the time of his death, further showing Zarqawi was being used by elements within the US-backed Iraqi government.

By the time of Zarqawi’s death, the neoconservative agenda to divide and weaken Iraq through instigating chaos and sectarian conflict had reached its pinnacle. This goal was further exacerbated by the emergence of a successor group to AQI – ISIS – which played an outsized role a few years later in destabilizing neighboring Syria, igniting sectarian tensions there, and providing the justification for the renewal of a US military mandate in Iraq.

March 26, 2024 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | al-Qaeda, CIA, Iraq, ISIS, Israel, Middle East, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

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“Davos Can Really Replace the UN”

Inside the book that maps the architecture behind global governance — from the Epstein files to the Pact for the Future

Lies are Unbekoming | April 1, 2026

On June 13, 2019, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum signed a partnership deal to “accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” That same evening, WEF president Börge Brende — Norway’s former Foreign Minister — had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. The Epstein files, released January 2026, contain an exchange between the two from the previous year. Epstein to Brende: “Davos can really replace the UN. C21, cyber, crypto . genetics… intl coordination.” Brende back to Epstein: “Exactly — we need a new global architecture. World Economic Forum (Davos) is uniquely positioned — public private.”

The next day, the UN General Assembly adopted the framework for restructuring global governance.

That sequence — the partnership signing, the Epstein dinner, the candid admission about replacing the UN with a public-private architecture, and then the formal adoption — opens Jacob Nordangård’s The Digital World Brain. Pages two and three. Footnoted to the UN resolution number, the Epstein files, and the General Assembly record.

I keep coming back to it because it captures what this book does that almost nothing else in the independent research space manages. I’ve followed Jacob’s work for years now and interviewed him about his research. Each book peels back another layer of the same institutional architecture, and each time I think he’s reached the limit of what can be documented, the next one goes further. Nordangård doesn’t speculate. He doesn’t editorialize much. He lays institutional actions next to each other in chronological order and lets the pattern announce itself. … continue

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