Syrian Women Exploited in MI6 Propaganda Ops
By Kit Klarenberg | Global Delinquents | December 5, 2024
The propaganda value of women in conflicts has long-been cynically exploited by Western intelligence services. A leaked CIA memorandum from March 2010 on covert means of increasing flagging support for NATO’s Afghanistan mission noted women “could serve as ideal messengers” in “humanizing” the military occupation. This was due to their “ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory”:
“Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories… could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the mission. Media events that feature testimonials by Afghan women would probably be most effective if broadcast on programs that have large and disproportionately female audiences.”
Throughout the US occupation of course, Afghanistan remained one of the worst countries in the world to be a woman, by some margin. Roughly a year after that CIA memo was authored, Gay Girl in Damascus, a blog purportedly written by Syrian-American lesbian Amina Arraf, garnered significant mainstream attention. Widely hailed for her “fearless” and “inspiring” eyewitness reporting, she was lauded as a symbol of the “progressive” revolution erupting in the country.
In June 2011, Amina’s cousin announced on the blog Amina had been kidnapped by three armed men in the Syrian capital. In response, numerous Facebook pages were set up calling for Amina’s release and ‘liked’ by tens of thousands, #FreeAmina trended widely on Twitter, journalists and rights groups begged Western governments to demand her release, and the US State Department announced it was investigating Amina’s disappearance.
Six days later, it was revealed ‘Amina’ was in fact Tom MacMaster, a middle-aged American man living in Scotland, who had penned extensive lesbian literotica fantasies under that alter ego. While corporate news outlets quickly forgot all about the hoax they’d so comprehensively fallen for, their appetite for dubious human interest stories emanating from the crisis wasn’t diminished.
‘Huge Global Coverage’
In July 2019, an image of two young Syrian girls trapped in rubble in opposition-occupied Idlib attempting to haul their sister to safety as she dangled off the precipice of a dilapidated building, their father looking on in horror above, spread far and wide on social media.
The photo, snapped by a photographer for Syrian news service SY24, went viral the world over. Unbeknownst to viewers though, SY24 was created and funded by Global Strategy Network, a prominent British intelligence cutout founded by Richard Barrett, former MI6 counter-terrorism director. In leaked submissions to the British Foreign Office, Global Strategy boasted of how its propaganda “campaigns” broadcast via SY24 generated “huge global coverage,” having been seen by “many hundreds of millions of people,” and “attracting comment as far as the UN Security Council.”
SY24 content was produced by a network of ‘stringers’ in Syria that Global Strategy trained and provided with equipment, including “cameras and video editing software.” The firm drew particular attention to a team of female journalists it had tutored, “who provide about 40 percent of all SY content,” and were part of “a broad ‘network of networks’” enabling the company “to drive stories into the mainstream.”
Global Strategy also established a dedicated centre for training female journalists to produce content for SY24 in Idlib, “accessing stories that male journalists cannot,” which were then shared on social media. It boasted that almost half of SY24’s followers were women, “a remarkably high ratio for Syria-focused platforms.”
Carefully cultivating an entirely misleading image of an inclusive, credible ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition was of paramount importance to British inelligence. It helped whitewash the barbarous nature of the various ‘rebel’ factions London was backing in the region, while simultaneously engendering support among Western citizens for regime change.
In order to engage the “international community” to this end, Global Strategy, in conjunction with ARK – a shadowy “conflict transformation and stabilization consultancy” headed by veteran MI6 officer Alistair Harris – planned “communication surges” around “key dates” such as International Women’s Day.
In a particularly elaborate example of such a “surge”, the pair collaborated on “Back to School”, a campaign in which young Syrians returned to education. Idlib City Council, opposition commanders, and other elements on the ground concurrently engaged in a “unified” communications blitz, using “shared slogans, hashtags and branding.” Rebel fighters were sent to “clear roads” and “enable children and teachers to get to schools,” all the while filmed by the pair’s voluminous local journalist network, footage of which was then “disseminated online and on broadcast channels.”
Ensuring “female teachers” received sizeable coverage in the Western media was a key objective of the campaign. Furthermore, in many leaked files, ARK boasted of the huge network of journalists it had trained and funded in Syria, who would cover such PR stunts, secretly orchestrated by the organisation. Their reports in turn fed to the firm’s “well-established contacts” at major news outlets including Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, New York Times, and Reuters, “further amplifying their effect.”
‘Thrust by Tragedy’
Other documents make clear ARK well-understood the immense difficulties of promoting the role of women internally and externally during the crisis. One file on “[incorporating] the role of women in the moderate opposition” notes Syrian women in rebel-occupied areas faced “an almost overwhelming variety of problems,” and “the space for women to participate in public life has contracted significantly as the conflict has progressed.”
As a result, ARK was “extremely aware of the risks of promoting women’s participation beyond currently accepted social norms… given the potential to hinder message resonance or result in a backlash against female participation.” It therefore proposed to “subtly reframe the narrative of women… increasing the amount of coverage of their initiatives and opinions as the context allows.”
One means of “subtle reframing” was Moubader (which translates to “person who takes initiative”), a media asset created by ARK in 2015, comprising a “high-quality hard copy monthly magazine with widespread distribution across opposition-held areas of Syria,” with a website and Facebook page boasting almost 200,000 likes. Moubader was established by ARK to achieve “behavioural change” in readers. “Given the importance of broadcast television as a trusted source” in Syria, ARK also sought British intelligence funding to develop a Moubader TV programme, to “leverage stories and values to maximum effect and reach an even wider audience.”
Documents submitted to the Foreign Office by another intelligence cutout, Albany, similarly noted women’s access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunity had “been debilitated” during the crisis, which issues such as early marriage, child military recruitment, and “transactional sex” exacerbated. The UN defines the latter as “non-commercial sexual relationships motivated by an implicit assumption that sex will be exchanged for material support or other benefits.”
Still, Albany considered so many Syrian women having been “thrust by tragedy into head of household and breadwinner positions” over the course of the crisis as a golden opportunity to propagandize them and, in turn, their families, while promoting the ‘inclusive’ nature of the opposition, by creating and partnering with female civil society organizations and journalists.
ARK likewise believed women to be a “critical audience”, given the number of Syrian households with female heads –“up to 70 percent”. So, the organisation sought to ensure they were well-represented in all its domestic and international “broadcast products”, as well as on social media.
‘Female Participation’
Unsurprisingly, the files do not acknowledge the increasingly hostile environment for women in Syria directly resulted from foreign efforts to destabilise and depose its government. ISIS and al-Nusra were and remain rightly notorious for their monstrous treatment of women in the areas they occupied, which included widespread rape, sexual violence and abduction.
However, many armed opposition groups backed by Britain and other foreign powers imposed stringent restrictions on women in the areas they occupied, requiring them to wear hijabs and abayas, doling out extreme punishments for failing to comply, imposing discriminatory measures prohibiting them from moving freely, working, attending school, and more.
There are indications British intelligence was in close quarters with such activities. For instance, in December 2017 BBC documentary Jihadis You Pay For alleged Foreign Office cash distributed on its behalf via contrator Adam Smith International in Syria ended up in the pockets of Free Syrian Police (FSP) officers who not only stood by while women were stoned to death, but closed surrounding roads to facilitate their murder.
The ‘Free Syria Police’ at work
FSP, an unarmed shadow civilian police force operating in opposition-controlled areas, was created, funded and trained under the auspices of the British intelligence-funded Access to Justice and Community Security (AJACS) program. In a perverse irony, leaked Adam Smith International files relating to the project indicate it too sought to exploit women for propaganda purposes, applying a gender policy “to encourage female participation in justice and policing.” The company boasted of how, of the 1,868 police officers it trained under the scheme, six – 0.32 percent – were female.
Quite some “revolution”. As Human Rights Watch noted in 2014, prior to the outbreak of civil war, women and girls across Syria were “largely able to participate in public life, including work and school, and exercise freedom of movement, religion, and conscience.” While the country’s penal code and laws governing issues such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance contained some discriminatory provisions, the country’s constitution guaranteed gender equality.
Leaks expose secret British military cell plotting to ‘keep Ukraine fighting’
By Kit Klarenberg · The Grayzone · November 16, 2024
Leaked files show top UK military figures conspired to carry out the Kerch bridge bombing, covertly train “Gladio”-style stay-behind forces in Ukraine, and groom the British public for a drop in living standards caused by the proxy war against Russia.
Emails and internal documents reviewed by The Grayzone reveal details of a cabal of British military and intelligence veterans which plotted to escalate and prolong the Ukraine proxy war “at all costs.” Convened under the direction of the British Ministry of Defense in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the cell referred to itself as Project Alchemy. As British leadership sabotaged peace talks between Kiev and Moscow, the cell put forward an array of plans “to keep Ukraine fighting” by imposing “strategic dilemmas, costs and frictions upon Russia.”
The leaks obtained by The Grayzone expose a hidden hand behind Britain’s policy in Ukraine, showing in unusually granular detail how it aimed to engineer a long, grinding war through covert operations that stretched the bounds of legality.
Project Alchemy’s proposed schemes spanned every conceivable field of warfare, from cyber attacks to “discreet operations” to outright terrorism. The secret cell even put forward a plan to “aggressively pursue” and “dismantle” independent media outlets – including The Grayzone – through an aggressive campaign of legal harassment and online censorship, so they “would be forced to close.” The incendiary blueprints were fed to the highest levels of the British state and national security structure, where they were apparently well-received.
Founded by a senior British Ministry of Defence official, Project Alchemy is composed of veteran military and intelligence operatives united by a desire for all-out war between the West and Russia. Some have trained Ukrainian forces in clandestine sabotage tactics.
Members of the national security cabal tacitly acknowledged that their proposed operations stretched the bounds of British law. Thus they suggested that London should be “prepared to creatively use the law” to meet its goals, and even be willing to erase “legal restrictions on UK deniable ops” against Russia.
Some of Project Alchemy’s most extreme recommendations have already been implemented, often with calamitous results. These include the cell’s proposal to strike Crimea’s Kerch Bridge, which prompted a Russian escalation that saw punishing attacks on Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure. Alchemy also envisioned the construction of a secret, Gladio-style army of Ukrainian partisan fighters to carry out assassination, sabotage, and terror missions behind enemy lines.
It appears the British premier, Keir Starmer, fell under the influence of the Project Alchemy cabal soon after his election in July, when he eagerly embraced the role of “wartime prime minister.” After pledging to support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” however, Starmer is quietly backing away from the maximalist policy. In Kiev, Ukrainians are left to ponder how their “friends” in London got them into this mess, and why they can not, or will not get them out of it.
The British spooks who gathered around Project Alchemy reasoned that the longer the proxy war continued, the more Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “credibility at home and abroad drops, and his ability to fight NATO is degraded.” Today, Project Alchemy’s gambit has clearly backfired, as Putin remains popular within Russia, while a crumbling Ukrainian army loses territory by the day despite constant re-arming by the West. But the war planners in London remain staunchly committed to escalation, refusing to shelve their diabolical proposals.
Britain takes ‘unilateral lead’ on ‘regime change’ in Russia
Project Alchemy was founded on the personal orders of Lt. General Charlie Stickland, who is charged with “planning, executing and integrating UK led joint and multinational overseas military operations” as the head of Britain’s Permanent Joint Headquarters. Stickland boasts in leaked communications that his family “come from a long line of pirates and buccaneers.” In his email signature, the general identifies himself as an “LGBTQ+ Advocate” in rainbow-colored text.
Stickland and his assistant, Maj. Ed Harris, did not answer The Grayzone’s calls to their personal phones, nor did they respond to detailed questions submitted to them through WhatsApp.
https://twitter.com/GeneralStaffUA/status/1624474926064230402
Stickland convened the first meeting of Project Alchemy’s on February 26, 2022, just days after Russian troops made their initial foray into Ukraine. According to minutes of the gathering, “an assortment of leading academics, authors, strategists, planners, pollsters, comms, data scientists and tech” was on hand to produce a “grand strategy options paper.”
The paper consisted of a series of proposals for the British government to “defeat Putin in Ukraine and set the conditions for the reshaping of an open international order of the future.” Throughout the document, the need to “keep Ukraine fighting” was described as London’s “main effort” in the conflict.
In an email to British military apparatchiks dated March 3 2022, Stickland described Alchemy’s paper as the result of “some mischief I’ve been up to” with “a group of ‘sideways thinkers.’” He expressed satisfaction that “this has been seen by all sorts of people,” including senior British government and military officials, “and landed well.”
An Excel document listing potential and confirmed recruits for the effort, authored by project chief Dom Morris, names a number of individuals from the private sector and academia alongside high-ranking army officials. Currently a fellow at King’s College’s “Centre for Grand Strategy,” Morris was listed in the document as a “civilian leader.” The role of “military leader” was to be carried out by Simon Scott, a brigadier in the British army who was appointed O.B.E. in 2013 for his “gallant and distinguished services” in Afghanistan.
Information operations were to be headed by a still-to-be determined member of Britain’s 77th Psychological Operations Brigade. Also listed as a participant in information operations was longtime British psychological warfare operative Amil Khan, founder of the “counter-disinformation” analysis firm Valent Projects.
In 2021, The Grayzone revealed how the then-Prince of Wales, King Charles, enlisted Khan’s Valent Projects to astroturf a pseudo-socialist YouTube influencer to attack skeptics of the government’s ham-fisted response to Covid. Previously, Khan participated in the UK Foreign Office’s program to foment regime change in Syria.
Months after Alchemy put Khan forward as a member of its team, The Grayzone exposed him for plotting with celebrity-left journalist Paul Mason to destroy this publication. One leaked email showed Khan proposing a “full nuclear legal [attack] to squeeze [The Grayzone ] financially.” The newly-uncovered documents indicate the decision to assail The Grayzone was met with approval from the highest ranks of the British government.
‘Ukraine’s Next Chapter – Elders Grand Strategy Options Paper’
Within Project Alchemy’s covert war room, the obsession with a long war quickly took hold. Members of the cell took their cues from a policy paper Stickland attributed to “The Elders,” which he described as “a group of Fusion players,” referring to the strata of academics and defense industry figures with strong ties to the British military.
An Alchemy document composed under Stickland’s watch and titled, “Ukraine’s Next Chapter – Elders Grand Strategy Options Paper,” suggests that members of the cabal had convinced themselves a “palace coup” inside the Kremlin was inevitable. So long as Russia struggled inside Ukraine, they believed, British intelligence would be granted “the opportunity to challenge” Moscow’s ever-growing “stature as a competent international actor” on the world stage.
“A long war against a small state makes [Putin] look a fool,” the Alchemy paper asserted. “He is obsessed by the end of Ghaddafi – he will want to avoid that… Pressure will pile on from oligarchs as a long war drags on – he will not want to give them excuses to threaten his authority.” The group reasoned that “a long war will affect [Putin’s] international credibility,” as “a failure to quickly defeat Ukraine will seriously… reduce his credibility with new rich friends in Belarus, Hungary, China, India, Middle East, Brazil etc.
“Most importantly,” protracted Russian involvement in Ukraine “will embolden NATO,” Alchemy argued. Convinced that Putin would fail in the eastern Donbas region, triggering a collapse of his government, Project Alchemy members openly fantasized about absorbing Russia into the Western-dominated financial order afterwards under the guise of a “Post Putin Marshall Plan.” Of particular interest was London’s “re-engagement” with Moscow “in global energy and commodity markets,” a seeming reference to the West’s desire for cheap Russian gas and wheat.
“Discreet operations”: reviving ‘Operation Gladio’ terror ops in Ukraine
To accomplish the balkanization of Russia, Project Alchemy’s plotters took inspiration from Operation Gladio, a CIA and NATO-orchestrated covert operation that saw fascist paramilitaries carry out false flag terrorist attacks across Western Europe after World War II in a bid to prevent communism from taking root.
A section detailing potential “discreet operations” in Alchemy’s strategy paper, which stressed the “need to intervene in every way except ‘official,’” explicitly recommended “Stay-behind Gladio handbooks/ Partisan Pamphlets” which would be “updated for Information Age.”
Another move Alchemy proposed was to deploy Britain’s “strong” private military [PMC] industry “to out Wagner, Wagner.” In other words, the group aimed to establish a British rival to the Russian mercenary force founded by the now-deceased commander Yevgeny Prigozhin. This objective required the formulation of “a new doctrine, operating concept, and legal framework, for effectively integrating the activities of PMCs and other [non-military] actors.” Under these guidelines, British mercenary firms capable of using “sophisticated weaponry like SAMS, cyber, combat air, drones” would be employed to “operate and train and accompany Ukraine formations.”
These operations were all intended to ultimately be “sponsored and commanded” by the UK government, “using discreet cover” to avoid triggering NATO’s Article 5.
Following the production of their grand strategy paper, Stickland invited his team of “sideways thinkers” at Project Alchemy to submit further proposals for Gladio-style operations. Among the pitches that arrived was a “mission” to “disable the Kerch Bridge in a way that is audacious, and disrupts road and rail access to Crimea and maritime access to the Sea of Azov.” The blueprints of this highly provocative plot were exposed by The Grayzone in October 2022, in the immediate aftermath of the truck bomb attack that crippled the Kerch Bridge.
Alchemy’s team also produced a PowerPoint presentation entitled, “Training a Ukrainian Commando Force to restore Maritime Sovereignty – Elders,” outlining plans to construct a 1,000-strong Ukrainian commando force “trained in Britain by military veterans equipped with British equipment” to “degrade the Russian Navy and open another flank in the fight for Kherson and the south of Ukraine.”
Alchemy’s team had been working on the plan for at least three months by the time of the presentation’s submission. “Ukrainians abroad and volunteers inside Ukraine” had already been recruited, in advance of 12 weeks basic training “in the use of all troop weapons including mortars, anti-tank missiles, sniper craft, cliff assault, small craft training, demolitions,” the proposal stated.
The plan called for formally integrating the commandos into the Ukrainian Navy. Alchemy boasted that the prospective force “will be a force multiplier and highly mobile,” while Russia’s “outdated doctrine will struggle with a highly motivated and well-equipped naval force conducting hit and run operations and targeting Crimea.”
Moreover, “individuals who are fluent Russian speakers and deemed suitable for covert undercover operations,” including “female operators,” would be “inserted into southern occupied Ukraine and Crimea for intelligence gathering and sabotage of key infrastructure targets.” They would be trained by MI6 officers. For this, Alchemy asked the British government for a total of £73.5 million. “The program is at a high state of readiness. We are ready to go,” the presentation forcefully declared.
The enormous sum was to be paid to Elders Services Ltd that was founded by Alchemy members and registered to an address just 15 miles from Fort Monckton, which was described by former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson as “the SIS’s field operations training centre.” It is unknown how much money, if any, the firm received from the British government for resuscitating Operation Gladio in Ukraine. Elders Services Ltd shuttered in March 2023 after less than a year of operation, without filing financial accounts.
British spies call for ‘action’ against The Grayzone
Behind the Project Alchemy team’s bravado was a sense that Western hegemony was crumbling on the icy borderlands separating Ukraine from Russia. Referring to the rising BRICS alliance, which gathered in Kazan, Russia this October to challenge the US-dominated financial order, Alchemy planners urged British leadership to “prepare for SWIFT II,” as SWIFT was “going to be destroyed” by the West’s anti-Russia sanctions, “slowly, but inevitably.”
According to Alchemy’s analysts, countries across the globe would naturally “see the need for a non-US alternative” means of safely parking their cash and trading. In a rare show of political sobriety, the British spooks predicted that sanctions on Russia combined with the Ukraine proxy war would impose higher prices on consumer goods and “hit British voters in the pocket.”
This posed “a threat to public support” for the British government’s “hard line” on Ukraine, they warned. “Domestic UK public opinion” would understandably get “fed up” paying more for everyday goods, meaning “pressure grows for a compromise.”
To prepare the British public for the coming storm, Project Alchemy’s plotters proposed what they blandly described as “information operations,” but which could be more accurately described as a blend of domestic state propaganda and malign attacks on disruptive media outlets.
The task they outlined not only included “[dismantling] Russian disinformation infrastructure” by pressuring social media to ban RT and Sputnik, but also targeting critical independent media like The Grayzone.
“A number of actions can be undertaken against these outlets. The most obvious is legal since the content of these media outriders is frequently in contravention of media law in the UK, US and EU,” Alchemy insisted.
“Aggrieved parties currently tend to ignore libel/defamation by these outlets. Were they to aggressively pursue these outlets, it is likely they would be forced to close.”
The Grayzone, it was claimed, had thus far “managed to obscure” its funding – a suggestion that this outlet is covertly funded by Russia or some other enemy state, which is completely false. The paranoid fantasies of British intelligence may explain why this journalist was quizzed on the subject by British counter-terror police when they detained and interrogated him at Luton International Airport in May 2023.
Alchemy plotters seek to place Britain at lead of war with Russia
In addition to playing a leading role in media manipulation, Alchemy sought to place Britain at the forefront of the International Criminal Court’s agenda to investigate and prosecute the Russian government for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
Alchemy suggested London “set international conditions, collection mechanisms and funding for collection of data and evidence” in the proxy conflict, and “provide all possible support, including intelligence” to the ICC “in its efforts to investigate war crimes,” just as British spies did for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Though not named in the document, high-profile British lawyers, including celebrity Amal Clooney, have since emerged at the forefront of efforts to prosecute Russian officials for war crimes, and establish an ICTY analog. As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal reported, Britain played a critical role in the appointment of Amal Clooney’s mentor, Karim Khan, as ICC prosecutor.
Project Alchemy’s provocative proposals appear to have reached the desk of PM Keir Starmer in some form. At NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, Starmer issued his full-throated endorsement of deep strikes by the Ukrainian military into Russia. Echoing the aggressive language found in Alchemy documents, he pledged to “deliver £3 billion worth of support to Ukraine each year… for as long as it takes.”
But as the Ukrainian military’s offensive in Russia’s Kursk region falters, the Biden administration has distanced itself from the calls for striking into the Russian heartland. Fortunately for British leaders hellbent on taking the fight to Moscow, Project Alchemy has ensured that a platter of off-the-books options remains handy.
As Alchemy noted in its grand strategy paper, “The UK seeks always to act multilaterally, but is prepared to take a unilateral lead where achieving multilateral consensus might prove time-consuming or difficult.” Among the war’s covert sponsors, who were safely ensconced over 1,000 miles away from the front lines, it was firmly agreed: “we should attempt at all costs to keep Ukraine fighting.”
The CIA/MI6 Skripal Conspiracy Exposed
By Kit Klarenberg | Global Delinquents | November 17, 2024
On October 14th, a much-delayed inquiry into the mysterious death of Dawn Sturgess, a British citizen who died in July 2018 after reputedly coming into contact with Novichok nerve agent left in England by a pair of Russian assassins, finally commenced. Already, the public show trial has unearthed tantalising evidence gravely undermining the official narrative of the poisoning of GRU defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, in March that year.
These revelations emerged despite the British state’s best efforts to sabotage the inquiry, and curtail its ability to ascertain the truth. For one, the Skripals have been prevented from testifying, despite formally requesting to do so. Such is the apparent risk of Russian intelligence attempting to target the pair anew, not even their video-recorded police interviews from the time can be entered into evidence. Meanwhile, the urgent question of what British intelligence and security services knew, and when they knew it, will not be explored.
Yet, primary source evidence British spies and their American counterparts were well-aware the two Russians accused of attempting to murder the Skripals were visiting Britain in advance of their arrival has lain in plain sight for years. Whether such foreknowledge implies the CIA and MI6 were in reality behind the abortive hit remains a matter of interpretation – but that the CIA and MI6 sought to exploit the Russian presence in Salisbury for their own malign purposes is beyond doubt.
In January 2021, US watchdog group American Oversight released hundreds of pages of emails sent to and from the personal address of Mike Pompeo, CIA director January 2017 – April 2018. In many cases, the emails were official Agency communications discussing matters of extreme sensitivity, conducted off-books. The records – heavily redacted under the US National Security Act – show that on March 1st 2018, Pompeo was approached by two high-ranking CIA operatives, who asked for a meeting on a “very urgent matter”. They added:
“A very positive opportunity is within reach but requires your engagement because of the urgency…I am convinced that this is a very promising opportunity.”
Pompeo responded in the affirmative, and the meeting went ahead early the next morning. Underlining their covert summit’s importance, the emails indicate CIA staffers were preparing to pitch the “positive opportunity” to the Agency’s chief from the early hours of March 2nd. Eerily, the email requesting Pompeo’s signoff on the proposal was sent less than half an hour after Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, Skripal’s alleged assassins, purchased plane tickets from Moscow to London Gatwick for their Salisbury visit.
‘Strong Option’
Who emailed Pompeo is redacted, although then-CIA deputy director Gina Haspel is an obvious candidate. A longstanding Russia hawk, who cut her Agency teeth recruiting spies in the Soviet Union in the years before its collapse, she twice served as the CIA’s London station chief twice – from 2008 – 2011, and 2014 – 2017. Sergei Skripal arrived in Britain in July 2010 via a grand spy swap during her first tenure, which was negotiated by Haspel’s longtime collaborator Daniel Hoffman, then-CIA Moscow station chief. He was among the very first sources to publicly blame Russia for the Salisbury incident.
During Haspel’s “unusual” second spell in London, Skripal’s enduring connection to his homeland, and yearning to return, would’ve been well-known to British intelligence. Serendipitously, BBC veteran Mark Urban serendipitously interviewed the GRU defector in the year prior to his poisoning. He recorded that Skripal was “an unashamed Russian nationalist, enthusiastically adopting the Kremlin line in many matters, even while sitting in his MI6-purchased house.” Coincidentally, Urban once served in the same tank regiment as Pablo Miller, Skripal’s MI6 recruiter/handler, and Salisbury neighbour.
Moreover, former Kremlin official Valery Morozov, an associate of the GRU defector likewise exiled to Britain, claimed days after the poisoning that Skripal remained in “regular” contact with Moscow’s embassy in London, and met with Russian military intelligence officers there “every month”. He also flatly repudiated any suggestion the purported nerve agent attack on Sergei and Yulia was the work of Russian spies:
“Putin can’t be behind this. I know how the Kremlin works, I worked there. Who is Skripal? He is nothing for Putin. Putin doesn’t think about him. There is nobody in Kremlin talking about former intelligence officer [sic] who is nobody. There is no reason for this. It is more dangerous for them for such things to happen.”
That this information was not shared with Haspel stretches credulity. The Washington Post has reported how her time in Britain made her the personal “linchpin” of the CIA’s relationship with MI6, the Agency’s “most important foreign partner.” Her British colleagues gushed to the outlet, “she knows them so well… they call her the ‘honorary UK desk officer’.” Haspel regularly drew on this experience to “stabilize the transatlantic alliance” between London and Washington, which was frequently strained while she was CIA director May 2018 – January 2021.
This friction resulted in no small part from Trump legitimately accusing British chaos agents of “conspiring with American intelligence to spy on his presidential campaign,” charges that “rattled the British government at the highest levels.” Strikingly, a cited example of Haspel stabilising CIA relations with MI6 provided by WaPo was convincing a highly reluctant President to back the Western-wide expulsion of Russian diplomats, encouraged by London in the Salisbury incident’s wake.
How Haspel pressed Trump over Salisbury was revealed in April 2019. The New York Times reported that the President at first downplayed Skripal’s alleged poisoning and refused to respond, believing the apparent attack to be “legitimate spy games, distasteful but within the bounds of espionage.” However, Haspel successfully lobbied Trump to take the “strong option” of expelling Russian embassy staff in the US, by providing him with British-sourced “emotional images”:
“Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives… Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option.”
‘Operation Foot’
The New York Times exposé caused a stir upon release, not least because the “emotional images” described had never hitherto been published or referred to in the mainstream media. While the Skripals giving bread to three local boys to feed ducks in Salisbury’s Avon Playground on March 4th 2018 was initially widely reported, no media outlet, government minister, spokesperson, health professional or law enforcement official had ever previously claimed children and/or waterfowl were “sickened” after coming into contact with Novichok. The reverse, in fact.
On March 26th that year, the Daily Mail recorded that the boys given bread by the Skripals – one of whom apparently ate some – were “rushed to hospital for blood tests amid fears they’d been poisoned,” but promptly discharged after being given “the all-clear.” Moreover, two days after the New York Times article was published, British health officials issued a statement not only refuting the report entirely, but denying any children were admitted to hospital in Salisbury as a result of Novichok exposure at all.
Subsequently, the New York Times radically amended its piece, removing any suggestion Haspel showed Trump photos of Novichok victims provided by the British. In fact, the newspaper reverse-ferreted, she had “displayed pictures illustrating the consequences of nerve agent attacks, not images specific to the chemical attack in Britain.” The question of whether the aforementioned images did exist, and were forged by British intelligence for the explicit purpose of bouncing Trump into a hostile anti-Russia stance, remains thoroughly open five-and-a-half years later.
After all, British spies had been planning and hoping for a mass defenestration of Russian diplomats globally, as a prelude to all-out war with Moscow, for years by that point. In January 2015, MI6/NATO front the Institute for Statecraft (IFS) a document setting out “potential levers” for achieving “regime change” in Russia, spanning “diplomacy”, “finance”, “security”, “technology”, “industry”, “military”, and even “culture”. One “lever”, which IFS listed thrice, stated:
“Simultaneously expel every [Russian] intelligence officer and air/defence/naval attaché from as many countries as possible (global ‘Operation Foot’).”
Operation Foot saw 105 Soviet officials deported from Britain in September 1971. Several mainstream media outlets referenced this incident when reporting on London successfully corralling 26 countries – including, of course, the US – into expelling over 150 Russian diplomatic staff in response to the Salisbury incident in March 2018. As a result, IFS got one step closer to its longstanding objective of “armed conflict of the old-fashioned sort” with Russia, which “Britain and the West could win.”
Fast forward to today, and Britain and the West are on the verge of losing that conflict once and for all. Meanwhile, the Salisbury incident’s ever-fluctuating official narrative continues to shift radically, in ways large and small. Contrary to all prior media reports on the matter, the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry has now been told one boy given bread by the Skripals to feed ducks actually “got sick” as a result, and he and his friends “were unwell for a day or two afterwards.”
This fresh rewriting neatly ties in with the highly controversial claim, unflinchingly clung to by British authorities, that the Skripals were poisoned with Novichok smeared on the doorknob of Sergei’s home on the morning of March 4th 2018, before heading into Salisbury. As subsequent investigations will show, available evidence – including Yulia Skripal’s own hospital bed testimony – points unmistakably to the pair being attacked elsewhere, at another time and by another means entirely, with British and American intelligence square in the frame.
NATO’s Destruction of Ukraine Under the Guise of “Helping”
Propaganda & Proxy Wars
By Glenn Diesen | September 17, 2024
In a recent public event, the heads of the CIA and the MI6 assessed developments in the Ukraine War. The head of the MI6 applauded the invasion of Kursk for having changed the “narrative” of the war, while the head of the CIA also outlined the objective to “put a dent” in the Kremlin’s narrative about the development of the war. There can be no doubt that the invasion of Kursk was an utter disaster for Ukraine and NATO. However, controlling the narrative is imperative as the Western public will support financing the war if they believe they are helping Ukraine and the war can be won.
During the 20-year-long NATO occupation of Afghanistan, public support was also maintained by constructing a narrative of progress and helping the people of Afghanistan. Every week the Western public was reassured by the media that the war effort in Afghanistan was making great progress, until NATO fled in a great hurry as people fell off planes. Much like how the Pentagon Papers exposed the deceit of the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan Papers exposed how the war was an unmitigated disaster. Yet, in both instances, a rosy picture was presented by the media.
A leaked CIA report outlined how they could increase public support for NATO’s occupation of Afghanistan by selling it to the public as helping women. The report revealed that “Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban”, and framing NATO’s occupation as a crusade for women’s rights could “overcome pervasive scepticism among women in Western Europe towards the ISAF mission”.[1] NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg even co-authored an article with Hollywood star Angelina Jolie with the title: “Why NATO must defend women’s rights”.[2] Appealing to the best in human nature to mobilise public support for doing the worst in human nature is a good description of war propaganda.
Selling the Ukraine War
The Ukraine War is sold to the public as being merely selfless “help” from NATO for Ukraine to defend itself against an expansionist Russia, motivated solely by territorial acquisition and restoring the Soviet Union. Framing the war as a simple struggle between good and evil is why NATO cannot negotiate or even pursue basic diplomacy, and peace depends on good defeating evil. In what is close to a copyright infringement of “war is peace” in George Orwell’s 1984, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg asserts that “weapons are the way to peace”.
In political propaganda, it is common to frame a war through a concept that everyone agrees with, such as the need to “help” Ukraine. We all want to help Ukraine preserve its sovereignty, territory and the lives of its citizens. However, instead of discussing what would help Ukraine, such concepts are given a fixed meaning to shut down debates. Any argument can then be framed as either being pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian. However, what is bad for Russia is not automatically good for Ukraine. Yet, people who can be taught to speak in clichés can be taught to think in clichés. Commentary on NATO policies toward Russia is similarly framed as being pro-Western or pro-Russian, which circumvents an actual discussion about whether these policies are in the West’s interests or not.
Concepts such as “helping Ukraine” can then be filled with any content that often contradicts what “helping” entails, but corresponds with proxy war. When we unpack what NATO frames as “helping Ukraine”, we find that it rarely has the support from the majority of Ukrainians and it almost always ends up with disastrous consequences. So how does NATO “help Ukraine”?
NATO Expansion
NATO dismisses any accusations of an expansionist agenda by presenting itself as a passive actor that merely responds to Ukraine’s desire to join NATO. This narrative conceals the reality that every poll between 1991 and 2014 demonstrates that only approximately 20% of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. When NATO promised future membership to Ukraine in 2008, 43 percent of Ukrainians considered NATO a threat to Ukraine and merely 15 percent associated NATO with protection.[3] Forty-six percent of Ukrainians answered it was more important to have close relations with Russia, while only 10 percent of Ukrainians supported close relations with the US over Russia.[4] In 2011, a NATO document acknowledged: “The greatest challenge for Ukrainian-NATO relations lies in the perception of NATO among the Ukrainian people. NATO membership is not widely supported in the country, with some polls suggesting that popular support of it is less than 20%”.[5]
Even after Russia seized Crimea in response to the Western-backed coup in 2014, only a small minority of Ukrainians wanted integration with NATO (10.3% in the South and 13.1% in the East).[6] Nonetheless, Ukraine was still pulled toward NATO even though CIA Director Burns had warned already back in 2008 that it would likely trigger a civil war in Ukraine and “Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face”.[7] In December 2020, former British ambassador to Russia Roderic Lyne similarly warned that attempting to push Ukraine into NATO “was stupid on every level at that time. If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it. Moreover, any poll in Ukraine showed that two thirds of the Ukrainian public did not want NATO membership”.[8] If the Ukrainians did not want NATO membership and we knew it would trigger a war, why was it “pro-Ukrainian”?
Regime Change in Kiev
In February 2014, NATO countries toppled the government in Ukraine under the guise of supporting a “democratic revolution”. Yanukovich had been elected in what the OSCE had recognised to be a free and fair election, and there was no evidence that Yanukovich would not have stepped down if he had lost in the next election. The Maidan protests did not enjoy democratic majority support from the Ukrainians and even fewer supported a coup.[9] British Foreign Minister William Hague deceived the public by claiming that the toppling of President Yanukovich had been done in compliance with the constitution, contrary to the clear rules in the Ukrainian constitution that specified procedures for removing the head of state.[10] A phone call leaked two weeks before the coup, exposed how Washington was planning the coup and hand-picked the new government that would be installed.[11] NATO supported the toppling of the democratically elected government that attempted to bridge a divided society, and replaced it with a divisive pro-NATO/anti-Russian government. Yet criticise the Western-backed coup in Kiev and you will be branded to be “anti-Ukrainian” and “pro-Russian”. In contrast, the people who set Ukraine on a path to destruction against their will claim to “stand with Ukraine”.
Asserting Administrative Control over Ukraine
On the first day after the coup, the head of Ukraine’s intelligence services in the new government that the US had hand-picked, called the CIA and MI6 to start a partnership for a covert war against Russia.[12] This partnership was a key reason why Russia decided to intervene militarily eight years later in February 2022.[13] The Washington Post reported: “the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow”.[14] The US then also strengthened the far-right fascist groups in Ukraine as they functioned as a veto power on any efforts to seek peace with Russia.
Several Westerners took key positions in the Ukrainian government. In 2014, Natalie Jaresko took the position of Finance Minister of Ukraine and received Ukrainian citizenship on the same day as she took the job. Jaresko was a former US State Department official and former Economic Section Chief of the US Embassy in Ukraine. She transitioned from representing American interests in Ukraine, to representing Ukraine. The general prosecutor of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, complained that since 2014, “the most shocking thing is that all the [government] appointments were made in agreement with the United States”. According to Shokin, Washington’s behaviour indicated that they “believed that Ukraine was their fiefdom”.[15] Biden would later take credit for having fired Ukraine’s General Prosecutor, who had opened an investigation into the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Three months after the coup in February 2014, Hunter Biden and a close family friend of US Secretary of State, John Kerry, became board members of Burisma.[16]
After Russia invaded in February 2022, the US further strengthened its grip over Ukraine. In 2023, an American transgender who argued that Russians are not human beings became the new spokesperson for Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Forces. As Ukraine’s situation became more precarious and dependence on the West increased, Kiev largely outsourced the post-war reconstruction process to BlackRock and J.P. Morgan to manage the Ukraine Development Fund. The US asserting administrative control over the Ukrainian government was depicted as helping Ukraine with democratic governance and fighting corruption.
De-Russifying Ukraine
Decoupling Ukraine from Russia was a key objective to permanently place Ukraine in NATO’s orbit. The US-orchestrated Orange Revolution in 2004 installed the Yushchenko government that distanced itself from Russia and pursued NATO membership, however, the public eventually reversed this trajectory by electing Yanukovich. At the end of Yushchenko’s presidential term, Newsweek labelled Yushchenko the world’s most unpopular leader with a 2.7 percent approval rating.[17]
US support for the de-Russification of Ukrainian society entailed purging the political opposition, arresting the main opposition leader, banning independent media, banning the Orthodox Church, and purging the Russian language and culture. The first decree by the new Ukrainian Parliament in 2014 was a call to repeal Russian as a regional language. By 2024, Ukraine even had language inspectors to counter the spread of the Russian language.[18] The BBC reported that after the coup, Kiev’s city council was covered with large neo-Nazi banners, the American confederate flag, and portraits of the fascist ally of Hitler, Stepan Bandera.[19] A new nationalist identity was supported based on the far-right in which street names with the shared Russian or Soviet history were replaced with fascists who collaborated with Hitler. To de-Russify a country that lived in the same state as Russia for centuries and shared language, culture and faith, could not possibly coexist with democracy, stability or basic human rights. Such policies caused a deep rift in the social cohesion of the country and caused misery for millions of Ukrainians who became second-rate citizens in their own country.
Yet, these developments could be supported under the guise of “helping Ukraine” to decouple from Russia as a condition for asserting its distinctive identity and sovereignty.
The War Against Donbas
After the coup in 2014, people in Donbas rejected the new government in Kiev that had seized power with the support of the West, as predicted by CIA Director Burns. The first instinct of the new authorities and their backers in Washington was to send the military to destroy the uprising. Yet, the Ukrainian army was weak and regular soldiers were not comfortable with turning their guns on their own population. This problem was overcome by recruiting fascist militias in Western Ukraine, such as Azov, who were happy to kill. Yevhan Karas, the leader of the fascist group C14, informed his audience that the West did not give weapons to help Ukrainians but did so because “we have started a war” that was fulfilling the goals of the West. The nationalists were supported by the West due to their resilience: “because we have fun, we have fun killing and we have fun fighting”.[20]
Kiev launched an “anti-terrorist operation” against Donbas, which killed more than 14.000 Ukrainians. Ignoring all evidence about the involvement of local Ukrainians in the uprising, the Western media largely denied any agency as all fighting was done by “pro-Russian” militias or Russians themselves. Thus, the war against Ukrainians in Donbas could be sold to the Western public as helping Ukraine fight Russian influence.
Sabotaging the Minsk-2 Peace Agreement
The fighting between Kiev and Donbas came to an end with the Minsk-2 peace agreement. Both Poroshenko and Zelensky attempted to implement the Minsk-2 agreement before being opposed by the US-backed far-right.
The BBC reported in August 2015 that a clear majority of 265 MPs out of 450 had supported the first reading of the decentralisation bill to grant more autonomy to Donbas. This sparked a violent veto by the far right, it then reported: ‘Protesters led by the populist Radical Party and the ultra-nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party—who oppose any concession to the Russian-backed separatists’ clashed with riots police that resulted in the death of a national guard member and over 100 injured.[21] Poroshenko subsequently began to abandon his efforts to implement the Minsk-2 agreement.
Zelensky was therefore able to win a landslide election victory with 73% of the votes in 2019. He won over the Ukrainian public by running on a platform of peace by promising to implement the Minsk agreement to ensure peace After Zelensky became president, he was threatened by the US-backed far right and a protest was arranged in Kiev in which approximately 10,000 people rallied against President Zelensky’s plan to end the war, which was denounced as “capitulation”.[22] After failing to assert control over the far-right groups in the military, Zelensky had to align himself closer with the nationalists and thus rejected peace with Donbas.[23]
The US assisted its government in Ukraine to ignore the UN-approved Minsk-2 peace agreement by building an increasingly powerful Ukrainian army and tying it closer to NATO. Germany and France had negotiated the Minsk-2 peace agreement in 2015, although they later revealed this had been a deceit. Angela Merkel argued in an interview with both Bild and Spiegel that the Minsk Agreement enabled her to buy time for Ukraine to build itself into a powerful and well-fortified country.[24] When her French counterpart, former president François Hollande, was asked about Merkel’s statement that the Minsk-2 peace agreement was merely intended to buy time, he confirmed: “Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point” and added that the conflict with Russia would be resolved on the battlefield: “There will only be a way out of the conflict when Russia fails on the ground”.[25] Retired German General Harald Kujat, the former head of the German Bundeswehr and former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, later argued that the West’s sabotage of the Minsk agreement was “a breach of international law… it turns out that we are the ones who do not comply with international agreements”.[26]
NATO countries had confirmed for 7 years that the Minsk-2 peace agreement was the only path to a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine, while concurrently sabotaging the only path to peace. This path to war was done against the overwhelming will of the Ukrainian population, as evidenced by their consistent voting for a peace platform. Why should NATO efforts to overturn the result of the Ukrainian elections to sabotage the peace agreement be considered “pro-Ukrainian” or “helping Ukraine”?
Refusing Russia’s Demand for Security Guarantees in 2021
Russia demanded in 2021 security guarantees to mitigate the threats from NATO’s growing footprint in Ukraine, otherwise, the escalating threat would be resolved by military means. President Biden warned Ukraine that Russia was preparing its military for an invasion, yet he did not want to offer any security guarantees to prevent an invasion.
Kurt Volker, the former US Ambassador to NATO and former US Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations from 2017 to 2019, even argued that Biden should not make any agreements with Putin as “the best possible outcome is not one of modest agreements and a commitment to ‘predictability,’ but one of a lack of agreements altogether. Success is confrontation”.[27] NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also acknowledged that halting NATO expansion was required to prevent an invasion: “President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And [it] was a pre-condition for not invad[ing] Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that”.[28] Under a fierce security competition in which Russia feared for its security, “helping Ukraine” would certainly have involved mitigating some of Russia’s security concerns.
Sabotaging the Istanbul Peace Negotiations in 2022
After the Minsk agreement had been sabotaged for 7 years and no security guarantees were forthcoming, Russia decided in February 2022 to use military force to impose a political settlement. On the first day after the Russian invasion, Zelensky confirmed “Today we heard from Moscow that they still want to talk. They want to talk about Ukraine’s neutral status… We are not afraid to talk about neutral status”.[29] On the third day after the invasion, Moscow and Kiev announced they would hold peace talks “without preconditions” in Belarus.[30] Zelensky even suggested later a “collective security agreement” to ensure that the security concerns of both Russia and Ukraine would be met.[31]
The US had other objectives. On the first day after the Russian invasion, Washington rejected peace without preconditions as Russia first had to withdraw all its forces from Ukraine.[32] Washington even suggested that it would not support Ukraine’s effort to resolve the conflict through a compromise as “this is a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia, it’s bigger than Ukraine”.[33] In March 2022, Zelensky argued in an interview with the Economist that “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives”.[34]
According to the leader of Zelensky’s political party and Zelensky’s advisor, Russia and Ukraine were close to an agreement. Ukrainian Ambassador Oleksandr Chalyi, who participated in peace talks with Russia, confirms Putin “tried everything” to reach a peace agreement and they were able “to find a very real compromise”.[35]
Retired German General Harald Kujat, the former head of the German Bundeswehr and former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, argued that NATO provoked the war and that the US and UK sabotaged the Istanbul peace negotiations as “the West was not ready for an end to the war”.[36] The Turkish mediators confirmed: “I had the impression that there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue—let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine”.[37] The Israeli mediators reached the same conclusion as former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recognised “both sides very much wanted a ceasefire” but the West “blocked” the peace agreement as a “decision by the West to keep striking Putin” rather than pursuing peace.[38]
After interviews with American and British leaders, Niall Ferguson reported in Bloomberg that a decision had been made for “the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin” as “the only end game now is the end of Putin regime”.[39] Over the next two and a half years, numerous American political and military leaders expressed their support for the war as it was a great opportunity to weaken Russia as a strategic rival without using and losing American troops. The decision to fight Russia with Ukrainians was nonetheless framed consistently in the media as “helping Ukraine”.
Keeping Ukraine in the War
As Zelensky had argued in March 2022, some of its Western partners preferred “long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives”.[40] The Americans were pressuring Ukraine to launch the disastrous counter-offensive of 2023, as a “senior Ukrainian military official recalled, the Americans were nagging about a delayed start”.[41] The New York Times reported that “American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse, one reason it has been cautious about pressing ahead with the counteroffensive”.[42]
However, despite the disastrous casualties among the Ukrainians and the failure of the counter-offensive, the Washington Post could report that “for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance”.[43] As Ukraine continues to bleed dry in the war of attrition, there are more and more videos on Ukrainian Telegram channels of more aggressive “recruitment” tactics that involve grabbing Ukrainians off the street and throwing them into vans. Yet, the discussions in NATO countries revolve around lowering the conscription age in Ukraine or deporting Ukrainian refugees that can be used to refill the trenches.
If these were our own soldiers dying in the hundreds of thousands, would we not have begun negotiations a long time ago? The incoming EU foreign policy chief has rejected any diplomacy with Russia as Putin is a “war criminal”, while also punishing EU member states such as Hungary for attempting to restore diplomacy and negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. NATO could help Ukraine by using the promise to end expansion as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Russia. Instead, NATO continues to threaten further expansion after the war, which makes any peace agreement impossible. When Ukraine begins to collapse, the US and NATO will likely call for a ceasefire to freeze the frontlines to yet again buy some time to rebuild its Ukrainian army and fight another day.
As we reflect on NATO’s policies toward Ukraine, can we conclude that they have been in the interest of Ukraine or had the support of the Ukrainians? Has it been in the interest of the West? The ability to ask critical questions is prevented by presenting all policies as being either pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian, in which dissent is effectively criminalised. It is a common phenomenon that when political leaders create propaganda, they often end up deceiving themselves.
…..
– The text includes excerpts from my book “The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order” https://www.claritypress.com/product/the-ukraine-war-the-eurasian-world-order/
[1] WIKILEAKS – – CIA Red Cell Special Memorandum; Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission-Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough, March 11, 2010
[2] Why Nato must defend women’s rights | Jens Stoltenberg and Angelina Jolie | The Guardian
[3] J. Ray and N. Esipova, ‘Ukrainians Likely Support Move Away From NATO’, Gallup, 2 April 2010.
[4] C. English, ‘Ukrainians See More Value in Ties With Russia Than U.S.’, Gallup, 15 February 2008.
[5] 2011 – 172 CDSDG 11 E REV1 – UKRAINE – MALAN REPORT | NATO PA (nato-pa.int).
[6] GALLUP® CORP Template (usagm.gov)
[7] W.J. Burns, ‘Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines’, Wikileaks, 1 February 2008.
[8] R. Lyne, ‘The UC Interview Series: Sir Roderic Lyne by Nikita Gryazin’, Oxford University Consortium, 18 December 2020.
[9] BBC, ‘Ukraine’s revolution and the far right, BBC, 7 March 2014.
[10] D. Morrison, ‘How William Hague Deceived the House of Commons on Ukraine’, Huffington Post, 10 March 2014.
[11] BBC, ‘Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call’, BBC, 7 February 2014.
[12] The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[13] The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[14] G. Miller and I. Khurshudyan, ‘Ukrainian spies with deep ties to CIA wage shadow war against Russia’, The Washington Post’, 23 October 2023.
[15] M.M. Abrahms, ‘Does Ukraine Have Kompromat on Joe Biden?’, Newsweek, 8 August 2023.
[16] P. Sonne and J. Grimaldi, ‘Biden’s Son, Kerry Family Friend Join Ukrainian Gas Producer’s Board’, The Wall Street Journal, 13 May 2014.
[17] O. Matthews, ‘Viktor Yushchenko’s Star Has Fallen’, Newsweek, 13 March 2009.
[18] Language inspectors to start working in Frankivsk | УНН (unn.ua)
[19] BBC, ‘Ukraine’s Revolution and the Far Right’, BBC, 7 March 2014.
[20] A. Rubenstein and M. Blumenthal, ‘How Ukraine’s Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on front lines of war with Russia’, The Grayzone, 4 March 2022.
[21] BBC, ‘Ukraine crisis: Deadly anti-autonomy protest outside parliament’, BBC, 31 August 2015.
[22] A. Korniienko, ‘Thousands rally in Kyiv against Zelensky’s plan to end war with Russia’, Kyiv Post, 6 October 2019.
[23] J. Melanovski, ‘Ukrainian President Zelensky deepens alliance with far right’, WSWS, 30 April 2021.
[24] A. Osang, ‘You’re Done with Power Politics’, Spiegel, 1 December 2022.
[25] T. Prouvost ‘Hollande: ‘There will only be a way out of the conflict when Russia fails on the ground’’, The Kyiv Independent, 28 December 2022.
[26] Emma, ‘Russland will verhandeln!’ [Russia wants to negotiate!], Emma, 4 March 2023.
[27] K. Volker, ‘What Does a Successful Biden-Putin Summit Look Like? Not What You Think’, CEPA, 2 June 2021.
[28] J. Stoltenberg, ‘Opening remarks’, NATO, 7 September 2023.
[29] V. Zelensky, ‘Address by the President to Ukrainians at the end of the first day of Russia’s attacks’, President of Ukraine: Official website, 25 February 2022.
[30] S. Raskin and L. Brown, ‘Ukraine and Russia to meet for peace talks ‘without preconditions,’ Zelensky says’, New York Post, 27 February 2022.
[31] M. Hirsh, ‘Hints of a Ukraine-Russia Deal?’, Foreign Policy, 8 March 2022.
[32] US Department of State, ‘Department Press Briefing’, US Department of State, 25 February 2022.
[33] US Department of State, ‘Department Press Briefing’, US Department of State, 21 March 2022.
[34] The Economist. ‘Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin’ The Economist, 27 March 2022.
[35] Breaking the Stalemate to Find Peace: The Russia-Ukraine War – A Geneva Security Debate (youtube.com)
[36] J. Helmer, ‘Whr. Gen. Kujat: Ukraine War is Lost, Germany Now Faces an Angry Russia… Alone’, Veterans Today, 25 January 2023.
[37] R. Semonsen, ‘Former Israeli PM: West Blocked Russo-Ukraine Peace Deal’, The European Conservative, 7 February 2023.
[38] N. Bennett, ‘Bennett speaks out’, YouTube Channel of Naftali Bennett, 4 February 2023.
[39] N. Ferguson, ‘Putin Misunderstands History. So, Unfortunately, Does the U.S.’, Bloomberg, 22 March 2022.
[40] The Economist. ‘Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin’ The Economist, 27 March 2022.
[41] ‘Miscalculations, divisions marked offensive planning by U.S., Ukraine’, The Washington Post, 4 December 2023.
[42] ‘Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say’, The New York Times, 18 August 2023.
[43] D. Ignatius, ‘The West feels gloomy about Ukraine. Here’s why it shouldn’t’, The Washington Post, 18 July 2023.
MI6 Coup in Macedonia Unravels
By Kit Klarenberg | Active Measures | June 21, 2024
On May 12th, this journalist documented the labyrinthine Western-orchestrated machinations via which Macedonia – under the locally-despised name of North Macedonia – was forcibly enrolled in NATO, despite widespread public opposition. Absent from that investigation was reference to the central role played in these connivances by British intelligence. Namely, London’s ambassador to Skopje and lifetime MI6 operative, Charles Garrett. Now troublesome VMRO-DPMNE is returned to office, it is vital his activities in the country are re-examined.
Charles Garrett receives an award from King Charles
As The Grayzone has previously documented, London operates a dedicated program known as “Global Britain” in the West Balkans. Leaked documents related to the effort reveal it is concerned with insidiously influencing the composition of local governments and legal and regulatory environments to advance British interests, while filling regional security, intelligence, and military forces with handpicked assets. As one leaked file makes clear, MI6 does not tolerate regional opposition to its agenda, readily deploying active measures to neutralize any and all local resistance:
“In contexts where elite incentives are not aligned with [Britain’s] objectives/values… an approach that seeks to hold elite politicians to account might be needed… We can build relationships and alliances with those who share our objectives and values for reform… It is critical that the media have the capacity and freedom to hold political actors to account.”
Events in Macedonia over the past decade provide a brutal demonstration of what can befall governments and officials in the Balkans who do not share Britain’s “objectives” and “values”, and how they are “held to account.” So too does a 2020 coup in Kyrgyzstan, where Garrett set up shop after leaving Skopje. With Central Asia now in the crosshairs of London’s endless quest for “reform” overseas, it’s never been more vital to beware Brits bearing gifts.
‘Colorful Revolution’
Following Russia’s March 2014 reunification with Crimea, NATO’s efforts to expand in the Former Yugoslavia became turbocharged. The Grayzone has previously reported how alliance membership was imposed upon Montenegro, despite near-universal public opposition, in 2016. Achieving this feat required sustaining a corrupt, savage pro-Western dictator in power for almost two decades, and an elaborate connivance whereby anti-NATO opposition actors were jailed on bogus charges of colluding with Russian intelligence to overthrow the government, based on bogus CIA and MI6-supplied evidence.
Similar subterfuge played out in Skopje, which signed a “Membership Action Plan” with NATO in 1999. While slightly more supportive of NATO membership than Montenegrins, the local population near-unanimously opposed changing the country’s name, which Greece, the EU and US made a prerequisite for joining. The VMRO government, led by Nikola Gruevski, pledged Macedonia would always be called Macedonia. So a Western-orchestrated coup was put into motion.
In February 2015, opposition party SDSM’s leader Zoran Zaev began regularly dropping what he and the media branded “bombs” – deeply damaging wiretaps of private conversations between prominent Macedonian officials, businesspeople, journalists, and judges. The tapes seemingly implicated Gruevski and his ministers in serious crimes, including murder. Zaev claimed the illegally-captured recordings were passed to him by whistleblowers. The premier countered that the releases were supplied by foreign intelligence services, with the objective of forcing an early election.
Subsequent investigations exposed how SDSM deceptively edited and spliced these leaked recordings to grossly distort their contents, and falsely incriminate government officials. For example, one “bomb” was extensively doctored to make it sound like VMRO leaders conspired to cover up the 2011 murder of a young Macedonian in Skopje by a senior police officer, while shielding them from justice. The unexpurgated tape indicated they were in fact shocked by the killing, and wanted the culprit to be severely punished.
It was not until four years later that the truth was revealed, however. Upon release, Zaev’s “bombs” sparked widespread outcry in Macedonia, prompting hundreds of thousands of citizens to take to the streets, voicing righteous rage at VMRO. Openly called the “colorful revolution” by participating citizens and NGOs, and English language media, the EU and US duly stepped in and brokered the Przino Agreement, under which Gruevski resigned, and new elections were held.
SDSM scraped into office via a fragile coalition, then set about laying the foundations of Macedonia’s name change in explicit service of NATO membership, with tens of millions of dollars in assistance from intelligence cutout USAID. Parliamentarians were blackmailed – frequently using the illegal wiretap intercepts – and bribed into passing unconstitutional and highly controversial reforms, allowing Skopje to be rebranded North Macedonia without public support, or even the President’s signoff. A sham referendum, boycotted by most citizens, was also cynically staged.
At last, North Macedonia was formally inducted into NATO in March 2020. Alliance officials have since repeatedly made clear they consider Bosnia and Herzegovina joining to be inevitable. This is despite 98% of Bosnian Serbs opposing membership, due to NATO’s central role in the criminal destruction of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. There are covert British efforts to promote NATO in Serbia too, despite over 80% of the population opposing joining.
‘Charlie’s Angels’
In August 2013, Charles Garrett was appointed London’s ambassador to Macedonia. His express brief was to help the country “achieve its goals of joining NATO and the EU.” Multiple local sources have informed this journalist that Garrett was instrumental in the “colorful revolution,” distributing cash to NGOs and activists involved in the unrest from his diplomatic pouch, while attempting to get government supporters on board.
Public records strongly suggest Garrett is a lifetime MI6 officer. His lengthy career in London’s diplomatic service includes spells in Cyprus, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Taiwan, all key nuclei of intelligence gathering and cloak-and-dagger action for Britain’s foreign spying agency. He was also posted to the Balkans in the latter half of the 1990s, when the region became a veritable MI6 playground.
Under the Przino Agreement, a Special Prosecutor’s Office (SPO) was created to investigate officials over serious crimes supposedly revealed by the illegal intercepts. A previously unknown prosecutor from a small Macedonian border town, Katica Janeva, was selected to run the Office. While the SPO was supposed to prosecute SDSM activists – including Zaev, for releasing the intercepts – this never materialized. Meanwhile, any and all Western officials visiting Macedonia made sure to visit SPO headquarters and get snapped with Janeva. Garrett was, of course, among them.
Charles Garrett and Katica Janeva
Initially, Western journalists treated Janeva to multiple fawning profiles. The British press was particularly smitten. The Financial Times referred to her as Macedonia’s “Beyonce”. The BBC dubbed the Special Prosecutor and her two primary assistants “Charlie’s Angels”, claiming the trio were “the scourge of Macedonia’s political elite and heroines of the street protests now rocking the tiny Balkan nation.” A lengthy USAID-funded “documentary” featured her staff mocking their targets via phone, between discussing who to jail next over pizza and cigarettes.
That broadcast has been removed from the web, and virtually no trace of its existence can be found online today. This may be because in June 2020, Janeva was jailed for seven years for corruption. Her crime-fighting crusade was from inception an obscene, partisan fraud. Along the way, the Special Prosecutor secretly enriched herself through a variety of unscrupulous, criminal means. The SPO’s true objective was destabilizing the VMRO government, and discrediting its supporters by association.
Janeva’s targets were often indicted on farcical charges. For example, at one stage Prime Minister Gruevski was accused of “abuse of office” for commissioning the construction of two “Chinese highways”. Prosecutors charged he had improperly benefitted from the deal – not financially, but because he would “receive a popularity boost” if the highways were completed on schedule. Elsewhere, a pro-VMRO female journalist was accused of tax fraud for writing off laundry as a business expense, and resultantly subjected to much misogynistic mockery in SDSM-affiliated media.
More gravely, the owner of an independent news site committed suicide after being pressured to turn state witness by the SPO, following early morning police raids targeting him and his family. Cases brought against the owners of government-supporting TV stations Sitel and Nova shifted their editorial line in favor of SDSM, leading to the latter being closed outright. In its place, the rabidly pro-SDSM 1TV was launched by eccentric Macedonian media personality Bojan Jovanovski, also known as Boki 13.
Publicly, Boki 13 used his station to relentlessly promote the SDSM-led government and the SPO’s work, with Janeva a frequent guest on its assorted “factual” and entertainment programs. In private, he extorted wealthy businesspeople indicted by Janeva, or somehow caught up in the illegal intercepts, promising to make their legal troubles go away in return for lavish advertising buys on 1TV, or sizable donations to his “charity”, International Association. None other than Charles Garrett sat on its board.
‘Fifth Column’
By the time these facts became public knowledge, and Janeva and Boki 13 were in prison, Garrett was safely extracted from Skopje, having been appointed British ambassador to Kyrgyzstan. Almost immediately, a revolution erupted in Bishkek. Mass demonstrations, ignited by reports of vote rigging in the October 2020 parliamentary election, culminated with the military storming President Sooronbay Jeenbekov’s compound and removing him – physically – from office.
In February 2022, a Kyrgyzstan government-affiliated newspaper openly accused Garrett of operating a “fifth column” in Bishkek. It alleged that in the leadup to the 2020 vote, he along with US State Department representatives met with local journalists and bloggers, offering them enormous sums to identify electoral violations – such as vote rigging – and document official pressure on media outlets and civil society groups. Garrett purportedly promised them top-of-the-range broadcasting equipment, to increase their audience reach. Not long after publication, he returned to London.
Garrett has kept a low profile ever since and now occupies a cushy role overseeing the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Nonetheless, in September 2023, he submitted written evidence to a British parliamentary committee investigating London’s “engagement in Central Asia”. He advocated a number of means to exploit “disruption caused by Moscow’s renewed invasion of Ukraine” to undermine the region’s historic, economic and political ties with Russia and China, and “shape the future of these countries” according to Britain’s interests.
When British Foreign Secretary David Cameron conducted a much-publicized tour of Central Asia in May 2024, he followed Garrett’s proposals to the letter. The ambassador’s legacy visibly endures in Macedonia today too. In March 2016, colorful revolution protesters attempted to burn down the President’s office, after 56 individuals indicted by the SPO were pardoned. The premises were transformed into the headquarters of UK Aid, a now-defunct British government agency intimately implicated in the neoliberal rape and pillage of Ukraine.
The Skopje headquarters of UK Aid
This included running covert communications campaigns on Kiev’s behalf, promoting the destruction of workers’ rights locally. It is likely the organization was engaged in similar skullduggery in Skopje, after Garrett rode into town. VMRO’s return to government at last offers Macedonians an opportunity to halt the operations of all US and British intelligence fronts and cutouts operating on their soil, and reclaim foreign-conquered territory.
CIA Vet Warns US Intel Agencies ‘Will Do Everything’ to Help Dems in 2024 Race
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 22.06.2023
Former Special Counsel John Durham offered his first public testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday regarding the details of his report into the FBI’s handling of allegations of collusion between ex-President Donald Trump and Russia. The day before, Durham testified behind closed doors to the US House Intelligence Committee.
While it is not completely clear whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation knew from the outset that dug-up “information on Trump” had been paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, there is “no excuse for their having learned that and, nevertheless, proceeded with the investigation,” former CIA station chief Philip Giraldi told Sputnik.
“There might have been personal malice involved in going after Trump, but that has not been clearly demonstrated,” the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest added, referencing the FBI’s investigation into the alleged Trump-Russia “collusion”.
Former Special Counsel John Durham paid his second visit to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to face the House Judiciary Committee over the details of his May report, released after almost a four-year-long investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation codenamed, Crossfire Hurricane. Durham had found that the agency had been “seriously deficient,” relying on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” when probing the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s alleged ties to “Russia.”
“One has to assume that the Bureau felt it had a great deal invested in maintaining Democratic Party control of the presidency and that there were concerns that Trump would upset the arrangements made under [Barack] Obama,” Giraldi said.
The Durham report had also exposed the Democratic establishment’s anti-Trump narrative, and the role of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in spawning and then pushing the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
During his probe, the special counsel charged and convicted FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted to doctoring an email to state that Trump aide Carter Page had never been a CIA asset (which was not true) in order to push ahead with surveilling the former Trump campaign adviser. Durham also brought charges against Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann and Brookings Institution scholar Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI. Danchenko has served as the main ‘subsource’ for ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the author of the now infamous Steele dossier. It had been funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) through the law firm Perkins Coie, which Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann worked for at the time.
The claims the “dirty” dossier contained were used by the FBI in a series of clandestine preliminary probes against Trump starting from 2016. John Durham, as part of his investigation, found that Steele’s source, Danchenko, when questioned by the FBI was unable to confirm any of the assumptions.
‘Acting on Behalf of the Deep State’
As the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign sought to use fabricated information from the Steele dossier to smear Donald Trump and some of his advisors, similar tactics were wielded in the 2020 elections, Philip Giraldi previously underscored. After the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees found that senior Biden campaign officials colluded with the CIA to falsely discredit Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” as “Russian disinformation”, Giraldi pointed out that former acting CIA Director Michael Morell had drafted the notorious letter, titled “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden emails.” It was signed by 51 former intelligence officials including CIA Directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and Mike Hayden, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former Director of National Intelligence and James Clapper. The letter claimed that the data on Hunter’s hard drive “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
“The CIA did not ‘approve’ of the letter from the 51 former national security officials. My understanding is that it was submitted to them because the Agency exercises ‘prepublication review’ over all articles and books written by former undercover officers to block the publication of any national secrets. In this case, as I understand it, they confirmed that the letter contained no classified information. The letter itself was largely the product of collaboration by Tony Blinken and Michael Morell, both Democratic Party loyalists who expected to benefit personally,” Giraldi emphasized.
The 51 ex-spies’ opinion was quickly disseminated by the US mainstream press, while the Hunter Biden laptop story, shedding light on the Biden family’s questionable business dealings, was suppressed by both Big Media and Big Tech.
“Morell, Blinken and associates should have known that they were acting on behalf of the deep state and were in fact damaging US democracy such as it is! When the national security agencies go after candidates it is in fact the death of government of and by the people,” Giraldi remarked.
Ahead of John Durham’s testimony on June 21, Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) underscored in his opening statement that the hearing was tasked to provide more “detail and add more color” to the findings of the May report.
“Seven years of attacking Trump is scary enough… What’s more frightening is that any one of us could be next,” Jordan emphasized.
A number of Republicans echoed John Durham’s calls for reforming the FBI, underscoring that the agency, had become “politicized” and “weaponized”, and had carried out a “politically motivated” investigation of Donald Trump.
Looking ahead at the next election cycle, where both Biden and Trump are gearing up to vie for another Oval Office stint, Philip Giraldi concluded:
“For 2024, I expect that the agencies will do everything they can to help Biden or whoever replaces him from the Democratic Party but they will be a lot more careful about how they do it than they were in 2020.”
Declassified files expose British role in NATO’s Gladio terror armies
By Kit KLARENBERG | THE GRAYZONE | JUNE 19, 2023
Newly declassified British Foreign Office files have added disturbing details to the history of Operation Gladio. The covert operation was uncovered in 1990, when the public learned that the CIA, MI6 and NATO trained and directed an underground army of fascist paramilitary units across Europe, deploying its assets to undermine political opponents, including through false flag terror attacks.
Among them was a young Silvio Berlusconi, the media oligarch who served as Italian Prime Minister in four separate governments between 1994 and 2011. Listed as a member of the P2, the secret Cold War-era cabal of political elites devoted to Gladio’s aims, Berlusconi undoubtedly took some weighty secrets to the grave when he died this June 12th.
It is almost impossible to believe that inconvenient truths were not weeded from Britain’s documentary record on Operation Gladio prior to declassification. Nonetheless, the recently released material is highly illuminating. Covering a fraught twelve month period after the first public disclosure of Gladio’s existence, the papers illustrate how London’s foreign intelligence apparatus kept a keen eye on the continent as events unfolded.
The papers not only shed fresh light on the conspiracy, they underline Gladio’s relevance as British intelligence joins its America counterparts in contemporary plots involving secret partisan forces from Syria to Ukraine.
Various passages dotted across the tranche strongly suggest the British knew much more than they publicly admitted about egregious criminal deeds, including the attempted overthrow of an allied Italian government and the kidnap and murder of its leader.
A ‘clandestine resistance network’ goes to work
Gladio consisted of a constellation of “stay behind” anti-communist partisan armies whose ostensible mission was to fend off the Red Army in the event of Soviet invasion. In reality, these forces committed countless violent and criminal acts as part of a “strategy of tension” designed to discredit the left and justify a security state clampdown.
As Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a Gladio operative jailed for life in 1984 for a car bombing in Italy that killed three police officers and injured two, explained:
“You were supposed to attack civilians, women, children, innocent people from outside the political arena. The reason was simple, force the public to turn to the state and ask for greater security… People would willingly trade their freedom for the security of being able to walk the streets, go on trains or enter a bank. This was the political logic behind the bombings. They remain unpunished because the state cannot condemn itself.”
The scandal triggered in Western capitals by the exposure of Gladio dominated mainstream headlines for months. The European parliament responded by passing a resolution condemning the existence of a “clandestine parallel intelligence and armed operations organization [which] escaped all democratic controls, may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of member states [and] have at their disposal independent arsenals and military resources… thereby jeopardizing the democratic structures of the countries in which they are operating.”
The resolution called for independent judicial and parliamentary investigations into Gladio in every European state. But aside from inquiries in Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, nothing of substance materialized. What’s more, investigators heavily redacted their findings while avoiding having them translated them into English. This may help explain why the historic scandal has been largely forgotten.
In this context, the newly declassified documents may be one of the most valuable primary sources to date offering new insights into the origins and internal workings of NATO’s secret terror militias in Italy.
Take for example an aide-mémoire (see it here) prepared by Francesco Fulci, Italy’s permanent representative to the UN, which was shared at a “super-restricted” November 6th 1990 meeting of the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s principal political decision-making body, then forwarded to senior British officials at home and abroad.
Based on a note provided by Rome’s then-premier Giulio Andreotti to “the Head of the Italian Parliamentary Commission investigating terrorist incidents,” the aide-mémoire begins by noting that following World War II, Western intelligence agencies devised “unconventional means of defence, by creating in their territories a hidden network of resistance aimed at operating, in case of enemy occupation, through information gathering, sabotage, propaganda and guerrilla warfare.”
According to the aide-mémoire, authorities in Rome began laying the foundations of such an organization in 1951. Four years later, Italian Military Intelligence (SIFAR) and “a corresponding allied service” – a reference to the CIA – then formally agreed on the organization and the activities of a “post-occupation clandestine network”:
“[Gladio] was; formed by agents active in the territory who, by virtue of their age, sex and activities, could reasonably avoid eventual deportation and-imprisonment by the foreign occupiers; easy to manage even from a command structure outside the occupied territory; at a top secret level and hence subdivided into ‘cells’ so as to minimize any possible damage caused by defections, accidents or network penetration.”
The “clandestine resistance network” was subdivided into separate branches, covering information operations, sabotage, propaganda, radio communications, cypher, reception and evacuation of people and equipment. Each of these structures was to operate autonomously, “with liaison and coordination ensured by an external base.”
SIFAR established a dedicated, secret section to recruit and train Gladio operatives. Meanwhile, it maintained five “ready deployment guerrilla units in areas of special interest” across Italy which awaited activation on a continuous basis.
“Operational materials”, including a wide variety of explosives, weapons – such as mortars, hand grenades, guns and knives – and ammunition were stashed in 139 secret underground caches across the country. In April 1972, “to improve security,” these arsenals were exhumed, and moved to offices of the Carabinieri, Rome’s military police, near the original sites.
Only 127 of the weapons storehouses were officially recovered. The aide-mémoir states that at least two “were very likely taken away by unknown persons” at the time they were buried, in October 1964. Who these operatives were and what they did with their stolen arms is left to the imagination.
British involvement in the coup effort
Fulci was eventually quizzed by attendees of the North Atlantic Council summit “as to whether Gladio had deviated from its proper objectives.” In other words, beyond operating strictly as a “stay behind” force, to be activated in the event of Soviet invasion. While “he could not add to what was in the aide-mémoire,” Fulci confirmed “weapons used in some terrorist incidents had come from stores established by Gladio.”
This may reflect the fact that political violence was one of Gladio’s “proper objectives.” A June 1959 SIFAR report unearthed by historian Daniele Ganser confirms guerrilla action against “domestic threats” was hardwired into the operation from its inception. In the Italian context, this entailed systematically terrorizing the left.
As the Italian Communist party surged in polls ahead of the country’s 1948 election, the CIA pumped money into the coffers of the Christian Democrats and an attendant anti-communist propaganda campaign. The cloak-and-dagger effort was so successful in preventing the outbreak of a left-wing government in Rome that Langley secretly intervened in every one of Rome’s elections for at least the next 24 years.
Yet the covert CIA operations were insufficient to prevent Italians from occasionally electing the wrong governments. The 1963 general election saw the Christian Democrats prevail again, this time under the leadership of left-leaning politician Aldo Moro, who sought to construct a coalition with the Socialists and Democratic Socialists. Over the next year, protracted disputes erupted between these parties over what form their administration would take.
In the meantime, SIFAR and CIA black ops specialists such as William Harvey, known as “America’s James Bond,” cooked up a plot to prevent that government from taking office. Known as “Piano Solo,” it dispatched Gladio operatives for a false flag assassination attempt on Moro that would deliberately fail.
According to the plan, the kidnapper was expected to claim they were ordered to kill Moro by communists, thereby justifying the violent seizure of multiple political party and newspaper headquarters, along with the imprisonment of troublesome leftists at the Gladio chapter’s secret headquarters in Sardinia. The plan was ultimately aborted, though it remained on the table throughout 1964.
Moro became Prime Minister without incident and governed until June 1968. Piano Solo fell under official investigation four years later, yet the results were not published until the public first learned of Gladio’s existence. Though the findings omitted any reference to Britain’s role in the planned coup, the newly released documents strongly suggest London’s involvement. (Read them here).
Italy’s then-President Francesco Cossiga requested the ministry hand over “details of UK stay behind measures in 1964,” according to a detailed February 1991 Foreign Office memo on recent developments in the scandal.
Cossiga apparently made this enquiry as a result of a judge “whose investigations into unsolved terrorist attacks first brought Operation Gladio to light,” and who took the “unprecedented step” of demanding the president testify about the conspiracy under oath. By this point, Cossiga had admitted learning of the “stay behind” force while serving as a junior Defense Minister in 1966.
His Foreign Office query strongly suggests British intelligence played a role in Piano Solo, and that the Italian President was well-aware of the plot.
Doomed Italian PM Aldo Moro’s photo while in captivity of the Red Brigades
“One or more of Moro’s kidnappers was secretly in touch with the security apparatus”
On March 16th 1978, a unit of the leftist militant Red Brigades kidnapped Moro. He was on his way to a high-level meeting where he planned to give his blessing there to a new coalition government that relied on communist support, when the kidnappers violently extracted him from his convoy. Five of Moro’s bodyguards were murdered in the process.
After almost two months in captivity, when it became clear the government would neither negotiate with the Red Brigades nor release any of its jailed members in return for Moro, the kidnappers executed the former Italian Prime Minister. His bullet-riddled corpse was left in a car trunk to rot, and for authorities to find.
Moro’s murder has inspired widespread and well-founded suspicions that Gladio operatives infiltrated the Red Brigades to push the group to commit excessively violent acts in order to foment popular demand for a right-wing law-and-order regime. More than perhaps any other incident, his killing fulfilled the objectives of the security state’s strategy of tension.
Whether or not Moro was a casualty of Gladio, a declassified November 5th 1990 Foreign Office memo authored by Britain’s then-ambassador to Rome, John Ashton, makes it clear that London knew much more about the case than has ever been disclosed publicly by any official source. (Read the full Ashton note here).
“There is circumstantial evidence one or more of Moro’s kidnappers was secretly in touch with the security apparatus at the time; and that the latter deliberately neglected to follow up leads which might have led to the kidnappers and saved Moro’s life,” Ashton declared.
What’s more, according to the British diplomat, the presidential crisis committee responsible for attempting to rescue Moro was part of the notorious P2 – the “subversive Masonic lodge” composed of political elites loyal to Gladio.
According to Ashton, P2 was just one of many “mysterious right wing forces” striving “by terrorism and street violence to provoke a repressive backlash against Italy’s democratic institutions” under the “strategy of tension.” And President Cossiga was completely unaware it had infiltrated his crisis committee.
In April 1981, magistrates in Milan raided the villa of Licio Gelli, an Italian financier and self-identified fascist who founded P2. There, they uncovered a list of 2,500 members which read like a “Who’s Who” of Italian politicians, bankers, spooks, financiers, industrialists, and senior law enforcement and military officials. Among the cabal’s most prominent members was Silvio Berlusconi.
Future Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s P2 file
Moro’s “historic compromise,” under which the communists “made possible Andreotti’s government”, would be the party’s “final step before their own entry into government.” Ashton stated that this development “was anathema to P2,” which was “then in virtual control of [Italy’s] security apparatus,” and also to many non-P2 establishment politicians, and also to the US,” and sought to “eliminate once and for all any possibility that the Communist Party… might achieve national power.”
Ashton acknowledged “circumstantial evidence” of “US support for P2.” In reality, P2 founder Gelli was so well-connected to Washington’s national security and intelligence apparatus, the CIA’s Rome station had explicitly charged him with establishing an anti-communist parallel government in Rome.
Subsequent investigations showed how Henry Kissinger helped oversee the recruitment of 400 high-ranking Italian and NATO officers as P2 operatives in 1969. The US was so grateful for Gelli’s anti-communist purge that it made him a guest of honor at the inauguration ceremonies of US Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Ashton concluded his revealing note by noting the truth about Washington’s involvement in Rome’s bloodspattered “Years of Lead” would “probably never be known.” The full extent of Britain’s involvement in terrorist attacks, government overthrows, destabilization campaigns and other heinous skullduggery under the aegis of Operation Gladio, not merely in Italy but throughout Europe, will almost certainly remain a secret as well, and by design.
It was not until 1993 that the public learned how the US and British gifted munitions to Gladio operatives to foment bloody acts of terror across Italy. As Francesco Fulci told his NATO friends at the “super-restricted” meeting, Washington and London supplied the perpetrators of mass casualty attacks including the 1980 bombing of Bologna Centrale railway station, which killed 85 people and wounded over 200.
Those responsible for these hideous crimes have eluded justice in almost every case. Several of the Bologna massacre’s chief suspects, including committed fascist and confirmed MI6 asset Robert Fiore, escaped to London. Britain refused to extradite him and his co-conspirators despite their convictions in absentia for violent crimes.
The extensive experience British intelligence obtained in Operation Gladio raises questions about the lessons the MI6 has applied to current covert operations in theaters of conflict. As The Grayzone revealed in November 2022, British military and intelligence veterans have trained and sponsored a secret partisan terror army in eastern Ukraine to carry out acts of sabotage in Crimea and other majority-Russian areas. The plan called for the training of cells of ideologically dedicated Ukrainians to “shoot, move, communicate, survive.”
Pentagon Leak: Disinfo Op to Expand Control of Internet & Get Rid of Biden
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 14.04.2023
The Pentagon “leak” could have been deliberately orchestrated to force the removal of US President Joe Biden and/or to expand the power of the US government to regulate anything posted on the Internet, Larry Johnson, retired CIA intelligence officer and ex-State Department official, told Sputnik.
Twenty-one-year-old Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira was arrested on Thursday over the much-discussed Pentagon “leaks”. He was charged with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents.
In an affidavit accompanying the charges, an FBI special agent revealed that Teixeira had security clearance for the highest level of classification, “top secret/sensitive compartmented information” (TS/SCI).
“It’s not normal. It’s not typical. It’s not easy, particularly for a member of the National Guard [to gain this level of clearance],” Larry Johnson, a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, who provided training to the US Military’s Special Operations task force for 24 years, told Sputnik. “So, this is very unusual and strange. The thing that captures my attention is that the individual was part of the Air Force unit that’s involved with information warfare. At that age and at that low rank the possibilities that he would have unlimited access to highly classified material is just extremely unlikely.”
The trove of documents was initially released on the Discord platform, popular with gamers, weeks ago. Later, the alleged Pentagon files found their way to major social media platforms and eventually were picked by the US mainstream media.
A Deliberate Leak and Here’s Why
Johnson believes that it was a controlled leak, even though initially the former CIA analyst had been inclined to think that the leaked documents were the work of a frustrated whistleblower. What struck Johnson was a document labeled “CIA Operations Center Intelligence Update” in the trove.
“The one document that did capture my attention as far as being highly unlikely that he would ever have access to it was the report from the CIA Operations Center,” Johnson explained. “That document is prepared for internal use only within the CIA. It’s not the kind of document that’s prepared and circulated within the other agencies that are considered part of the intelligence community.”
One might ask why the leak was needed. According to the CIA veteran, those who he claimed tricked Teixeira may have sought to kill several birds with one stone: to smear MAGA conservatives, justify new Internet restrictions and remove Joe Biden from the Oval Office. Thus, Teixeira was immediately described as a right winger, as an anti-Semite, as a racist, a gun lover and a religious extremist: he “checks all the boxes” routinely smeared by the US mainstream press. As Johnson wittingly remarked in his blog earlier in the day, “the only thing lacking is that the fellow, Jack Texeira, was not wearing a MAGA cap.”
“There’s current legislation being proposed that would not only ban Tik-Tok, but would expand the power of the US government to regulate anything posted on the Internet,” So this could be an act designed to help create political support for that kind of authoritarian crackdown on information, a complete violation of the First Amendment.”
“Another possibility is that disclosure of these documents is designed to embarrass the Biden administration, ultimately forcing the removal of Joe Biden,” the CIA veteran suggested.
Another thing that set alarm bells ringing for Johnson was Bellingcat, which is characterized by the former State Department official as “an Open Source Intelligence outfit that has been funded by US and British intelligence.” It was Bellingcat that allegedly managed to trace the “leak” to a Discord server called “WowMao,” which seemed to have been sourced from the Thug Shaker Central channel.
The story about “leaked Pentagon files” was also picked up by the New York Times and the Washington Post which are largely criticized for being in cahoots with the US federal government and its intelligence agencies.
“That’s why I think it’s a disinformation operation,” Johnson said. “Bellingcat has been funded by both MI6 and the CIA and has worked really as what they call an open source intelligence operation. And it has been used as an intelligence entity. And several of the reporters who were involved, both writing for The New York Times, had previously worked with Bellingcat. The timing of this is just very unusual, that all of a sudden it’s just discovered and the documents that are being leaked are very precisely focused on Ukraine, the conflict with Ukraine and Russia’s activities in Ukraine.”
Convenient Scapegoat
The 21-year old appears to be more of a convenient scapegoat rather than a “hero”, according to Johnson. The former CIA analyst does not rule out that Teixeira will be punished alone – akin to William Calley in the My Lai Massacre case – while his chain of command will be let off the hook.
“I don’t think he had any clear purpose for what he was doing,” said the CIA veteran. “And it’s not clear why he started doing this. And these things are getting posted to this gamer board. Ostensibly, again, that’s the story we’re being told. I don’t know what to believe anymore from the US government. The lies that have been told are so extensive and so massive. I just don’t know what to believe.”
If convicted, Teixeira faces up to 15 years in prison. And if it was indeed a controlled leak, it would send an alarming signal about the extent to which the US government agencies are eager to violate Constitutional rights of a US citizen to reach their objectives. Remarkably, the US mainstream press has not raised the question if Teixeira should be treated as a “whistleblower.”
“The government violating constitutional rights wouldn’t shock me at all,” remarked Johnson. “That’s why I said he’s a convenient scapegoat. They’re using him in this way. He was not working for some foreign intelligence service. He would not have been able just on his own to get access to those documents. I know how really difficult it is, even electronically, when you log into these systems to find some of that information and then to turn it off, then take it out and then decide to photograph and then post it. The story doesn’t add up.”
Touching upon the timing of the “leak” the CIA veteran suggested that “elements in the intelligence community” have eventually “recognized that the prospects for Ukraine in the war with Russia are bleak and hurting and getting more dismal by the day so that Russia is going to prevail and Ukraine is going to lose.”
“And that has really created some great consternation within elements of the intelligence community,” he concluded.
Leaked files reveal Britain’s ambulances aided terrorists in war-torn Syria
By Kit Klarenberg | Press TV | February 20, 2023
On February 6, Syria and Turkey were rocked by devastating back-to-back earthquakes. Ever since, people in these countries and the region have been subjected to a particularly merciless – yet illuminating – crash course in Western double standards on humanitarian aid.
While aid and assistance have flowed into Istanbul and Damascus from all neighbors, initially many governments were reticent to dispatch anything at all to Syria, because US and EU sanctions made it illegal for planes to land in its airports.
It meant that those eager to provide humanitarian assistance could not dispatch it, for fear of dire repercussions. Such concerns were well-founded. Washington enforces sanctions with an iron fist, and any individual or state breaching them faces severe penalties.
Giving in to intense global public pressure, the US Treasury on February 10 enacted a 180-day waiver on certain sanctions imposed on Syria, to allow for vital earthquake relief to reach the country.
Still, neither Washington nor its constellation of international allies has provided any meaningful assistance to Damascus whatsoever, despite the death toll in the country grimly ratcheting daily.
Meanwhile, Israeli regime officials expressed the readiness to bomb Iranian aid deliveries arriving by land. And, in the end, they ended up bombing the people still recovering from the shock of a colossal human tragedy.
Complicating matters further, terrorist groups that still occupy portions of Syrian territories, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the northwest, are blocking the government’s attempts to distribute provisions, a spokesperson for HTS in Idlib telling Reuters no shipments would be permitted to pass its checkpoints, on the basis, “we won’t allow the regime to take advantage of the situation to show they are helping.”
These pockets crisscross the country, an enduring and shameful legacy of the West’s failed decade-long dirty war against Damascus.
Almost never acknowledged by the mainstream media, their continued presence is particularly relevant to consider now, for they are relics of a time when the Western world was only too eager to invest vast sums to flood Syria with medical aid, albeit in service of “regime change”.
Healthcare as psychological warfare
In August 2016, a remarkable and never-before-disclosed covert British intelligence operation began near Amman, Jordan.
At a secret training site operated by London and Washington, British Foreign Office contractor Torchlight – which this journalist has repeatedly exposed for assisting Britain’s infiltration of security and spying agencies across West Asia – extensively tutored violent groups funded and armed by the spy agencies CIA and MI6 in providing medical assistance to terrorists and mercenaries.
Dubbed “MAO CASEVAC” (Moderate Armed Opposition Casualty Evacuation), the program ran the gamut from practical training for paramedics to the provision of multiple ambulances purchased from Qatar, advanced medical technology, elaborate communications systems to ensure the safe and timely transfer of injured “rebels” from the frontline, and the creation and maintenance of dedicated facilities to treat the wounded, at a cost of millions.
Internal documents related to the effort note that at the time it was launched, injured fighters relied “on inadequately prepared and supported self-help at the point of injury, followed by ad hoc systems and capabilities to evacuate and treat them in a hostile and austere environment,” with an overwhelming reliance on civilian hospitals and healthcare infrastructure.
Moreover, CIA and MI6-supported terrorist groups lacked “dedicated doctors”, and medical professionals locally, while willing to treat anyone whatever their ailments, remained “keen to maintain their independence” lest they be accused of serving as in-house doctors for armed actors.
These practitioners even lacked high-tech equipment such as scanners for detecting internal bleeding, and access to resources such as blood products.
So it was Torchlight that set about training 200 opposition actors every year for three years in all conceivable medical disciplines and equipping them accordingly.
While London was careful not to publicize the initiative’s existence in any way, its results were intended to be broadcast widely locally and internationally – for MAO CASEVAC’s objectives were as practical as they were psychological.
It was hoped that on top of saving lives and protecting the welfare of terrorists, their “morale and motivation” would all “be enhanced”, while “purpose, ethos and culture” would be instilled in them:
“If the MAO is able to provide this support then fighters will have greater confidence that they can be provided for in case of injury. Consequently, this will improve motivation, a sense of welfare, and the credibility of MAO troops, as well as reduce battlefield losses. This will add credibility to the MAO.”
As such, MAO CASEVAC was but one component of Britain’s wide-ranging information warfare campaign throughout the Syrian dirty war, designed to destabilize the democratically-elected government of Bashar al-Assad, while rebranding the murderous militant groups rampaging across the country as a “moderate” alternative. Its founding documents make these objectives very clear.
Noting that the British government sought to “foster a negotiated political transition” in Syria, these papers openly state that MAO CASEVAC’s aim was to “generate pressure” on the Assad government.
This was predicated on the notion that “regime change” required “an empowered opposition on the ground,” capable of convincing locals, Western citizens and international bodies that they were courageous freedom fighters on a righteous mission, rather than a ragtag bunch of crazed fundamentalists complicit in countless hideous atrocities, wholly dependent on foreign backing to survive in every way.
Of course, if the opposition could demonstrate to the world they were highly skilled in saving lives, it would go some way to cementing the perception of a professional, humanitarian-orientated force.
This was precisely the rationale behind the creation of the White Helmets – a terrorist group masquerading as a civil defense force – by the British intelligence agency.
‘Risk of ricochet’
Another indication of MAO CASEVAC’s darker nature is provided in Torchlight documents on risks related to its operation.
The training area in Jordan, provided to the company by British intelligence “at no cost to the project,” offered “accommodation, ablution, dining, classrooms, driving tracks, outside rural environment areas, and open space for equipment storage.”
However, the milieu was far from idyllic – medics would be trained alongside opposition fighters learning the art of killing, including the use of AK47s and other weaponry. The proximity between the two programs was such, Torchlight repeatedly warned of the “physical security risk” posed to their students by the site’s dual purpose:
“Another training conducted on the site involves live firing. Consequently, third-party personnel are in possession of weapons and live ammunition on the camp in addition to the Jordanian Security Personnel on site. Risk of ricocheting from the live firing ranges onto the driving range and wider area behind. There is likely to be an overlap of live firing and driving courses [emphasis added].”
If that wasn’t enough, Torchlight also forecast the threat of a “disaffected student” or Jordanian security operative “in possession of a weapon and ammunition” carrying out an armed attack on its staff and trainees to be “high” risk.
Absent was any consideration of students joining the al-Nusra Front and Daesh Takfiri group, and equipment being one way or another appropriated by these terrorist groups, although such considerations are writ large in leaked Foreign Office risk assessments of the fighter training program, which was likewise overseen by British intelligence cutouts.
However, the UK Foreign Office, which funded the program to the tune of $21 million over the same timeframe as MAO CASEVAC, with up to 600 fighters trained annually as a result, was intensely relaxed about those prospects. Any loss of equipment was to be “tolerated” to “a reasonable degree.”
The same was true of AJACS, a controversial British intelligence “aid” project that created the Free Syrian Police, which was run in coordination with Nour al-Din al-Zinki, a CIA-backed entity linked to heinous crimes against humanity, including the videotaped beheading of a Palestinian teenager in 2016.
The implementing contractor of that effort, the notorious Adam Smith International, simply didn’t consider it “cost-effective” to prevent their participation.
All of this begs the question of whether the real objective behind MAO CASEVAC and other interrelated British intelligence operations was to insidiously bolster and equip the most violent, deranged elements on the ground in Syria.
At the very least, it’s evident that whatever anxieties London may harbor today about humanitarian aid making its way to earthquake-hit Syria, an enemy state in dire need of respite, hasn’t historically applied to terrorist groups that further its interests in the country.
This may explain why they remain active there so long after the dirty war theoretically ended.
Christopher Steele, author of the infamous ‘Trump pee-tape’ dossier, stands by his ludicrous claims in a fawning ABC interview
By Michael McCaffrey | RT | October 18, 2021
Former MI6 man Christipher Steele is the subject of an obscenely vapid ABC documentary, with a contemptible interview by George Stephanopoulos that’s so deferential it’s like watching a first date that should be an interrogation.
Just as MI6 super spy James Bond is back in theatres with No Time to Die, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele is back in the spotlight with the story that refuses to die, in an ABC ‘documentary’ titled Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier, now streaming on Hulu.
Steele came to fame as the shadowy force behind the Steele Dossier, the document which was the spark that lit the Trump-Russia collusion fire that was doused in gasoline by obsessive partisan media coverage and numerous, spurious government investigations for the last five years. The dossier claimed that then-candidate Trump was “colluding with Moscow” and that those devious Russians had “kompromat” on Trump in the golden form of a “pee tape.”
Steele’s “coming out of the shadows” consists of him sitting down with George Stephanopoulos and having a cuddle session on fancy sofas in a posh apartment.
Stephanopoulos is the perfect choice for the softball interview since he and Steele have a lot in common – they’ve both worked for the Clintons. Stephanopoulos as adviser to President Bill Clinton and Steele as de facto dirt-finder for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
ABC tried to stretch the excruciatingly thin gruel of this supposed ‘interview’ into an hour-long documentary by adding talking heads from their own newsroom. They failed, as the end result is a one-hour show that is hilariously shallow and vapid, even by ABC News standards.
Out of the Shadows spends considerably more time rehashing the “history” of Russia, Vladimir Putin and Trump than it does actually talking to Steele. Russia is deemed “a rogue state virus spreading westward with its villainy,” Putin a “KGB killer,” and Trump a “threat to American democracy.” In other words, it’s standard establishment media talking points.
Steele’s background is somewhat explored, but being the ever-diligent super spy that he is, Steele never explicitly states that he worked for MI6. I guess he doesn’t want to blow his cover.
What Steele actually says in this interview is of strikingly minimal impact. Thanks to Stephanopoulos’ anti-journalistic, anti-adversarial, deferential approach, no new ground is broken.
It’s well-known that Steele didn’t just compile the dossier, he actively pushed it to media outlets, in effect working to try and scupper Trump’s election campaign. The fact that he was ostensibly working for Democrats at the time certainly makes it appear as if he was a part of a wider disinformation/interference operation, but of course that’s a topic Stephanopoulos whistles past in this patty-cake chat.
Steele admits to no wrongdoing or error, despite the U.S. intelligence agencies “eviscerating” his findings after thorough investigation, and the FBI labelling him “untrustworthy.”
The issue of the “sources” Steele uses doesn’t get the attention it deserves either, as it’s reported that he only used one “key collector,” but Steele is quick to make clear it was “one collector” but not “one source.” That seems like a distinction without a difference.
As the documentary reports, that one collector was not a person in Moscow, but actually someone in Washington DC whose name is not revealed. The Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported this person claimed that the information being given to Steele was “word of mouth and hearsay.” In other words, Steele was acting less as an intelligence expert seeking truth with his dossier than he was being a gossip columnist spreading rumor and innuendo.
Steele’s declaration, “I stand by the work we did, the sources we had, and the professionalism we applied to it,” is as devoid of substance as the rest of the interview.
The most damning aspect comes toward the end, and even that is soft pedaled, when Stephanopoulos asks Steele about both the dossier’s allegation that Trump counsel Michael Cohen went to Prague to meet with Russian intelligence and about the pee tape.
Cohen denies a Prague meeting ever took place, and since he has now flipped against Trump, one would assume he’s telling the truth. But Steele’s resolve remains, as he conjures up a wild scenario where Cohen is still lying because he wants to avoid being charged with treason.
Stephanopoulos, of course, lets this utter lunacy pass almost without notice. He could’ve asked Steele how exactly Cohen got to Prague, since his passport shows no travel to the Czech Republic. Or pressed Steele to provide details or at least a passable explanation for how that meeting could possibly have taken place? But he didn’t, he just smiled and continued playing footsie with Steele.
The ‘pee tape’ is the most salacious accusation in the dossier, and despite it never surfacing and no evidence it exists, Steele still stands by the claim…sort of. He says that the tape “probably does” exist but that he wouldn’t “put 100% certainty on it.”
When Stephanopoulos asks why the tape hasn’t come out, Steele replies that “it hasn’t needed to be released…because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president.”
Look, I loathe Trump, always have and always will, but this sounds like the ravings of someone deeply infected with a ferocious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is maybe why he is still taken seriously by the equally afflicted establishment media.
The more you know about Steele, the more readily apparent it becomes that he’s an absolute charlatan and bullshit artist masquerading as a serious intelligence expert. He’s no James Bond, he’s not even George Smiley. He’s more like a cross between Mr. Bean and Inspector Clouseau, who should, like this vacant and vacuous interview/documentary, be relentlessly ridiculed and righteously disrespected.
Lavrov Calls Out Perfidious Albion in EU Diplomat Spat
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 28, 2021
Britain is fomenting a diplomatic crisis between the European Union and Russia, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Evidence and precedent indicate Lavrov has his sight well-trained.
The British establishment’s notorious ability for machination and intrigue – hence the ancient moniker Perfidious Albion – can be seen as stirring the escalating row between the European Union and Russia in which diplomats are being expelled pell-mell.
This week, Russia ordered the withdrawal of representatives from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. That came in response to the expulsion of Russian diplomats from those countries. Russia has also ordered home more diplomats from the Czech Republic. Poland and Italy have also been caught up in diplomatic antagonism with Moscow.
The row blew up last week when the Czech Republic accused Russian state agents of being responsible for twin explosions on its territory back in 2104. The blasts caused the deaths of two workers at an ammunition depot near the village of Vrbetice close to the border with Slovakia. Until recently, the Czech authorities had concluded that the explosions were an industrial accident.
What prompted the Czechs to revise their ideas and to now blame Russia for sabotage is the interpolation of Britain in providing “new information”. Specifically, it was the MI6-sponsored media group Bellingcat (a so-called private investigatory agency) which appears to have furnished the disinformation which purports to show the involvement of Russian military intelligence (GRU). Incredibly, the British claim their “evidence” shows that two of the GRU agents were also the same individuals who were alleged to have been involved in poisoning the Russian traitor-spy Sergei Skripal in England in 2018. The British claim to have passport information to support their claims, but such methodology is rife with forgery – a black art that the British are all-too skilled at.
On leveling the accusation against Russia, the Czech Republic then ordered the expulsion of 18 Russian diplomats. Moscow responded angrily, saying that the claims of sabotage were a “dirty fabrication” and pointing out that Prague did not provide any information for verification. Russia took swift reciprocal action by banishing 20 Czech diplomats from its territory.
However, the row continues to flare with the Baltic states entering the fray by banning Russian officials in “solidarity” with the Czech Republic. The move by the Baltic states is predictable as they are supercharged by anti-Russian political sentiment. It’s a case of any excuse for them to inflame relations.
The dispute comes at a fraught time when the European Union is discussing imposing more sanctions on Russia over wider concerns about the conflict in Ukraine, the imprisonment of blogger Alexei Navalny and a Russian security crackdown on Navalny’s shadowy Western-backed “opposition” network.
The skirmishing over diplomats is a convenient way to further damage relations between the EU and Russia, especially as the strategically important Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project nears completion – a project that Washington wants to eviscerate for its own selfish commercial reasons. Uncle Sam’s junior partner Britain may be obliging in that regard and thus trying to curry favor for garnering an American trade deal in the post-Brexit world.
Certainly, Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov is clear about the stealthy British hand in recent events. In a media interview this week, Lavrov mentioned the United Kingdom in wary terms, saying: “As far as the relations between Russia and Europe are concerned, I still believe that the UK is playing an active and a very serious subversive role. It withdrew from the European Union, but we see no decrease in its activities on this track. On the contrary, they are trying to influence EU member states’ approaches to Russia to the maximum possible extent.”
It should be recalled that Britain has played a starring duplicitous role in demonizing Russia and poisoning international relations.
It was Bellingcat (MI6) that pushed the narrative that Russia was complicit in the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner in 2014 over Eastern Ukraine with the loss of nearly 300 lives. Based on British “evidence” (which has been debunked as fabrication), a Dutch investigation into the disaster has accused Russia. That affair has hardened European prejudices against Russia which has fomented the imposition of sanctions.
It was a former British MI6 operative Christopher Steele who was instrumental in promoting the Russiagate dossier around 2016 which destroyed bilateral relations between the United States and Russia, and which continues to fuel fabrications about Moscow’s interference in American and European politics (even those Steele’s “dirty dossier” is a risible load of rubbish and has been debunked).
And it was the Skripal saga in Salisbury in March 2018 which Britain hatched to further poison international relations with Russia. That saga – with no proof against Russia – has become a concocted “standard proof” for the subsequent saga of “poisoning” the blogger conman Alexei Navalny. Western governments and media refer to the “Kremlin plot” to kill Skripal as “evidence” for another “Kremlin plot” to assassinate Navalny. This is tantamount to one fiction being used to prove another fiction. The same saga is now feeding into the Czech explosion row. And it all comes back to the devious ingenuity of Perfidious Albion.
Foreign Minister Lavrov added a further incisive comment on the role of Britain. He said: “At the same time, you know, they send us signals, they propose establishing contacts. This means, they do not shy away from communication [with Russia], but try to discourage others. Again, probably [this can be explained by] their desire to have a monopoly of these contacts and again prove that they are superior to others.”
The British establishment likes to boast that they “punch above their weight” in terms of influence beyond their territorial size. It’s not hard to see how they manage such a feat. It’s called duplicity, intrigue, lies, and dividing and ruling. Perfidious Albion par excellence.
Featured Video
Israel’s diamond industry is dying. That’s a billion-dollar problem for the IDF.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Mossad behind Italian ‘blackmail’ spying scandal
The Cradle | November 1, 2024
An Italian private intelligence firm that allegedly hacked government databases to collect information on thousands of prominent people, including politicians, entrepreneurs, and celebrities, is accused of working for Israeli intelligence and the Vatican, media reported on 30 October.
Police wiretaps leaked to Italian media show that Equalize, which employs former members of Italian intelligence, is accused of breaching the servers of government ministries and the police between 2019 and 2024 to collect information.
Yedioth Ahronoth reported that Equalize allegedly collected numerous classified files that contain sensitive information about prominent Italians to sell to clients – including major companies and law firms seeking information to gain an advantage over competitors, win court cases, or for blackmail and extortion.
Prime Minister Meloni described the alleged scheme as “unacceptable” and “a threat to democracy.” … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Bill Francis on Victoria Moves to Force Online… papasha408 on The Empire of Lies: How the BB… loongtip on US Weighs Port Restrictions on… Bill Francis on Chris Minns Defends NSW “Hate… Sheree Sheree on I was canceled by three newspa… Richard Ong on Czech–Slovak alignment signals… John Edward Kendrick on Colonel Jacques Baud & Nat… eddieb on Villains of Judea: Ronald Laud… rezjiekc on Substack Imposes Digital ID Ch… loongtip on US strikes three vessels in Ea… eddieb on An Avoidable Disaster Steve Jones on For Israel, The Terrorist Atta…
Aletho News- Israel’s diamond industry is going extinct. That’s a billion-dollar problem for the IDF.
- Iran says no basis for inspection of bombed nuclear sites
- How reporting facts can now land you in jail for 14 years as a terrorist
- Bill Gates, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla Ordered to Testify in Dutch COVID Vaccine Injury Lawsuit
- The vindication (and brutal punishment) of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich
- US Department of State Discloses Names of 5 Europeans Sanctioned for Censorship Against US
- The Epstein Saga: Chapter 1, Mr. Clinton
- Bill Clinton is in the frame again, but this time it’s Trump who put him there
- US Navy effectively becomes a tool of modern piracy
- EU Morphing Into Its Own Worst Enemy – Viktor Orban
- If Americans Knew
- The Faces of AIPAC: the largest pro-Israel lobbying org in the US
- Gazan Christians mark 3rd Christmas under genocide – Not a Ceasefire Day 75
- Israeli scams children with cancer out of millions fundraised for their treatment, BBC finds
- Casey Kennedy Fired from AG Scientific Amid Zionist Troll Campaign Over Track AIPAC Work
- The Hasmoneans: The Jewish Dynasty That Gave Us Hanukkah Is a Symbol of Murder, Not Heroism and Hope
- Int’l NGOs may be blocked from Gaza starting Jan. 1 – Not a Ceasefire Day 74
- From Churches to ChatGPT: Israeli Contracts Worth Millions Aim to Influence U.S. Public Opinion
- Who is the Pro-Israel Clique behind TikTok’s US Takeover?
- Medical Crisis in UK Prisons – 800 Doctors Warn of ‘Imminent Deaths’ Among Palestine Action Strikers
- The New York Times ignores an essential part of the Jeffrey Epstein story — Israel
- No Tricks Zone
- Merry Christmas Everybody!
- Two More New Studies Show The Southern Ocean And Antarctica Were Warmer In The 1970s
- Der Spiegel Caught Making Up Reports About Conservative America (Again)
- New Study: 8000 Years Ago Relative Sea Level Was 30 Meters Higher Than Today Across East Antarctica
- The Wind Energy Paradox: “Why More Wind Turbines Don’t Always Mean More Power”
- New Study Reopens Questions About Our Ability To Meaningfully Assess Global Mean Temperature
- Dialing Back The Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence Of Climate Tipping Points!
- Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon Challenges The Climate Consensus … It’s The Sun, Not CO2
- Regional Cooling Since The 1980s Has Driven Glacier Advance In The Karakoram Mountains
- Greenland Petermann Glacier Has Grown 30 Kilometers Since 2012!
Aletho News 
