Quote:In a truly remarkable bit of honesty and candor regarding the U.S. national-security establishment, new Senate minority leader Charles Schumer has accused President-elect Trump of "being really dumb."

Was Schumer referring to Trump's ideology, philosophy, or knowledge about economics or foreign policy?

None of the above. According to an article in The Hill, he told Rachel Maddow on her show that Trump was dumb for taking on the CIA and questioning its conclusions regarding Russia.

"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you…. He's being really dumb to do this."

Maddow then asked Schumer what he thought the intelligence community might do to Trump to get back at him.

Schumer's response was fascinating and revealing. He responded, "I don't know."

So, Schumer knows that there are six ways from Sunday for the intelligence community to get back at Trump but then, a few seconds later, can't enumerate even one of those ways? That makes no sense, unless he was a bit scared to go into the details for fear that one of those "six ways from Sunday" might be employed against him.

In any event, Schumer's point is a good one, even if he is reluctant to clarify it. No president since John F. Kennedy has dared to take on the CIA or the rest of the national security establishment or to operate outside the bounds of permissible parameters within the paradigm of the national-security state.

That might have been because post-JFK presidents just happened to find themselves on the same page as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.

But another possibility is that the one mentioned by Schumer: They knew that if they opposed the national-security establishment at a fundamental level, they would be subjected to retaliatory measures.

Kennedy had come into office as a standard Cold Warrior and as a supporter of the national-security state system, the totalitarian-like apparatus that was grafted onto America's federal governmental system after World War II. But after he was set up and betrayed by the CIA with respect to the Bay of Pigs invasion, he was at loggerheads with that agency for the rest of his presidency. After the Bay of Pigs, he vowed to tear the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds. He also fired CIA Director Allen Dulles, who, in a rather unusual twist of fate, would later be appointed to the Warren Commission to investigate Kennedy's murder.

Kennedy's antipathy toward the CIA gradually extended to what President Eisenhower had termed the military-industrial complex, especially when it proposed Operation Northwoods, which called for fraudulent terrorist attacks to serve as a pretext for invading Cuba, and when it suggested that Kennedy initiate a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. (The latter suggestion caused Kennedy to indignantly leave the meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the suggestion was made and remark to an aide, "And we call ourselves the human race."

The feeling was mutual. The CIA considered Kennedy to be a traitor for refusing to provide U.S. air support for the CIA's invaders at the Bay of Pigs. One member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered the way Kennedy handled the Cuban Missile Crisis to be the biggest defeat in U.S. history and compared the president's actions to Neville Chamberlain's capitulation at Munich in 1938.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's war with his national-security establishment got even worse. That's because Kennedy concluded that the Cold War was bunk, that it should be ended, and that the United States could peacefully coexist with the communist world. That's when he delivered his famous Peace Speech at American University, which was broadcast all across the Soviet Union. He had failed to consult with the Pentagon or the CIA in preparing the speech. He also entered into a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets, over the fierce objections of his national-security establishment. He also ordered a partial withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and told close associates that he would order a complete withdrawal after defeating Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election. Worst of all, from the standpoint of the national-security establishment, he initiated secret personal negotiations with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, both of whom, by this time, were on the same page as Kennedy.

But that wasn't the page that the CIA and the Pentagon were on. They were convinced that Kennedy was surrendering America to the communists. As far as they were concerned, there could never be peaceful coexistence with the communist world. There was only one way that the Cold War could end by finishing off the Soviet Union once and for all.

It's worth pointing out that Kennedy's actions constituted a direct threat to the trillions of dollars in military and intelligence largess that would end up flowing into the coffers of the "defense" industry if the Cold War and hot wars (e.g., Vietnam) were to continue.

Kennedy was fully aware of the danger he faced by taking on such a formidable enemy. He understood precisely what Schumer just pointed out about the national-security establishment that they have "six ways from Sunday" to retaliate.

One possibility, of course, was a military coup, the same type that the U.S. national-security establishment would initiate in Chile some ten years later to save the country from a democratically elected president who was deemed to be a threat to national security, especially owing to his desire to establish friendly relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Kennedy was so concerned about that possibility that he persuaded a friend in Hollywood to turn the novel Seven Days in May into a movie (I highly recommend itit stars Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas) to serve as warning to the American people. The movie was an echo of the warning that President Eisenhower had given to the American people in his 1961 Farewell Address, when he pointed out that the military-industrial complex, which was new to the American way of life, posed a grave threat to the freedoms and democratic processes of the American people. Also, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK's brother Bobby told the Russians that there was a grave danger of a U.S. military takeover if the matter wasn't settled soon.

Another possibility, of course, was assassination, thereby elevating to president the vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, who just happened to reject Kennedy's view on the Cold War and who just happened to embrace the Pentagon's and CIA's views on the Cold War. Once he assumed the presidency, Johnson immediately canceled JFK's plans to withdraw from Vietnam and, working with the Pentagon, came up with the bogus Gulf of Tonkin attack that served as a pretext to expand U.S. involvement in the war. More than 58,000 American men would ultimately die for nothing in Vietnam.

Ever since the Kennedy assassination, no president has dared to tangle with the national-security establishment at a fundamental level. Everyone in Washington knows where the real power of the federal government is centered. (See the excellent book National Security and Double Government by Michael Glennon.) Every president knows that he is expected to operate within the parameters set forth by the national-security establishment and every president since Kennedy has dutifully complied.

Once he assumes the presidency, Donald Trump might be the first president since Kennedy to violate that sacred rule of the national-security establishment. If he does and if he refuses to do what previous presidents have done, it will be interesting to see the outcome. As Sen. Schumer has pointed out, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have "six ways from Sunday" by which to retaliate.

Paul Rigby Wrote:Dr. Paul Craig Roberts states clearly and repeatedly that if they can't stop him becoming president they'll kill Trump just as they did with John Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield and William McKinley.

Paul Rigby Wrote:Why the CIA, Dems and Deep State Hate Trump

Published on 13 Jan 2017

Visit our website at http://www.billstill.com

[video=youtube_share;BGnbUORijmg]http://youtu.be/BGnbUORijmg[/video]

Quote:Is a military coup in the works? Or are U.S. intelligence agencies laying the political groundwork for forcing Donald Trump from the presidency because they can't abide his rejection of a new cold war with Russia? Not long ago, even asking such questions would have marked one as the sort of paranoid nut who believes that lizard people run the government. But no longer.

Thanks to the now-notorious 35-page dossier concerning Donald Trump's alleged sexual improprieties in a Moscow luxury hotel, it's clear that strange maneuverings are underway in Washington and that no one is quite sure how they will end.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper added to the mystery Wednesday evening by releasing a 200-word statement to the effect that he was shocked, shocked, that the dossier had found its way into the press. Such leaks, the statement said, "are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security."

Clapper added: "that this document is not a US Intelligence Community product and that I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC. The IC has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions. However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security."

Rather than vouching for the dossier's contents, in other words, all Clapper says he did was inform Trump that it was making the rounds in Washington and that he should know what it said and that he thus couldn't have been more horrified than when Buzzfeed posted all 35 pages on its website.

But it doesn't make sense. As The New York Times noted, "putting the summary in a report that went to multiple people in Congress and the executive branch made it very likely that it would be leaked" (emphasis in the original). So even if the "intelligence community" didn't leak the dossier itself, it distributed it knowing that someone else would.

Then there is the Guardian, second to none in its loathing for Trump and Vladimir Putin and hence intent on giving the dossier the best possible spin. It printed a quasi-defense not of the memo itself but of the man who wrote it: Christopher Steele, an ex-MI6 officer who now heads his own private intelligence firm. "A sober, cautious and meticulous professional with a formidable record" is how the Guardian described him. Then it quoted an unnamed ex-Foreign Office official on the subject of Steele's credibility:

"The idea his work is fake or a cowboy operation is false, completely untrue. Chris is an experienced and highly regarded professional. He's not the sort of person who will simply pass on gossip. … If he puts something in a report, he believes there's sufficient credibility in it for it to be worth considering. Chris is a very straight guy. He could not have survived in the job he was in if he had been prone to flights of fancy or doing things in an ill-considered way."

In other words, Steele is a straight-shooter, so it's worth paying attention to what he has to say. Or so the Guardian assures us. "That is the way the CIA and the FBI, not to mention the British government, regarded him, too," it adds, so presumably Clapper felt the same way.

What is Afoot?

So what does it all mean? Simply that U.S. intelligence agencies believed that the dossier came from a reliable source and that, as a consequence, there was a significant possibility that Trump was a "Siberian candidate," as Times columnist Paul Krugman once described him. They therefore sent out multiple copies of a two-page summary on the assumption that at least one would find its way to the press.

Even if Clapper & Co. took no position concerning the dossier's contents, they knew that preparing and distributing such a summary amounted to a tacit endorsement. They also knew, presumably, that it would provide editors with an excuse to go public. If the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency feel that Steele's findings are worthy of attention, then why shouldn't the average reader have an opportunity to examine them as well?

How did Clapper expect Trump to respond when presented with allegations that he was vulnerable to Russian blackmail and potentially under the Kremlin's thumb? Did he expect him to hang his head in shame, break into great racking sobs, and admit that it was all true? If so, did Clapper \then plan to place a comforting hand on Trump's shoulder and suggest, gently but firmly, that it was time to step aside and allow a trusted insider like Mike Pence to take the reins?

Based on the sturm und drang of the last few days, the answer is very possibly yes. If so, the gambit failed when Trump, in his usual high-voltage manner, denounced the dossier as "fake news" and sailed into the intelligence agencies for behaving like something out of "Nazi Germany." The intelligence community's hopes, if that's what they were, were dashed.

All of which is thoroughly unprecedented by American political standards. After all, this is a country that takes endless pride in the peaceful transfer of power every four years or so. Yet here was the intelligence community attempting to short-circuit the process by engineering Trump's removal before he even took office.

But the Guardian then upped the ante even more by suggesting that the CIA continue with the struggle. Plainly, the Republican congressional leadership has "no appetite" for an inquiry into Steele's findings, the paper's New York correspondent, Ed Pilkington, wrote, adding:

"That leaves the intelligence agencies. The danger for Trump here is that he has so alienated senior officials, not least by likening them to Nazis, that he has hardly earned their loyalty."

What was the Guardian suggesting that disloyal intelligence agents keep on searching regardless? And what if they come up with what they claim is a smoking gun?

Explained Pilkington: "To take a flight of fancy, what if it [i.e. Steele's findings] were substantiated? That would again come down to a question of politics. No US president has ever been forced out of office by impeachment (Richard Nixon resigned before the vote; Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were acquitted by the Senate). Any such procedure would have to be prepared and approved by a majority of the House of Representatives, and then passed to the Senate for a two-thirds majority vote. As the Republicans hold the reins in both chambers, it would take an almighty severing of ties between Trump and his own party to even get close to such a place."

It's a long shot, but the Guardian's recommendation is that rogue agents keep on digging until they strike pay dirt, at which point they should go straight to Congress and persuade if not pressure the Republican leadership to initiate the process of throwing Trump out of office.

This is not the same as sending an armored column to attack Capitol Hill, but it's close. Essentially, the Guardian was calling on the intelligence agencies to assume ultimate responsibility regarding who can sit in the Oval Office and who cannot.

A Desperate Establishment

All of which demonstrates how desperate the military-intelligence complex has grown after Clapper's report on alleged Russian hacking of Democratic emails met with such a derisory reception following its publication on Jan. 6. Even the Times admitted that it provided "no new evidence to support assertions that Moscow meddled covertly through hacking and other actions" while the Daily Beast said it was "unlikely to convince a single skeptic" due to a notable absence of anything by way of back-up data.

The Steele dossier was supposed to take up the slack. Yet it has fallen short as well. It asserts, for example, that Trump attorney Michael Cohen traveled to Prague to discuss hacking with a Russian official named Oleg Solodukhin, a claim that both men have since denied. It misspells the name of a major Russian bank and gets its Russian geography wrong too.

As Owen Matthews points out in a very smart article in Newsweek, it "seems to be under the impression that the suburb of Barvikha on the tony Rublevskoe highway is a closed government compound, instead of just an expensive vacation home area favored by the new rich."

The dossier misspells the name of an Azeri real-estate mogul named Aras Agalarov and "reports his association with Trump as news in August 2016 when Agalarov publicly organized Trump's visit to the Miss Universe pageant in 2013 and arranged a meeting with top Russian businessmen for Trump afterward, both of which were widely reported at the time."

Other aspects of the dossier don't add up either. It reports that the Russian government "has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years" in order to "encourage splits and divisions in the Western alliance." But as Matthews points out, Trump wasn't in politics five years ago and was considered a long shot for months after entering the presidential race in mid-2015. So how could the Kremlin be sure that their man would ultimately prevail?

The dossier says that Trump "accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on Democratic and other political rivals." But Trump gave no hint of having inside information when he called for "Crooked Hillary" to be locked up for purging her email files; to the contrary, he did so on the basis of information available on every front page. The memo says that the Russians also had "compromising material" on Clinton. If so, then why wasn't it used?

Hearsay Evidence

The discrepancies go on. But this is what one would expect of a document based entirely of hearsay in which Source A claims to have gotten a juicy tidbit from Source B, who heard it from Source C deep inside the Kremlin.

Grasping at straws, the Guardian's Ed Pilkington conceded that no news agency has been able to verify the dossier's findings. But, he said, they are "unlikely to be discarded as quickly or as conclusively as Trump would like" for the simple reason that "the flip side of information that cannot be classed reliable is that neither can it be classed unreliable."

But the same could be said for information that someone got from a friend whose brother-in-law heard from a park ranger that Barack and Michelle like to while away their evenings snorting cocaine. It can't be classed as reliable because no one can verify that it's true. But it can't be classed as unreliable because no one can prove that it's wrong. So maybe the best thing to do is to impeach Obama in the few days he has remaining just to be sure.

This not to say that the so-called President-elect's legitimacy is not open to question. To the contrary, it is questionable in the extreme given that he lost the popular election by more than 2.86 million votes. In a democratic country, this should count for something. But the intelligence community is not attacking him on democratic grounds, needless to say, but on imperial.

Trump is a rightwing blowhard whose absurd babblings about Saudi Arabia, Iran and Yemen reveal a man who is dangerously ignorant about how the world works. But he has managed to seize on one or two semi-good ideas over the years. One is that Obama administration's confrontational policies toward Russia are a recipe for disaster, while another is that toppling Syria's Bashar al-Assad with Al Qaeda and ISIS still up and about will only hasten their march on Damascus.

Both views are perfectly sensible. But because Washington's endlessly bellicose foreign-policy establishment is wedded to the opposite, it sees them as high treason.

This is very serious. U.S. foreign policy has been marked by a high degree of continuity since World War II as Republican and Democratic presidents alike pledged to uphold the imperial agenda. But Trump, as radical in his way as William Jennings Bryan was in 1896 or Henry A. Wallace in 1948, is bucking the consensus to an unprecedented degree.

Even though its policies have led to disaster after disaster, the foreign-policy establishment is aghast. Consequently, it is frantically searching for a way to prevent him from carrying his ideas out. The intelligence agencies appear to be running out of time with the inauguration only a few days away. But that doesn't mean they're giving up. All it means, rather, is that they'll go deeper underground. Trump may enter the White House on Jan. 20. But the big question is how long he'll remain.

Quote:Chris Steele is a former MI6 and FBI asset who compiled a dossier of unsubstantiated allegations about President-elect Donald Trump. The current Director at the private security and investigation firm Orbis Business Intelligence, is a curious player in the sensational efforts of Trump adversaries. Here is what I discovered about the former British intelligence officer.

For Donald Trump's part, his press conference this week revealed his righteous indignation at just how far his opponents will go to smear his coming administration. Shunning Buzzfeed and ostracizing CNN for their irresponsible broadcasting of the "dossier", Mr. Trump was crystal clear in pointing the finger at crooked media and the people behind. The incoming president was also clear in identifying his adversaries, a fact that has been corroborated.

The Steele dossier was contracted by both Republican and Democratic adversaries of Mr. Trump. Senator John McCain, the notoriously hawkish Arizona arms industry puppet, admitted he turned over the dossier to the FBI. While McCain's involvement is shocking enough, I believe other familiar faces funded the extended smear campaign. The Guardian has done some of the homework in tracking down how this dossier came into being, but this "Steele" character is still a bit of an enigma.

Chris Steele has only this week come into the limelight, but Mother Jones had actually reported on some of his activities back in October of 2016. By using The Guardian story, and what can be gleaned from the Mother Jones report, profiling Mr. Trump's new nemesis is actually not so difficult. Steel's LinkedIn profile and connections are telling. Steele has received some interesting endorsements on LinkedIn.

First, Jonathan Winer, who's a Special Envoy at US Department of State, acknowledged the former MI6 agent on his international relations skills, it is key to note that Winer is not only the special envoy for Libya, but he was previously a senior director at Margery Kraus' APCO Worldwide, a former Assistant Secretary of State, and Secretary of State John Kerry's legislative assistant. Are your eyebrows raised?

Paul Andrews, who's director of Ultrax Consulting Limited also recommended Steele. Of further interest is the fact Andrews was a member of Her Majesty's Foreign Commonwealth Office for 15 years. Maybe a direct quote from Andrews' security agency will shed more light:

"ULTRAX has, both directly and indirectly, been a leading provider of training services to Her Majesty's Government and is one of a small number of private companies to have been entrusted with providing consultancy services and training to Ministry of Defence and Government Agencies with a National Security agenda."

Clovis Meath Baker CMG OBE is a senior adviser to the UK Government's so-called Stabilisation Unit. He recommended Steele for his "counterterrorism" capacity. As an interesting note here, Baker is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) is the world's oldest independent think tank on international defense and security.

Chris Burrows, Steele's fellow director at Orbis, he's in the same circles as the Trump dossier author, but with a wider reach within the LinkedIn community. Burrows was the First Secretary of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office for 9 years, and is perhaps tied in part to the Moscow element of this story. His recommendations include one from Fedor Zhavoronkov, who is the most intriguing figure in this loop of spooks I found so far. Zhavoronkov was a key security account manager for the famous Grant Vympel agency in Russia formed from the famous special operations Group "Vympel, which took part in storming the Russian "White House" in support of then President Boris Yeltsin. I mention this only because the 2nd October Revolution only narrowly failed with the reluctant help of elements of the Russian military. Of dissenters in Russia, there are still many.

Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge takes the same track I did in framing the connections of Christopher Steele, but he goes further in assessing the credibility of the so-called "Trump dossier". Durden quotes one Andrew Wordsworth, co-founder of London-based investigations firm Raedas, who often works on Russian issues, who called the dossier "unconvincing" at best. What is most "convincing" for me is the fact Chris Steele was involved with Alexander Litvinenko, the man whose death the British leadership tried to pin on Vladmir Putin. According to today's reports, Steele has now fled his multimillion pound sterling home fearing his own life. You read this correctly, the web of "Putin probably did it" macabre is growing huge.

The murdered Russian double agent Alexander Litvinenko, Ukraine revolution cheerleader and warmonger Senator John McCain, MI6 spooks out the ying yang, Fake News going rampant, the US intelligence community melting down, and Donald Trump accused of more infidelity than Putin himself what else can we expect in the next few days? McCain visits the scene of his war crimes, then flies home to turn over make-believe dossiers on a new president? Oh well, just read this Daily Mail piece and find a copy of Alice in Wonderland, then come back and tell me which crazy world we live in.

Quote:The Zinoviev letter - one of the greatest British political scandals of this century - was forged by a MI6 agent's source and almost certainly leaked by MI6 or MI5 officers to the Conservative Party, according to an official report published today.
New light on the scandal which triggered the fall of the first Labour government in 1924 is shed in a study by Gill Bennett, chief historian at the Foreign Office, commissioned by Robin Cook.

It points the finger at Desmond Morton, an MI6 officer and close friend of Churchill who appointed him personal assistant during the second world war, and at Major Joseph Ball, an MI5 officer who joined Conservative Central Office in 1926.

The exact route of the forged letter to the Daily Mail will never be known, Ms Bennett said yesterday. There were other possible conduits, including Stewart Menzies, a future head of MI6 who, according to MI6 files, admitted sending a copy to the Mail.

The letter, purported to be from Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Comintern, the internal communist organisation, called on British communists to mobilise "sympathetic forces" in the Labour Party to support an Anglo-Soviet treaty (including a loan to the Bolshevik government) and to encourage "agitation-propaganda" in the armed forces.

On October 25, 1924, four days before the election, the Mail splashed headlines across its front page claiming: Civil War Plot by Socialists' Masters: Moscow Orders To Our Reds; Great Plot Disclosed. Labour lost by a landslide.

Ms Bennett said the letter "probably was leaked from SIS [the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6] by somebody to the Conservative Party Central Office". She named Major Ball and Mr Morton, who was responsible for assessing agents' reports.

"I have my doubts as to whether he thought it was genuine but [Morton] treated it as if it was," she said. She described MI6 as being at the centre of the scandal, although it was impossible to say whether the head of MI6, Admiral Hugh Sinclair, was involved.

She said there was no evidence of a conspiracy in what she called "the institutional sense". The security and intelligence community at the time consisted of a "very, very incestuous circle, an elite network" who went to school together. Their allegiances, she says in her report, "lay firmly in the Conservative camp".

Ms Bennett had full access to secret files held by MI6 (some have been destroyed) and MI5. She also saw Soviet archives in Moscow before writing her 128-page study. The files show the forged Zinoviev letter was widely circulated, including to senior army officers, to inflict maximum damage on the Labour government.

She found no evidence to identify the name of the forger. She said the letter - sent to MI6 from one of its agents in the Latvian capital, Riga - was written as a result of a campaign orchestrated by White Russians who had good contacts in London who were strongly opposed to the Anglo-Soviet treaty.

The report says there is no hard evidence that MI6 agents in Riga were directly responsible - though it is known they had close contacts with White Russians - or that the letter was commissioned in response to British intelligence services' "uneasiness about its prospects under a re-elected Labour government".

However, if Ms Bennett is right in her suggestion that MI6 chiefs did not set up the forgery, her report makes clear that MI6 deceived the Foreign Office by asserting it did know who the source was - a deception it used to insist, wrongly, that the Zinoviev letter was genuine.

Ms Bennett says it is wrong to conclude the scandal brought down Ramsay Macdonald's government which had already lost a confidence vote and Liberal support on which it depended was disappearing. The Labour vote in the election actually increased by a million.

"In electoral terms", she says, "the impact of the Zinoviev letter on Labour was more psychological than measurable".

The Zinoviev letter was not the only attempt by the security and intelligence services to destabilised a Labour government. Peter Wright, a former MI5 officer, showed in Spycatcher how elements in his agency worked against the Wilson government in the 1970s.

Quote:Among the more sensational revelations thrown up by the symposium were the identities of intelligence operators quite possibly involved in different stages of the alleged forgery. Owen Dudley Edwards (University of Edinburgh) speculated that one likely candidate, capable of constructing the text of typed matter' and reworking the Black Diaries from original diaries, was the Cambridge historian, Sir F.E. Adcock OBE (1886-1968). In 1915 Adcock was recruited into intelligence by Sir Alfred Ewing and served in the intelligence division of the Admiralty (Room 40) until 1919. There his mastery of the German language, retentive memory and cryptic mind proved invaluable in the daily task of deciphering German intercepts. Adcock idolised the director of naval intelligence, Captain Reginald Hall, whose portrait hung on the walls of Adcock's rooms at King's College, Cambridge beside that of his close friend, the poet A.E. Housman. After the war Adcock edited the Cambridge Ancient History, and as a historian had a close affinity to the historical approach of Thucydides. He wrote a number of important papers on source-criticism and was conscious of how a number of accepted classical sources must be suspected as fictitious'. On the outbreak of the Second World War, Adcock was active in recruiting a new generation of intelligence operators to both Bletchley Park and other war-time Foreign Office intelligence departments, including the brilliant but doomed, Alan Turing, responsible for breaking the Nazis' Enigma codes.

Another name' mentioned, by Trinity College graduate, Kevin Mannerings, as a possible candidate for the calligraphic penmanship of the forgery was Donald Im Thurn. Despite his rather distinguished relatives, Im Thurn is a rather shady character drifting on the periphery of intelligence during and after the First World War. His name is most sensationally associated with the forging of the Zinoviev Letter. Mannerings had a number of well argued reasons for suggesting Im Thurn could be the genius' forger referred to by Basil Thomson. However, even if the diaries are ultimately exposed as forgeries, the exact identities of those involved will probably remain a mystery.

Quote:Over the years, many American presidents have found themselves at odds with their spy chiefs. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are three notorious examples.

But there's never been anything like the current open warfare between President-elect Donald Trump and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Weeks of simmering hostility exploded into the open on Wednesday when he accused intelligence chiefs of licensing the publication of false claims about his allegedly depraved sexual practices.

Trump is now engaged in a fight to the death with the CIA, the independent agency responsible for providing national security intelligence to the White House and senior U.S. policy-makers.

Only one side can win. For either the CIA will be humbled or Trump will be humiliated and destroyed.

Crucially, this isn't just an issue that affects the United States it is one of global importance whose outcome will affect all of us.

Also, it is a high-stakes drama which directly involves Britain, and in particular our foreign intelligence service, MI6.

We have learnt that Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer who reportedly once headed the agency's Russian desk at MI6 headquarters in Vauxhall Cross, South London, was the mastermind behind the dossier of lurid accusations about Trump's activities in a Moscow hotel suite.

Whether true or not, the material suggests that the Kremlin has other documentation which it could use to blackmail Trump.

Meanwhile, the American tycoon-turned-politician is accused of being too friendly with Russian businessmen and Kremlin power-brokers.

Either way, this is an unprecedented position for an American president to be in.

As for the Steele dossier, it was undoubtedly calculated to stop Trump being elected leader of the most powerful country in the Western world.

Being unproven, it may not be the bombshell it was intended to be. But it is still a thermo-nuclear weapon dropped into the U.S. political system. If Mr Steele were a rogue private operative, that would be troubling enough. But the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.

I have no doubt that MI6 must have had full knowledge of his role in researching and then assembling his dossier, before offering it to Trump's political enemies.

More damning still, it has been reported that Mr Steele sought the approval of Whitehall before showing his report to the FBI, America's domestic intelligence agency.

In other words, British spy chiefs gave the green light to a scheme intended to destroy the man who would be President of the United States of America.

Like most people, I find it very hard to comprehend this. But it is the only interpretation which makes any sense of the facts as we know them.

If so, what on earth did MI6, a highly respected organisation, think that it was doing?

MI6 is licensed by the British government to break the law and carry out illicit acts on the assumption that it always acts in the British national interest. This is allowed under the Intelligence Services Act 1994.

But why meddle mischievously with Washington? As always, it is overwhelmingly in Britain's interest to develop and maintain excellent relations with the American government particularly as we negotiate Brexit.

As we leave the EU, we urgently need to strike a trade deal with the U.S., the largest economy in the world and historically our closest ally.

So why does it seem that MI6 decides to risk destroying that relationship by interfering in U.S. domestic politics? Here is what I think happened. MI6 has an exceptionally close and strong relationship with the CIA (an organisation which British intelligence officers helped to create in the immediate aftermath of World War II).

So when, as now, MI6 chiefs believe, with considerable justification, that their transatlantic counterparts are being sidelined, they feel sympathetic and want to help.

For there is little question that the CIA has two massive concerns about Trump as president.

First, it fears he is mentally unbalanced and therefore could pose a threat to American national security.

Second, the CIA is appalled at his determination to seek a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin.

For these two reasons, there are people inside the CIA who would love to see the unpredictable tycoon replaced by vice-president-elect Mike Pence, a man who they feel they can work with.

Of course, it is well-known that the CIA has an infamous record of plotting coups d'etats against democratically elected governments in other countries for example, in the early-Fifties when it helped the Iranian military overthrow premier Mohammad Mosaddeq and reinstate the Shah, and the ousting of Chile's president Salvador Allende in 1973.

The atmosphere is currently so feverish in Washington that there are well-informed people who now believe that the CIA is contemplating a version of the same thing in America itself.

This would be a truly appalling and stupid course of action. It would be incredibly foolish for MI6 even to be seen to be part of it.

Of course President Trump may not last four years and Mr Pence may take over.

If so, MI6 and its dirty tricks department will have secured the gratitude of its sister agency in the U.S.

But what if Donald Trump faces down the CIA?

Then, he will never forgive or forget the fact that Britain played such a squalid role in trying to stop him getting to the White House.

The damage to Britain's standing in the world would be permanent, and Christopher Steele's dossier of sexual depravity will go down as an MI6 catastrophe on the same scale as the agency's fabricated dossier on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Alex Younger, the head of MI6 and a former officer in the Scots Guards, is by all accounts a decent and sensible man. But does he know what his spy agency has unleashed? Is he in control?

One thing is certain. MI6 should never have approved Christopher Steele's dossier on Donald Trump.

2016 was certainly a remarkable year. But the first days of 2017 have been yet more extraordinary.

We are entering times in which fact and fiction merge.

There is good reason today to feel more afraid than at any time since the Thirties.

Paul Rigby Wrote:Trump, Russia & The Zinoviev Letter

George Galloway

Published on 12 Jan 2017
Recorded on Thursday 12 January

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