<![CDATA[Deep Politics Forum - Black Operations]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/ Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:40:49 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16265 Mon, 27 Sep 2021 13:40:55 +0000 Magda Hassan]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16265 https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assass...57786.html

London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks

Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff
Sun, September 26, 2021, 7:00 PM·39 min read


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In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation.
Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”
The conversations were part of an unprecedented CIA campaign directed against WikiLeaks and its founder. The agency’s multipronged plans also included extensive spying on WikiLeaks associates, sowing discord among the group’s members, and stealing their electronic devices.
While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault 7,” which the agency ultimately concluded represented “the largest data loss in CIA history.”
President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7,” said a former Trump national security official. “They were seeing blood.”
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Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo in 2017. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The CIA’s fury at WikiLeaks led Pompeo to publicly describe the group in 2017 as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” More than just a provocative talking point, the designation opened the door for agency operatives to take far more aggressive actions, treating the organization as it does adversary spy services, former intelligence officials told Yahoo News. Within months, U.S. spies were monitoring the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel, including audio and visual surveillance of Assange himself, according to former officials.

This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.
The CIA declined to comment. Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment.
“As an American citizen, I find it absolutely outrageous that our government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful information,” Barry Pollack, Assange’s U.S. lawyer, told Yahoo News.
Assange is now housed in a London prison as the courts there decide on a U.S. request to extradite the WikiLeaks founder on charges of attempting to help former U.S. Army analyst Chelsea Manning break into a classified computer network and conspiring to obtain and publish classified documents in violation of the Espionage Act.
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“My hope and expectation is that the U.K. courts will consider this information and it will further bolster its decision not to extradite to the U.S.,” Pollack added.
There is no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved, in part because of objections from White House lawyers, but the agency’s WikiLeaks proposals so worried some administration officials that they quietly reached out to staffers and members of Congress on the House and Senate intelligence committees to alert them to what Pompeo was suggesting. “There were serious intel oversight concerns that were being raised through this escapade,” said a Trump national security official.
Some National Security Council officials worried that the CIA’s proposals to kidnap Assange would not only be illegal but also might jeopardize the prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder. Concerned the CIA’s plans would derail a potential criminal case, the Justice Department expedited the drafting of charges against Assange to ensure that they were in place if he were brought to the United States.
In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over kidnapping and other extreme measures, the agency’s plans were upended when U.S. officials picked up what they viewed as alarming reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing to sneak Assange out of the United Kingdom and spirit him away to Moscow.
The intelligence reporting about a possible breakout was viewed as credible at the highest levels of the U.S. government. At the time, Ecuadorian officials had begun efforts to grant Assange diplomatic status as part of a scheme to give him cover to leave the embassy and fly to Moscow to serve in the country’s Russian mission.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appears at the window of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Feb. 5, 2016. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)

In response, the CIA and the White House began preparing for a number of scenarios to foil Assange’s Russian departure plans, according to three former officials. Those included potential gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London, crashing a car into a Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange and then grabbing him, and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. (U.S. officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.)
“We had all sorts of reasons to believe he was contemplating getting the hell out of there,” said the former senior administration official, adding that one report said Assange might try to escape the embassy hidden in a laundry cart. “It was going to be like a prison break movie.”
The intrigue over a potential Assange escape set off a wild scramble among rival spy services in London. American, British and Russian agencies, among others, stationed undercover operatives around the Ecuadorian Embassy. In the Russians’ case, it was to facilitate a breakout. For the U.S. and allied services, it was to block such an escape. “It was beyond comical,” said the former senior official. “It got to the point where every human being in a three-block radius was working for one of the intelligence services — whether they were street sweepers or police officers or security guards.”
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White House officials briefed Trump and warned him that the matter could provoke an international incident — or worse. “We told him, this is going to get ugly,” said the former official.
As the debate over WikiLeaks intensified, some in the White House worried that the campaign against the organization would end up “weakening America,” as one Trump national security official put it, by lowering barriers that prevent the government from targeting mainstream journalists and news organizations, said former officials.
The fear at the National Security Council, the former official said, could be summed up as, “Where does this stop?”
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When WikiLeaks launched its website in December 2006, it was a nearly unprecedented model: Anyone anywhere could submit materials anonymously for publication. And they did, on topics ranging from secret fraternity rites to details of the U.S. government’s Guantánamo Bay detainee operations.
Yet Assange, the lanky Australian activist who led the organization, didn’t get much attention until 2010, when WikiLeaks released gun camera footage of a 2007 airstrike by U.S. Army helicopters in Baghdad that killed at least a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two young children. The Pentagon had refused to release the dramatic video, but someone had provided it to WikiLeaks.
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WikiLeaks releases leaked 2007 footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter fatally shooting a group of men at a public square in eastern Baghdad. (U.S. Military via Wikileaks.org)

Later that year, WikiLeaks also published several caches of classified and sensitive U.S. government documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange was hailed in some circles as a hero and in others as a villain. For U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the question was how to deal with the group, which operated differently than typical news outlets. “The problem posed by WikiLeaks was, there wasn’t anything like it,” said a former intelligence official.
How to define WikiLeaks has long confounded everyone from government officials to press advocates. Some view it as an independent journalistic institution, while others have asserted it is a handmaiden to foreign spy services.
“They’re not a journalistic organization, they’re nowhere near it,” William Evanina, who retired as the U.S.’s top counterintelligence official in early 2021, told Yahoo News in an interview. Evanina declined to discuss specific U.S. proposals regarding Assange or WikiLeaks.
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But the Obama administration, fearful of the consequences for press freedom — and chastened by the blowback from its own aggressive leak hunts — restricted investigations into Assange and WikiLeaks. “We were stagnated for years,” said Evanina. “There was a reticence in the Obama administration at a high level to allow agencies to engage in” certain kinds of intelligence collection against WikiLeaks, including signals and cyber operations, he said.
That began to change in 2013, when Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, fled to Hong Kong with a massive trove of classified materials, some of which revealed that the U.S. government was illegally spying on Americans. WikiLeaks helped arrange Snowden’s escape to Russia from Hong Kong. A WikiLeaks editor also accompanied Snowden to Russia, staying with him during his 39-day enforced stay at a Moscow airport and living with him for three months after Russia granted Snowden asylum.
In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the Obama administration allowed the intelligence community to prioritize collection on WikiLeaks, according to Evanina, now the CEO of the Evanina Group. Previously, if the FBI needed a search warrant to go into the group’s databases in the United States or wanted to use subpoena power or a national security letter to gain access to WikiLeaks-related financial records, “that wasn’t going to happen,” another former senior counterintelligence official said. “That changed after 2013.”
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An image of Edward Snowden on a giant screen in Hong Kong on June 23, 2013. (Sam Tsang/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)

From that point onward, U.S. intelligence worked closely with friendly spy agencies to build a picture of WikiLeaks’ network of contacts “and tie it back to hostile state intelligence services,” Evanina said. The CIA assembled a group of analysts known unofficially as “the WikiLeaks team” in its Office of Transnational Issues, with a mission to examine the organization, according to a former agency official.
Still chafing at the limits in place, top intelligence officials lobbied the White House to redefine WikiLeaks — and some high-profile journalists — as “information brokers,” which would have opened up the use of more investigative tools against them, potentially paving the way for their prosecution, according to former officials. It “was a step in the direction of showing a court, if we got that far, that we were dealing with agents of a foreign power,” a former senior counterintelligence official said.
Among the journalists some U.S. officials wanted to designate as “information brokers” were Glenn Greenwald, then a columnist for the Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, who had both been instrumental in publishing documents provided by Snowden.
“Is WikiLeaks a journalistic outlet? Are Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald truly journalists?” the former official said. “We tried to change the definition of them, and I preached this to the White House, and got rejected.”
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The Obama administration’s policy was, “If there’s published works out there, doesn’t matter the venue, then we have to treat them as First-Amendment-protected individuals,” the former senior counterintelligence official said. “There were some exceptions to that rule, but they were very, very, very few and far between.” WikiLeaks, the administration decided, did not fit that exception.
In a statement to Yahoo News, Poitras said reported attempts to classify herself, Greenwald and Assange as “information brokers” rather than journalists are “bone-chilling and a threat to journalists worldwide.”
“That the CIA also conspired to seek the rendition and extrajudicial assassination of Julian Assange is a state-sponsored crime against the press,” she added.
“I am not the least bit surprised that the CIA, a longtime authoritarian and antidemocratic institution, plotted to find a way to criminalize journalism and spy on and commit other acts of aggression against journalists,” Greenwald told Yahoo News.
By 2015, WikiLeaks was the subject of an intense debate over whether the organization should be targeted by law enforcement or spy agencies. Some argued that the FBI should have sole responsibility for investigating WikiLeaks, with no role for the CIA or the NSA. The Justice Department, in particular, was “very protective” of its authorities over whether to charge Assange and whether to treat WikiLeaks “like a media outlet,” said Robert Litt, the intelligence community’s senior lawyer during the Obama administration.
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Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras at a news conference in 2014. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

Then, in the summer of 2016, at the height of the presidential election season, came a seismic episode in the U.S. government’s evolving approach to WikiLeaks, when the website began publishing Democratic Party emails. The U.S. intelligence community later concluded the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU had hacked the emails.
In response to the leak, the NSA began surveilling the Twitter accounts of the suspected Russian intelligence operatives who were disseminating the leaked Democratic Party emails, according to a former CIA official. This collection revealed direct messages between the operatives, who went by the moniker Guccifer 2.0, and WikiLeaks’ Twitter account. Assange at the time steadfastly denied that the Russian government was the source for the emails, which were also published by mainstream news organizations.
Even so, Assange’s communication with the suspected operatives settled the matter for some U.S. officials. The events of 2016 “really crystallized” U.S. intelligence officials’ belief that the WikiLeaks founder “was acting in collusion with people who were using him to hurt the interests of the United States,” said Litt.
After the publication of the Democratic Party emails, there was “zero debate” on the issue of whether the CIA would increase its spying on WikiLeaks, said a former intelligence official. But there was still “sensitivity on how we would collect on them,” the former official added.
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The CIA now considered people affiliated with WikiLeaks valid targets for various types of spying, including close-in technical collection — such as bugs — sometimes enabled by in-person espionage, and “remote operations,” meaning, among other things, the hacking of WikiLeaks members’ devices from afar, according to former intelligence officials.
The Obama administration’s view of WikiLeaks underwent what Evanina described as a “sea change” shortly before Donald Trump, helped in part by WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic campaign emails, won a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
As Trump’s national security team took their positions at the Justice Department and the CIA, officials wondered whether, despite his campaign trail declaration of “love” for WikiLeaks, Trump’s appointees would take a more hard-line view of the organization. They were not to be disappointed.
“There was a fundamental change on how [WikiLeaks was] viewed,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. When it came to prosecuting Assange — something the Obama administration had declined to do — the Trump White House had a different approach, said a former Justice Department official. “Nobody in that crew was going to be too broken up about the First Amendment issues.”
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On April 13, 2017, wearing a U.S. flag pin on the left lapel of his dark gray suit, Pompeo strode to the podium at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, to deliver to a standing-room-only crowd his first public remarks as Trump’s CIA director.
Rather than use the platform to give an overview of global challenges or to lay out any bureaucratic changes he was planning to make at the agency, Pompeo devoted much of his speech to the threat posed by WikiLeaks.
“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence,” he said.
“It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” he continued.
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Pompeo answers questions at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in 2017. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

It had been barely five weeks since WikiLeaks had stunned the CIA when it announced it had obtained a massive tranche of files — which it dubbed “Vault 7” — from the CIA’s ultrasecret hacking division. Despite the CIA’s ramped up collection on WikiLeaks, the announcement came as a complete surprise to the agency, but as soon as the organization posted the first materials on its website, the CIA knew it was facing a catastrophe.
Vault 7 “hurt the agency to its core,” said a former CIA official. Agency officials “used to laugh about WikiLeaks,” mocking the State Department and the Pentagon for allowing so much material to escape their control.
Pompeo, apparently fearful of the president’s wrath, was initially reluctant to even brief the president on Vault 7, according to a former senior Trump administration official. “Don’t tell him, he doesn’t need to know,” Pompeo told one briefer, before being advised that the information was too critical and the president had to be informed, said the former official.
Irate senior FBI and NSA officials repeatedly demanded interagency meetings to determine the scope of the damage caused by Vault 7, according to another former national security official.
The NSA believed that, although the leak revealed only CIA hacking operations, it could also give countries like Russia or China clues about NSA targets and methods, said this former official.
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Pompeo’s aggressive tone at CSIS reflected his “brash attitude,” said a former senior intelligence official. “He would want to push the limits as much as he could” during his tenure as CIA director, the former official said.
The Trump administration was sending more signals that it would no longer be bound by the Obama administration’s self-imposed restrictions regarding WikiLeaks. For some U.S. intelligence officials, this was a welcome change. “There was immense hostility to WikiLeaks in the beginning from the intelligence community,” said Litt.
Vault 7 prompted “a brand-new mindset with the administration for rethinking how to look at WikiLeaks as an adversarial actor,” Evanina said. “That was new, and it was refreshing for the intelligence community and the law enforcement community.” Updates on Assange were frequently included in Trump’s President’s Daily Brief, a top-secret document prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies that summarizes the day’s most critical national security issues, according to a former national security official.
The immediate question facing Pompeo and the CIA was how to hit back against WikiLeaks and Assange. Agency officials found the answer in a legal sleight of hand. Usually, for U.S. intelligence to secretly interfere with the activities of any foreign actor, the president must sign a document called a “finding” that authorizes such covert action, which must also be briefed to the House and Senate intelligence committees. In very sensitive cases, notification is limited to Congress’s so-called Gang of Eight — the four leaders of the House and Senate, plus the chairperson and ranking member of the two committees.
But there is an important carveout. Many of the same actions, if taken against another spy service, are considered “offensive counterintelligence” activities, which the CIA is allowed to conduct without getting a presidential finding or having to brief Congress, according to several former intelligence officials.
Often, the CIA makes these decisions internally, based on interpretations of so-called “common law” passed down in secret within the agency’s legal corps. “I don’t think people realize how much [the] CIA can do under offensive [counterintelligence] and how there is minimal oversight of it,” said a former official.
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Assange discusses the publication of secret U.S. documents about the war in Afghanistan at a 2010 press conference in London. (Julian Simmonds/Shutterstock)

The difficulty in proving that WikiLeaks was operating at the direct behest of the Kremlin was a major factor behind the CIA’s move to designate the group as a hostile intelligence service, according to a former senior counterintelligence official. “There was a lot of legal debate on: Are they operating as a Russian agent?” said the former official. “It wasn’t clear they were, so the question was, can it be reframed on them being a hostile entity.”
Intelligence community lawyers decided that it could. When Pompeo declared WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service,” he was neither speaking off the cuff nor repeating a phrase concocted by a CIA speechwriter. “That phrase was chosen advisedly and reflected the view of the administration,” a former Trump administration official said.
But Pompeo’s declaration surprised Litt, who had left his position as general counsel of the Office of the Director for National Intelligence less than three months previously. “Based on the information that I had seen, I thought he was out over his skis on that,” Litt said.
For many senior intelligence officials, however, Pompeo’s designation of WikiLeaks was a positive step. “We all agreed that WikiLeaks was a hostile intelligence organization and should be dealt with accordingly,” said a former senior CIA official.
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Soon after the speech, Pompeo asked a small group of senior CIA officers to figure out “the art of the possible” when it came to WikiLeaks, said another former senior CIA official. “He said, ‘Nothing’s off limits, don’t self-censor yourself. I need operational ideas from you. I’ll worry about the lawyers in Washington.’” CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., sent messages directing CIA stations and bases worldwide to prioritize collection on WikiLeaks, according to the former senior agency official.
The CIA’s designation of WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service enabled “the doubling down of efforts globally and domestically on collection” against the group, Evanina said. Those efforts included tracking the movements and communications of Assange and other top WikiLeaks figures by “tasking more on the tech side, recruiting more on the human side,” said another former senior counterintelligence official.
This was no easy task. WikiLeaks associates were “super-paranoid people,” and the CIA estimated that only a handful of individuals had access to the Vault 7 materials the agency wanted to retrieve, said a former intelligence official. Those individuals employed security measures that made obtaining the information difficult, including keeping it on encrypted drives that they either carried on their persons or locked in safes, according to former officials.
WikiLeaks claimed it had published only a fraction of the Vault 7 documents in its possession. So, what if U.S. intelligence found a tranche of those unpublished materials online? At the White House, officials began planning for that scenario. Could the United States launch a cyberattack on a server being used by WikiLeaks to house these documents?
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Assange presents U.S. military documents on the Iraq War at press conference in London on Oct. 23, 2010. (Shutterstock)

Officials weren’t sure if the Defense Department had the authority to do so at the time, absent the president’s signature. Alternatively, they suggested, perhaps the CIA could carry out the same action under the agency’s offensive counterintelligence powers. After all, officials reasoned, the CIA would be erasing its own documents. However, U.S. spies never located a copy of the unpublished Vault 7 materials online, so the discussion was ultimately moot, according to a former national security official.
Nonetheless, the CIA had some successes. By mid-2017, U.S. spies had excellent intelligence on numerous WikiLeaks members and associates, not just on Assange, said former officials. This included what these individuals were saying and who they were saying it to, where they were traveling or going to be at a given date and time, and what platforms these individuals were communicating on, according to former officials.
U.S. spy agencies developed good intelligence on WikiLeaks associates’ “patterns of life,” particularly their travels within Europe, said a former national security official. U.S. intelligence was particularly keen on information documenting travel by WikiLeaks associates to Russia or countries in Russia’s orbit, according to the former official.
At the CIA, the new designation meant Assange and WikiLeaks would go from “a target of collection to a target of disruption,” said a former senior CIA official. Proposals began percolating upward within the CIA and the NSC to undertake various disruptive activities — the core of “offensive counterintelligence” — against WikiLeaks. These included paralyzing its digital infrastructure, disrupting its communications, provoking internal disputes within the organization by planting damaging information, and stealing WikiLeaks members’ electronic devices, according to three former officials.
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Infiltrating the group, either with a real person or by inventing a cyber persona to gain the group’s confidence, was quickly dismissed as unlikely to succeed because the senior WikiLeaks figures were so security-conscious, according to former intelligence officials. Sowing discord within the group seemed an easier route to success, in part because “those guys hated each other and fought all the time,” a former intelligence official said.
But many of the other ideas were “not ready for prime time,” said the former intelligence official.
“Some dude affiliated with WikiLeaks was moving around the world, and they wanted to go steal his computer because they thought he might have” Vault 7 files, said the former official.
The official was unable to identify that individual. But some of these proposals may have been eventually approved. In December 2020, a German hacker closely affiliated with WikiLeaks who assisted with the Vault 7 publications claimed that there had been an attempt to break into his apartment, which he had secured with an elaborate locking system. The hacker, Andy Müller-Maguhn, also said he had been tailed by mysterious figures and that his encrypted telephone had been bugged.
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Andy Müller-Maguhn speaks at the Cyber Security Summit in Bonn, Germany, in 2014. (Ollendorf/Itterman (Telekom))

Asked whether the CIA had broken into WikiLeaks’ associates’ homes and stolen or wiped their hard drives, a former intelligence official declined to go into detail but said that “some actions were taken.”
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By the summer of 2017, the CIA’s proposals were setting off alarm bells at the National Security Council. “WikiLeaks was a complete obsession of Pompeo’s,” said a former Trump administration national security official. “After Vault 7, Pompeo and [Deputy CIA Director Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange.”
At meetings between senior Trump administration officials after WikiLeaks started publishing the Vault 7 materials, Pompeo began discussing kidnapping Assange, according to four former officials. While the notion of kidnapping Assange preceded Pompeo’s arrival at Langley, the new director championed the proposals, according to former officials.
Pompeo and others at the agency proposed abducting Assange from the embassy and surreptitiously bringing him back to the United States via a third country — a process known as rendition. The idea was to “break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want,” said a former intelligence official. A less extreme version of the proposal involved U.S. operatives snatching Assange from the embassy and turning him over to British authorities.
Such actions were sure to create a diplomatic and political firestorm, as they would have involved violating the sanctity of the Ecuadorian Embassy before kidnapping the citizen of a critical U.S. partner — Australia — in the capital of the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally. Trying to seize Assange from an embassy in the British capital struck some as “ridiculous,” said the former intelligence official. “This isn’t Pakistan or Egypt — we’re talking about London.”
British acquiescence was far from assured. Former officials differ on how much the U.K. government knew about the CIA’s rendition plans for Assange, but at some point, American officials did raise the issue with their British counterparts.
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The Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange resided for seven years. (Will Oliver/EPA/Shutterstock)

“There was a discussion with the Brits about turning the other cheek or looking the other way when a team of guys went inside and did a rendition,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. “But the British said, ‘No way, you’re not doing that on our territory, that ain’t happening.’” The British Embassy in Washington did not return a request for comment.
In addition to diplomatic concerns about rendition, some NSC officials believed that abducting Assange would be clearly illegal. “You can’t throw people in a car and kidnap them,” said a former national security official.
In fact, said this former official, for some NSC personnel, “This was the key question: Was it possible to render Assange under [the CIA’s] offensive counterintelligence” authorities? In this former official’s thinking, those powers were meant to enable traditional spy-versus-spy activities, “not the same kind of crap we pulled in the war on terror.”
Some discussions even went beyond kidnapping. U.S. officials had also considered killing Assange, according to three former officials. One of those officials said he was briefed on a spring 2017 meeting in which the president asked whether the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide him “options” for how to do so.
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“It was viewed as unhinged and ridiculous,” recalled this former senior CIA official of the suggestion.
It’s unclear how serious the proposals to kill Assange really were. “I was told they were just spitballing,” said a former senior counterintelligence official briefed on the discussions about “kinetic options” regarding the WikiLeaks founder. “It was just Trump being Trump."
Nonetheless, at roughly the same time, agency executives requested and received “sketches” of plans for killing Assange and other Europe-based WikiLeaks members who had access to Vault 7 materials, said a former intelligence official. There were discussions “on whether killing Assange was possible and whether it was legal,” the former official said.
Yahoo News could not confirm if these proposals made it to the White House. Some officials with knowledge of the rendition proposals said they had heard no discussions about assassinating Assange.
In a statement to Yahoo News, Trump denied that he ever considered having Assange assassinated. “It’s totally false, it never happened,” he said. Trump seemed to express some sympathy for Assange’s plight. “In fact, I think he’s been treated very badly,” he added.
Whatever Trump’s view of the matter at the time, his NSC lawyers were bulwarks against the CIA’s potentially illegal proposals, according to former officials. “While people think the Trump administration didn’t believe in the rule of law, they had good lawyers who were paying attention to it,” said a former senior intelligence official.
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Then-President Donald Trump at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in 2017. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

The rendition talk deeply alarmed some senior administration officials. John Eisenberg, the top NSC lawyer, and Michael Ellis, his deputy, worried that “Pompeo is advocating things that are not likely to be legal,” including “rendition-type activity,” said a former national security official. Eisenberg wrote to CIA General Counsel Courtney Simmons Elwood expressing his concerns about the agency’s WikiLeaks-related proposals, according to another Trump national security official.
It’s unclear how much Elwood knew about the proposals. “When Pompeo took over, he cut the lawyers out of a lot of things,” said a former senior intelligence community attorney.
Pompeo’s ready access to the Oval Office, where he would meet with Trump alone, exacerbated the lawyers’ fears. Eisenberg fretted that the CIA director was leaving those meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president that Eisenberg knew nothing about, according to former officials.
NSC officials also worried about the timing of the potential Assange kidnapping. Discussions about rendering Assange occurred before the Justice Department filed any criminal charges against him, even under seal — meaning that the CIA could have kidnapped Assange from the embassy without any legal basis to try him in the United States.
Eisenberg urged Justice Department officials to accelerate their drafting of charges against Assange, in case the CIA’s rendition plans moved forward, according to former officials. The White House told Attorney General Jeff Sessions that if prosecutors had grounds to indict Assange they should hurry up and do so, according to a former senior administration official.
Things got more complicated in May 2017, when the Swedes dropped their rape investigation into Assange, who had always denied the allegations. White House officials developed a backup plan: The British would hold Assange on a bail jumping charge, giving Justice Department prosecutors a 48-hour delay to rush through an indictment.
Eisenberg was concerned about the legal implications of rendering Assange without criminal charges in place, according to a former national security official. Absent an indictment, where would the agency bring him, said another former official who attended NSC meetings on the topic. “Were we going to go back to ‘black sites’?”
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]]> https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assass...57786.html

London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks

Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff
Sun, September 26, 2021, 7:00 PM·39 min read


In this article:
















In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation.
Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”
The conversations were part of an unprecedented CIA campaign directed against WikiLeaks and its founder. The agency’s multipronged plans also included extensive spying on WikiLeaks associates, sowing discord among the group’s members, and stealing their electronic devices.
While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault 7,” which the agency ultimately concluded represented “the largest data loss in CIA history.”
President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7,” said a former Trump national security official. “They were seeing blood.”
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Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo in 2017. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The CIA’s fury at WikiLeaks led Pompeo to publicly describe the group in 2017 as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” More than just a provocative talking point, the designation opened the door for agency operatives to take far more aggressive actions, treating the organization as it does adversary spy services, former intelligence officials told Yahoo News. Within months, U.S. spies were monitoring the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel, including audio and visual surveillance of Assange himself, according to former officials.

This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.
The CIA declined to comment. Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment.
“As an American citizen, I find it absolutely outrageous that our government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful information,” Barry Pollack, Assange’s U.S. lawyer, told Yahoo News.
Assange is now housed in a London prison as the courts there decide on a U.S. request to extradite the WikiLeaks founder on charges of attempting to help former U.S. Army analyst Chelsea Manning break into a classified computer network and conspiring to obtain and publish classified documents in violation of the Espionage Act.
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“My hope and expectation is that the U.K. courts will consider this information and it will further bolster its decision not to extradite to the U.S.,” Pollack added.
There is no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved, in part because of objections from White House lawyers, but the agency’s WikiLeaks proposals so worried some administration officials that they quietly reached out to staffers and members of Congress on the House and Senate intelligence committees to alert them to what Pompeo was suggesting. “There were serious intel oversight concerns that were being raised through this escapade,” said a Trump national security official.
Some National Security Council officials worried that the CIA’s proposals to kidnap Assange would not only be illegal but also might jeopardize the prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder. Concerned the CIA’s plans would derail a potential criminal case, the Justice Department expedited the drafting of charges against Assange to ensure that they were in place if he were brought to the United States.
In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over kidnapping and other extreme measures, the agency’s plans were upended when U.S. officials picked up what they viewed as alarming reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing to sneak Assange out of the United Kingdom and spirit him away to Moscow.
The intelligence reporting about a possible breakout was viewed as credible at the highest levels of the U.S. government. At the time, Ecuadorian officials had begun efforts to grant Assange diplomatic status as part of a scheme to give him cover to leave the embassy and fly to Moscow to serve in the country’s Russian mission.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appears at the window of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Feb. 5, 2016. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)

In response, the CIA and the White House began preparing for a number of scenarios to foil Assange’s Russian departure plans, according to three former officials. Those included potential gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London, crashing a car into a Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange and then grabbing him, and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. (U.S. officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.)
“We had all sorts of reasons to believe he was contemplating getting the hell out of there,” said the former senior administration official, adding that one report said Assange might try to escape the embassy hidden in a laundry cart. “It was going to be like a prison break movie.”
The intrigue over a potential Assange escape set off a wild scramble among rival spy services in London. American, British and Russian agencies, among others, stationed undercover operatives around the Ecuadorian Embassy. In the Russians’ case, it was to facilitate a breakout. For the U.S. and allied services, it was to block such an escape. “It was beyond comical,” said the former senior official. “It got to the point where every human being in a three-block radius was working for one of the intelligence services — whether they were street sweepers or police officers or security guards.”
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White House officials briefed Trump and warned him that the matter could provoke an international incident — or worse. “We told him, this is going to get ugly,” said the former official.
As the debate over WikiLeaks intensified, some in the White House worried that the campaign against the organization would end up “weakening America,” as one Trump national security official put it, by lowering barriers that prevent the government from targeting mainstream journalists and news organizations, said former officials.
The fear at the National Security Council, the former official said, could be summed up as, “Where does this stop?”
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When WikiLeaks launched its website in December 2006, it was a nearly unprecedented model: Anyone anywhere could submit materials anonymously for publication. And they did, on topics ranging from secret fraternity rites to details of the U.S. government’s Guantánamo Bay detainee operations.
Yet Assange, the lanky Australian activist who led the organization, didn’t get much attention until 2010, when WikiLeaks released gun camera footage of a 2007 airstrike by U.S. Army helicopters in Baghdad that killed at least a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two young children. The Pentagon had refused to release the dramatic video, but someone had provided it to WikiLeaks.
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WikiLeaks releases leaked 2007 footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter fatally shooting a group of men at a public square in eastern Baghdad. (U.S. Military via Wikileaks.org)

Later that year, WikiLeaks also published several caches of classified and sensitive U.S. government documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange was hailed in some circles as a hero and in others as a villain. For U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the question was how to deal with the group, which operated differently than typical news outlets. “The problem posed by WikiLeaks was, there wasn’t anything like it,” said a former intelligence official.
How to define WikiLeaks has long confounded everyone from government officials to press advocates. Some view it as an independent journalistic institution, while others have asserted it is a handmaiden to foreign spy services.
“They’re not a journalistic organization, they’re nowhere near it,” William Evanina, who retired as the U.S.’s top counterintelligence official in early 2021, told Yahoo News in an interview. Evanina declined to discuss specific U.S. proposals regarding Assange or WikiLeaks.
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But the Obama administration, fearful of the consequences for press freedom — and chastened by the blowback from its own aggressive leak hunts — restricted investigations into Assange and WikiLeaks. “We were stagnated for years,” said Evanina. “There was a reticence in the Obama administration at a high level to allow agencies to engage in” certain kinds of intelligence collection against WikiLeaks, including signals and cyber operations, he said.
That began to change in 2013, when Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, fled to Hong Kong with a massive trove of classified materials, some of which revealed that the U.S. government was illegally spying on Americans. WikiLeaks helped arrange Snowden’s escape to Russia from Hong Kong. A WikiLeaks editor also accompanied Snowden to Russia, staying with him during his 39-day enforced stay at a Moscow airport and living with him for three months after Russia granted Snowden asylum.
In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the Obama administration allowed the intelligence community to prioritize collection on WikiLeaks, according to Evanina, now the CEO of the Evanina Group. Previously, if the FBI needed a search warrant to go into the group’s databases in the United States or wanted to use subpoena power or a national security letter to gain access to WikiLeaks-related financial records, “that wasn’t going to happen,” another former senior counterintelligence official said. “That changed after 2013.”
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An image of Edward Snowden on a giant screen in Hong Kong on June 23, 2013. (Sam Tsang/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)

From that point onward, U.S. intelligence worked closely with friendly spy agencies to build a picture of WikiLeaks’ network of contacts “and tie it back to hostile state intelligence services,” Evanina said. The CIA assembled a group of analysts known unofficially as “the WikiLeaks team” in its Office of Transnational Issues, with a mission to examine the organization, according to a former agency official.
Still chafing at the limits in place, top intelligence officials lobbied the White House to redefine WikiLeaks — and some high-profile journalists — as “information brokers,” which would have opened up the use of more investigative tools against them, potentially paving the way for their prosecution, according to former officials. It “was a step in the direction of showing a court, if we got that far, that we were dealing with agents of a foreign power,” a former senior counterintelligence official said.
Among the journalists some U.S. officials wanted to designate as “information brokers” were Glenn Greenwald, then a columnist for the Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, who had both been instrumental in publishing documents provided by Snowden.
“Is WikiLeaks a journalistic outlet? Are Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald truly journalists?” the former official said. “We tried to change the definition of them, and I preached this to the White House, and got rejected.”
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The Obama administration’s policy was, “If there’s published works out there, doesn’t matter the venue, then we have to treat them as First-Amendment-protected individuals,” the former senior counterintelligence official said. “There were some exceptions to that rule, but they were very, very, very few and far between.” WikiLeaks, the administration decided, did not fit that exception.
In a statement to Yahoo News, Poitras said reported attempts to classify herself, Greenwald and Assange as “information brokers” rather than journalists are “bone-chilling and a threat to journalists worldwide.”
“That the CIA also conspired to seek the rendition and extrajudicial assassination of Julian Assange is a state-sponsored crime against the press,” she added.
“I am not the least bit surprised that the CIA, a longtime authoritarian and antidemocratic institution, plotted to find a way to criminalize journalism and spy on and commit other acts of aggression against journalists,” Greenwald told Yahoo News.
By 2015, WikiLeaks was the subject of an intense debate over whether the organization should be targeted by law enforcement or spy agencies. Some argued that the FBI should have sole responsibility for investigating WikiLeaks, with no role for the CIA or the NSA. The Justice Department, in particular, was “very protective” of its authorities over whether to charge Assange and whether to treat WikiLeaks “like a media outlet,” said Robert Litt, the intelligence community’s senior lawyer during the Obama administration.
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Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras at a news conference in 2014. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

Then, in the summer of 2016, at the height of the presidential election season, came a seismic episode in the U.S. government’s evolving approach to WikiLeaks, when the website began publishing Democratic Party emails. The U.S. intelligence community later concluded the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU had hacked the emails.
In response to the leak, the NSA began surveilling the Twitter accounts of the suspected Russian intelligence operatives who were disseminating the leaked Democratic Party emails, according to a former CIA official. This collection revealed direct messages between the operatives, who went by the moniker Guccifer 2.0, and WikiLeaks’ Twitter account. Assange at the time steadfastly denied that the Russian government was the source for the emails, which were also published by mainstream news organizations.
Even so, Assange’s communication with the suspected operatives settled the matter for some U.S. officials. The events of 2016 “really crystallized” U.S. intelligence officials’ belief that the WikiLeaks founder “was acting in collusion with people who were using him to hurt the interests of the United States,” said Litt.
After the publication of the Democratic Party emails, there was “zero debate” on the issue of whether the CIA would increase its spying on WikiLeaks, said a former intelligence official. But there was still “sensitivity on how we would collect on them,” the former official added.
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The CIA now considered people affiliated with WikiLeaks valid targets for various types of spying, including close-in technical collection — such as bugs — sometimes enabled by in-person espionage, and “remote operations,” meaning, among other things, the hacking of WikiLeaks members’ devices from afar, according to former intelligence officials.
The Obama administration’s view of WikiLeaks underwent what Evanina described as a “sea change” shortly before Donald Trump, helped in part by WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic campaign emails, won a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
As Trump’s national security team took their positions at the Justice Department and the CIA, officials wondered whether, despite his campaign trail declaration of “love” for WikiLeaks, Trump’s appointees would take a more hard-line view of the organization. They were not to be disappointed.
“There was a fundamental change on how [WikiLeaks was] viewed,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. When it came to prosecuting Assange — something the Obama administration had declined to do — the Trump White House had a different approach, said a former Justice Department official. “Nobody in that crew was going to be too broken up about the First Amendment issues.”
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On April 13, 2017, wearing a U.S. flag pin on the left lapel of his dark gray suit, Pompeo strode to the podium at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, to deliver to a standing-room-only crowd his first public remarks as Trump’s CIA director.
Rather than use the platform to give an overview of global challenges or to lay out any bureaucratic changes he was planning to make at the agency, Pompeo devoted much of his speech to the threat posed by WikiLeaks.
“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence,” he said.
“It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” he continued.
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Pompeo answers questions at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in 2017. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

It had been barely five weeks since WikiLeaks had stunned the CIA when it announced it had obtained a massive tranche of files — which it dubbed “Vault 7” — from the CIA’s ultrasecret hacking division. Despite the CIA’s ramped up collection on WikiLeaks, the announcement came as a complete surprise to the agency, but as soon as the organization posted the first materials on its website, the CIA knew it was facing a catastrophe.
Vault 7 “hurt the agency to its core,” said a former CIA official. Agency officials “used to laugh about WikiLeaks,” mocking the State Department and the Pentagon for allowing so much material to escape their control.
Pompeo, apparently fearful of the president’s wrath, was initially reluctant to even brief the president on Vault 7, according to a former senior Trump administration official. “Don’t tell him, he doesn’t need to know,” Pompeo told one briefer, before being advised that the information was too critical and the president had to be informed, said the former official.
Irate senior FBI and NSA officials repeatedly demanded interagency meetings to determine the scope of the damage caused by Vault 7, according to another former national security official.
The NSA believed that, although the leak revealed only CIA hacking operations, it could also give countries like Russia or China clues about NSA targets and methods, said this former official.
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Pompeo’s aggressive tone at CSIS reflected his “brash attitude,” said a former senior intelligence official. “He would want to push the limits as much as he could” during his tenure as CIA director, the former official said.
The Trump administration was sending more signals that it would no longer be bound by the Obama administration’s self-imposed restrictions regarding WikiLeaks. For some U.S. intelligence officials, this was a welcome change. “There was immense hostility to WikiLeaks in the beginning from the intelligence community,” said Litt.
Vault 7 prompted “a brand-new mindset with the administration for rethinking how to look at WikiLeaks as an adversarial actor,” Evanina said. “That was new, and it was refreshing for the intelligence community and the law enforcement community.” Updates on Assange were frequently included in Trump’s President’s Daily Brief, a top-secret document prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies that summarizes the day’s most critical national security issues, according to a former national security official.
The immediate question facing Pompeo and the CIA was how to hit back against WikiLeaks and Assange. Agency officials found the answer in a legal sleight of hand. Usually, for U.S. intelligence to secretly interfere with the activities of any foreign actor, the president must sign a document called a “finding” that authorizes such covert action, which must also be briefed to the House and Senate intelligence committees. In very sensitive cases, notification is limited to Congress’s so-called Gang of Eight — the four leaders of the House and Senate, plus the chairperson and ranking member of the two committees.
But there is an important carveout. Many of the same actions, if taken against another spy service, are considered “offensive counterintelligence” activities, which the CIA is allowed to conduct without getting a presidential finding or having to brief Congress, according to several former intelligence officials.
Often, the CIA makes these decisions internally, based on interpretations of so-called “common law” passed down in secret within the agency’s legal corps. “I don’t think people realize how much [the] CIA can do under offensive [counterintelligence] and how there is minimal oversight of it,” said a former official.
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Assange discusses the publication of secret U.S. documents about the war in Afghanistan at a 2010 press conference in London. (Julian Simmonds/Shutterstock)

The difficulty in proving that WikiLeaks was operating at the direct behest of the Kremlin was a major factor behind the CIA’s move to designate the group as a hostile intelligence service, according to a former senior counterintelligence official. “There was a lot of legal debate on: Are they operating as a Russian agent?” said the former official. “It wasn’t clear they were, so the question was, can it be reframed on them being a hostile entity.”
Intelligence community lawyers decided that it could. When Pompeo declared WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service,” he was neither speaking off the cuff nor repeating a phrase concocted by a CIA speechwriter. “That phrase was chosen advisedly and reflected the view of the administration,” a former Trump administration official said.
But Pompeo’s declaration surprised Litt, who had left his position as general counsel of the Office of the Director for National Intelligence less than three months previously. “Based on the information that I had seen, I thought he was out over his skis on that,” Litt said.
For many senior intelligence officials, however, Pompeo’s designation of WikiLeaks was a positive step. “We all agreed that WikiLeaks was a hostile intelligence organization and should be dealt with accordingly,” said a former senior CIA official.
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Soon after the speech, Pompeo asked a small group of senior CIA officers to figure out “the art of the possible” when it came to WikiLeaks, said another former senior CIA official. “He said, ‘Nothing’s off limits, don’t self-censor yourself. I need operational ideas from you. I’ll worry about the lawyers in Washington.’” CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., sent messages directing CIA stations and bases worldwide to prioritize collection on WikiLeaks, according to the former senior agency official.
The CIA’s designation of WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service enabled “the doubling down of efforts globally and domestically on collection” against the group, Evanina said. Those efforts included tracking the movements and communications of Assange and other top WikiLeaks figures by “tasking more on the tech side, recruiting more on the human side,” said another former senior counterintelligence official.
This was no easy task. WikiLeaks associates were “super-paranoid people,” and the CIA estimated that only a handful of individuals had access to the Vault 7 materials the agency wanted to retrieve, said a former intelligence official. Those individuals employed security measures that made obtaining the information difficult, including keeping it on encrypted drives that they either carried on their persons or locked in safes, according to former officials.
WikiLeaks claimed it had published only a fraction of the Vault 7 documents in its possession. So, what if U.S. intelligence found a tranche of those unpublished materials online? At the White House, officials began planning for that scenario. Could the United States launch a cyberattack on a server being used by WikiLeaks to house these documents?
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Assange presents U.S. military documents on the Iraq War at press conference in London on Oct. 23, 2010. (Shutterstock)

Officials weren’t sure if the Defense Department had the authority to do so at the time, absent the president’s signature. Alternatively, they suggested, perhaps the CIA could carry out the same action under the agency’s offensive counterintelligence powers. After all, officials reasoned, the CIA would be erasing its own documents. However, U.S. spies never located a copy of the unpublished Vault 7 materials online, so the discussion was ultimately moot, according to a former national security official.
Nonetheless, the CIA had some successes. By mid-2017, U.S. spies had excellent intelligence on numerous WikiLeaks members and associates, not just on Assange, said former officials. This included what these individuals were saying and who they were saying it to, where they were traveling or going to be at a given date and time, and what platforms these individuals were communicating on, according to former officials.
U.S. spy agencies developed good intelligence on WikiLeaks associates’ “patterns of life,” particularly their travels within Europe, said a former national security official. U.S. intelligence was particularly keen on information documenting travel by WikiLeaks associates to Russia or countries in Russia’s orbit, according to the former official.
At the CIA, the new designation meant Assange and WikiLeaks would go from “a target of collection to a target of disruption,” said a former senior CIA official. Proposals began percolating upward within the CIA and the NSC to undertake various disruptive activities — the core of “offensive counterintelligence” — against WikiLeaks. These included paralyzing its digital infrastructure, disrupting its communications, provoking internal disputes within the organization by planting damaging information, and stealing WikiLeaks members’ electronic devices, according to three former officials.
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Infiltrating the group, either with a real person or by inventing a cyber persona to gain the group’s confidence, was quickly dismissed as unlikely to succeed because the senior WikiLeaks figures were so security-conscious, according to former intelligence officials. Sowing discord within the group seemed an easier route to success, in part because “those guys hated each other and fought all the time,” a former intelligence official said.
But many of the other ideas were “not ready for prime time,” said the former intelligence official.
“Some dude affiliated with WikiLeaks was moving around the world, and they wanted to go steal his computer because they thought he might have” Vault 7 files, said the former official.
The official was unable to identify that individual. But some of these proposals may have been eventually approved. In December 2020, a German hacker closely affiliated with WikiLeaks who assisted with the Vault 7 publications claimed that there had been an attempt to break into his apartment, which he had secured with an elaborate locking system. The hacker, Andy Müller-Maguhn, also said he had been tailed by mysterious figures and that his encrypted telephone had been bugged.
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Andy Müller-Maguhn speaks at the Cyber Security Summit in Bonn, Germany, in 2014. (Ollendorf/Itterman (Telekom))

Asked whether the CIA had broken into WikiLeaks’ associates’ homes and stolen or wiped their hard drives, a former intelligence official declined to go into detail but said that “some actions were taken.”
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By the summer of 2017, the CIA’s proposals were setting off alarm bells at the National Security Council. “WikiLeaks was a complete obsession of Pompeo’s,” said a former Trump administration national security official. “After Vault 7, Pompeo and [Deputy CIA Director Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange.”
At meetings between senior Trump administration officials after WikiLeaks started publishing the Vault 7 materials, Pompeo began discussing kidnapping Assange, according to four former officials. While the notion of kidnapping Assange preceded Pompeo’s arrival at Langley, the new director championed the proposals, according to former officials.
Pompeo and others at the agency proposed abducting Assange from the embassy and surreptitiously bringing him back to the United States via a third country — a process known as rendition. The idea was to “break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want,” said a former intelligence official. A less extreme version of the proposal involved U.S. operatives snatching Assange from the embassy and turning him over to British authorities.
Such actions were sure to create a diplomatic and political firestorm, as they would have involved violating the sanctity of the Ecuadorian Embassy before kidnapping the citizen of a critical U.S. partner — Australia — in the capital of the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally. Trying to seize Assange from an embassy in the British capital struck some as “ridiculous,” said the former intelligence official. “This isn’t Pakistan or Egypt — we’re talking about London.”
British acquiescence was far from assured. Former officials differ on how much the U.K. government knew about the CIA’s rendition plans for Assange, but at some point, American officials did raise the issue with their British counterparts.
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The Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange resided for seven years. (Will Oliver/EPA/Shutterstock)

“There was a discussion with the Brits about turning the other cheek or looking the other way when a team of guys went inside and did a rendition,” said a former senior counterintelligence official. “But the British said, ‘No way, you’re not doing that on our territory, that ain’t happening.’” The British Embassy in Washington did not return a request for comment.
In addition to diplomatic concerns about rendition, some NSC officials believed that abducting Assange would be clearly illegal. “You can’t throw people in a car and kidnap them,” said a former national security official.
In fact, said this former official, for some NSC personnel, “This was the key question: Was it possible to render Assange under [the CIA’s] offensive counterintelligence” authorities? In this former official’s thinking, those powers were meant to enable traditional spy-versus-spy activities, “not the same kind of crap we pulled in the war on terror.”
Some discussions even went beyond kidnapping. U.S. officials had also considered killing Assange, according to three former officials. One of those officials said he was briefed on a spring 2017 meeting in which the president asked whether the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide him “options” for how to do so.
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“It was viewed as unhinged and ridiculous,” recalled this former senior CIA official of the suggestion.
It’s unclear how serious the proposals to kill Assange really were. “I was told they were just spitballing,” said a former senior counterintelligence official briefed on the discussions about “kinetic options” regarding the WikiLeaks founder. “It was just Trump being Trump."
Nonetheless, at roughly the same time, agency executives requested and received “sketches” of plans for killing Assange and other Europe-based WikiLeaks members who had access to Vault 7 materials, said a former intelligence official. There were discussions “on whether killing Assange was possible and whether it was legal,” the former official said.
Yahoo News could not confirm if these proposals made it to the White House. Some officials with knowledge of the rendition proposals said they had heard no discussions about assassinating Assange.
In a statement to Yahoo News, Trump denied that he ever considered having Assange assassinated. “It’s totally false, it never happened,” he said. Trump seemed to express some sympathy for Assange’s plight. “In fact, I think he’s been treated very badly,” he added.
Whatever Trump’s view of the matter at the time, his NSC lawyers were bulwarks against the CIA’s potentially illegal proposals, according to former officials. “While people think the Trump administration didn’t believe in the rule of law, they had good lawyers who were paying attention to it,” said a former senior intelligence official.
[Image: 65f9deb3-1d56-11ec-b8fc-0ec82291ff7d]

Then-President Donald Trump at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in 2017. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

The rendition talk deeply alarmed some senior administration officials. John Eisenberg, the top NSC lawyer, and Michael Ellis, his deputy, worried that “Pompeo is advocating things that are not likely to be legal,” including “rendition-type activity,” said a former national security official. Eisenberg wrote to CIA General Counsel Courtney Simmons Elwood expressing his concerns about the agency’s WikiLeaks-related proposals, according to another Trump national security official.
It’s unclear how much Elwood knew about the proposals. “When Pompeo took over, he cut the lawyers out of a lot of things,” said a former senior intelligence community attorney.
Pompeo’s ready access to the Oval Office, where he would meet with Trump alone, exacerbated the lawyers’ fears. Eisenberg fretted that the CIA director was leaving those meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president that Eisenberg knew nothing about, according to former officials.
NSC officials also worried about the timing of the potential Assange kidnapping. Discussions about rendering Assange occurred before the Justice Department filed any criminal charges against him, even under seal — meaning that the CIA could have kidnapped Assange from the embassy without any legal basis to try him in the United States.
Eisenberg urged Justice Department officials to accelerate their drafting of charges against Assange, in case the CIA’s rendition plans moved forward, according to former officials. The White House told Attorney General Jeff Sessions that if prosecutors had grounds to indict Assange they should hurry up and do so, according to a former senior administration official.
Things got more complicated in May 2017, when the Swedes dropped their rape investigation into Assange, who had always denied the allegations. White House officials developed a backup plan: The British would hold Assange on a bail jumping charge, giving Justice Department prosecutors a 48-hour delay to rush through an indictment.
Eisenberg was concerned about the legal implications of rendering Assange without criminal charges in place, according to a former national security official. Absent an indictment, where would the agency bring him, said another former official who attended NSC meetings on the topic. “Were we going to go back to ‘black sites’?”
[Image: b0998e60-1d52-11ec-b3a6-eb807a482f2c]
]]> <![CDATA[CIA Whistleblower Cory Snodgres - Wow]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16245 Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:32:13 +0000 Ryan Murtha]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16245 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xch97nKTbC0&t=3595s]]> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xch97nKTbC0&t=3595s]]> <![CDATA["Hiding in Plain Sight:" Doug Valentine's Insights & The Franklin Scandal]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16226 Sat, 05 Dec 2020 23:08:23 +0000 George Williams]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16226 **Surviveandheal15 Lives On!!**
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." - Marie Curie

(*Author's note: this is NOT a QAnon Article. This author does not believe in QAnon AT ALL)

According to Nick Bryant, author of the "Franklin Scandal", Lawrence E. King, alleged high-powered child trafficker and abuser from “Franklin Scandal” infamy, was allegedly (or may still be?) employed as some kind of executive assistant at the BMW Dealership in Sterling, VA, owned by entrepreneur Thomas Moorehead. For those who want to investigate into the "Franklin Scandal" child trafficking scandal of the 80s, I cannot recommend enough the following two books specifically: Nick Bryant's "Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal," and also Nick Bryant & Henry Vinson's co-written 2015 book "Confessions of a DC Madam: The Politics of Sex, Lies and Blackmail." In both these books, adults interviewed by Bryant allege that as children in the 80s, Lawrence E King and his cronies subjected them to abuse so horrific that it is truly beyond the mind to comprehend. Henry Vinson alleges that on one occasion in the 80s in the Kalorama suburb of DC, Lawrence E. King, along with another unspeakably shady character named Craig Spence, both told him directly to his face that they (King & Spence) trafficked children to powerful pedophiles who "took pleasure" in murdering these children.

So how the hell can the mind react to this information? Beyond the inevitable shock and rage, what always remains, in my mind, is the absolute pressing need to shine as bright a light as possible on the disgustingly corrupt mechanisms of society that could ever enable this kind of abuse to happen in the first place. I do this in the hope, as ever small as it might be, that by shining a light on this corruption, we can at least hope that justice will someday be brought for the victims, and this abuse can someday stop forever.

In the spirit of all of this, I decided to personally dig into the question of why well over 20 years after the Franklin Scandal of the 80s, Lawrence E King had no problem at all finding himself a job selling cars at an extremely high-end Washington, DC. car dealership, without anyone apparently batting an eye. If you dig into the background of Larry King’s boss at this dealership, Thomas Moorehead, you will quickly find that back in the 80s he went through General Motor’s extremely selective dealership training program, which trains new dealership owners. In 1987, Moorehead opened his first car dealership, selling Buicks, in of all places (you guessed it)…. Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha is of course the epicenter of the Franklin Scandal child abuse allegations. By all accounts, Moorehead was an extremely successful car dealer, rapidly opening more dealerships after his initial one in Omaha. In 2002, he moved to Virginia to open a new BMW dealership in Sterling VA and went on to open a Rolls Royce Dealership right across the street. (Link to Moorehead’s profile in “Washington Life” Magazine)

According to the Washington Life article, Moorehead is very very concerned about providing the utmost customer service to his wealthy clients at his Rolls Royce dealership in Sterling. Apparently, he will even send “…homemade coffee cakes to clients whenever the dealership makes even a minor error.”
Using basic common sense, if a guy like Thomas Moorehead is so obsessed with “customer service” that he is baking coffee cakes in response to minor customer errors, does anyone really think he would ever hire someone at his dealership without performing the most thorough background check possible? Seeing all the horrible info about Lawrence E King that is out there on the internet without even needing to pay for a background check, obviously there is much more at play then meets the eye. In a radio interview, Franklin Scandal author Nick Bryant said that Larry King had gotten a “no-show job” at a car dealership in Virginia, and that clearly King was keeping his mouth shut and being rewarded for it.

Doug Valentine and The Phoenix Program
As bizarre as it is to see Larry King working at some random auto dealership in the DC suburbs, it made a lot more sense to me when I read author Doug Valentine’s 2017 book, “The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World.” Doug Valentine is a long-time researcher of the CIA, he is best known for his book “The Phoenix Program,” where he really exposed the Phoenix Program, a CIA-run assassination program during the Vietnam War that specifically targeted and sowed terror amongst the civilian population.
As Valentine documents, through the Phoenix Program the CIA operated torture centers all over South Vietnam, and assassination teams of Vietnamese mercenaries (many of them hardcore criminals) led by CIA paramilitary officers, were unleashed on the civilian population to wreak havok. Mass slaughter of civilians was commonplace, and apparently, some of these CIA kill teams were so depraved, members would actually “devour their enemies’ vital organs” after killing them.

Very much worth pointing out that a 1973 article in the Omaha Sun says that Larry King served as an Air Force “Information Specialist” in Thailand during the Vietnam war, and that he handled “top secret” military communications (from Nick Bryant’s “Franklin Scandal”). Doug Valentine also said in his "CIA as Organized Crime" book that during the Vietnam War era, Thailand was "awash with drug money." To better understand this history, I think it is very good to look at authors like Valentine, and at authors like researcher Alfred McCoy, with his book "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia." McCoy and Valentine both point out that during the Vietnam war, huge amount of opium was grown in the "Golden Triangle" region of Thailand, Burma and Laos as part of a massive heroin trafficking operation that operated under the protection and auspices of the CIA. Thailand in particular was known to be an important transit center for the huge amounts of drug money that flowed from the heroin trade. Book publisher Kris Millegan is the publisher of Nick Bryant's very important investigation of the Franklin Scandal; he runs TrineDay Publishing in Eugene OR, and himself is the son of a very high-ranking OSS and CIA intelligence analyst. Millegan has stated in interviews that Chiang Mai, a major city in northern Thailand, was known in the Vietnam War era to be a very important "heroin city," a place that hosted "all the major banks, and had a four-lane highway going to the Golden Triangle."

The reason I bring all this up, is because we can see from this accumulated evidence that Lawrence E. King was serving as some kind of very covert "intelligence messenger" of sorts for the Air Force in Thailand, in a country that at the very same time that King was there, was awash in heroin trafficking and huge amounts of money laundering, all of which just so happened to be operating under the protection of the... American intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA. If we then fast-foward to the 1980s, we then see Lawrence King directing a bank in Omaha NE, the Franklin Credit Union. Once the "Franklin" child abuse scandal started unfolding in the late '80s, one of the additional allegations that came out was the possibility that King was using his Credit Union to launder money for Ronald Reagan's illegal "Iran-Contra" operation. Iran-Contra was a scheme where financial proceeds from illegal operations, in particular drug trafficking and weapons sales, were used to pay to arm the Contras, a right-wing military group that fought the Sandinistas in El Salvador in the 80s.

As Nick Bryant writes in his "Franklin Scandal" book: "Rumors that Franklin Credit Union funds ended up in the Reagan administration illegal Contra war chest even made into the Lincoln Journal [Nebraska newspaper]..." Anyone who has studied the Iran-Contra scandal, knows the Contras were heavily implicated in trafficking huge amounts of cocaine from South America as a major means of funding their military operations. So clearly, laundering all the money this huge cocaine trafficking operation produced, had to be a very significant piece of the overall "Iran-Contra" scandal. So with Larry King, we see someone who is documented as being an actual intelligence agent in the Vietnam era. There is then the possibility that King may have played a very direct role in an "Iran-Contra" connected drug money laundering scheme in the 80s, through the operation of his Franklin credit union in Omaha. And then going back to the 60s, in King's role as a top secret intelligence messenger in Thailand in the 60s, at the very same time that country was awash in a US intelligence-protected heroin trafficking and money laundering operation... one can only wonder what King was up to in that era. As can be clearly seen, Doug Valentine, Alfred McCoy and Nick Bryant's information helps to give a bigger scope of the sinisterness of all this.

Getting back to Doug Valentine: In the 1980s, Valentine was in the process of writing “The Phoenix Program,” and he had managed to establish contacts with a number of “former” CIA officers who were leaking him bits of info about the Phoenix Program. As Doug describes it, the reason he was able to get a “foot in the door” to talk to some of these CIA people was because of a book he had written about his own father’s experiences in World War 2, called “The Hotel Tacloban” (I highly recommend the book).
Valentine’s father was a US military veteran who was captured by the Japanese and held in a POW camp in the Philippines during the war, that held mostly Australian enlisted men and British officers. He was part of a full-on mutiny by enlisted men in the POW camp, after the Australian enlisted men found out a British officer in the camp ratted out two attempted escapees who were then executed by the Japanese prison guards in the camp (beheaded on Christmas day). In response, there was a riot in the camp and the British officer was murdered by the enlisted men. After the POW camp was freed at the end of the war, Valentine’s father’s military records were altered, and he was ordered never to speak of the mutiny, under threat of being court-marshalled. Doug's father did eventually make it safely back to the US (eventually after his ordeals), where he married and had a family. The tribulations Valentine's father went through during WWII are a truly incredible story.

In the 1980s, Valentine sent a copy of “The Hotel Tacloban” to William Colby, then-Director of the CIA. Apparently, Colby was impressed by the book and what his father went through during the war and granted Doug Valentine an interview. Colby himself was a WW2 veteran, he served as an OSS Paratrooper (OSS was the predecessor to the CIA). He himself was also a major architect of the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. For whatever reason, Colby was willing to divulge some info about the Phoenix Program to Valentine, and other CIA agents followed suit, divulging info about some other aspects of CIA operations.

Exposing the CIA “Deep Cover Agent” Network in the US

In the 1980s, one of the CIA officers who came out of the woodwork to speak to Valentine was “Larry.” Larry was a former Marine who was recruited into the CIA during the Vietnam War. After Vietnam, Larry was set up by the CIA’s Central Cover Staff to be a “deep cover agent”. He was set up with a fake life and job history, and was assigned to the Philippines, where for 10 years he worked at management-level positions at American corporations all over the Philippines, all the while secretly reporting back to the CIA. These corporations include General Motors, Visa Card, and Westinghouse, and they all knowingly provided cover to this CIA agent.

On top of this, “Larry” actually managed to get himself elected as a politician and actually served in the Philippines legislature, all the while still being a CIA deep cover agent. Apparently, this was a bridge too far for the US State Department, so Larry was “whisked” out of the Philippines, his CIA assignment there ended.
In reward for his years of service in the Philippines, the CIA rewarded Larry, as a kind of cushy “retirement job” by making him the manager of the “Four Ways” Restaurant, a super-exclusive restaurant at DuPont Circle in DC. Larry invited Doug Valentine to meet at the restaurant, where he described what happened:

“This restaurant was the fanciest place I had ever been in my life. It was a place where striped pants State Department officials, foreign dignitaries and business tycoons met to make deals…each lavishly appointed room had its own dining table and waiter.
I was directed to a leather booth in the wood-paneled basement barroom, where Larry casually explained that each room was bugged by the CIA.
As we were talking, a group of well-dressed young men and women, chaperoned by an older man, took the booth next to us. The rest of the barroom was empty. They ordered drinks but remained silent and alert as Larry explained the ins and outs of his CIA experience to me.
At one point, Larry nodded to the older man at the next booth, then informed me that the young people listening to our conversation were [CIA] junior officer trainees from Langley.
Larry told me that the CIA manages a parallel society where deep-cover agents like him, as well as retired CIA officers and their agents, are provided with comfortable employment in their retirement years, or when they otherwise need sanctuary and recompense for their services.
Many of these agents […] are folded into this parallel universe as managers of the local Ford dealership, or proprietors of a Chinese restaurant, or in hundreds of other jobs held in abeyance by cooperating businesses.” Doug Valentine sums up this CIA-run “deep cover” network as “…the hidden geography of Top-Secret America, a subculture of highly trained operators with a dangerous set of skills that can be called upon at any moment. The one thing they have in common is that they are entirely dependent on the war criminals running the CIA.”

Relevance to Child Trafficking/Pedophile Ring Investigations
According to a number of sources, the CIA appears to have its tentacles extended into the horrifying world of child trafficking and pedophilia blackmail operations. Nick Bryant and Henry Vinson documented in their book “DC Madam,” the story of Craig Spence, who was allegedly running a sexual blackmail operation involving pimping underage children out of a mansion in the upscale DC suburb of Kalorama. Craig Spence apparently told people he worked for the CIA, and based on his sources, author and investigator Nick Bryant specifically describes Spence as some kind of "CIA asset." Furthermore, for people who don’t know about “The Finders” Case, the Finders were a bizarre satanic-type cult that was publicly exposed (briefly) in the ‘80s, that had operations in DC, including a warehouse that appeared to operate as a child trafficking hub where photos were found of naked children being ritualistically abused. Worth pointing out that the supposed leader of the “Finders” was a man named Marion Pettie. An article in US News Report stated that Marion Pettie’s wife worked for the CIA, and his son worked for Air America, a well-known CIA front company that was heavily involved in smuggling huge amounts of heroin during the Vietnam War as part of CIA-sanctioned drug trafficking operations.

Considering all these connections, Doug Valentine’s information about the CIA’s network of “deep cover agents” in businesses across the US, raises some big questions in regard to Pedogate-and Franklin Scandal-related research. As crazy as it may be to think, is it possible that Larry King himself has been tucked away into this very network? Clearly, King was given a cushy job in his older “retirement” years at a car dealership run by a man with a curious history that extends right back to Omaha. Honestly, this seems to fit right in with the network of “front” jobs described by Agent “Larry.” Could Thomas Moorehead be somehow beholden to the Agency for his enormous success, or an intelligence operative of sorts himself?

When it comes specifically to Pedogate-centered research, to be clear, Valentine never indicated that the Four Ways Restaurant where he met the agent was involved in anything related to child abuse. However, Valentine’s information certainly gives evidence that the CIA does in fact operate restaurants in DC as fronts, and bugs the rooms. Also, definitely have to point out that the Four Ways restaurant, when it was open in the ‘80s, was located in the Fraser Mansion, which is at 1701 20th St NW, at DuPont Circle in DC. Guess what’s going on there now?  The Church of Scientology owns the Fraser Mansion, and uses it as their “National Affairs” office. Can’t help thinking of Greta Van Susteren, a well-known Scientologist, who as an attorney reportedly played a major role in covering up Craig Spence’s child trafficking operations in DC in the early 90s (please see my other post on Deep Politics Forum about Van Susteren HERE.)

In conclusion, I’d encourage folks to look more into Doug Valentine’s research into the CIA. I have never heard of him researching into Pedogate-related topics, but I think the knowledge he provides about the reality of how the CIA operates, can be very valuable in this community. The very idea that this “deep cover agent” network Valentine exposes, could possibly function as a way of hiding “in plain sight” one of the worst child abusers imaginable, is obviously horrifying. However, knowledge is always power, and the more we can do to expose the specific machinations through which this evil network operates, clearly the better. Good luck with the digging everyone, take care and STAY SAFE!

"If there are computers, societies, and ecosystems that exist, 
this is not merely because new properties emerge (or, as 
reductionists would have it, seem to emerge) from atoms, 
but also because God has placed within each monad all of 
the possibilities of its individual development. In fact, God 
has harmonized all of the possible developmental paths of
all monads through his predeterminations, though He does
not coerce but rather "inclines" each monad towards its
telos."

    -from James L. Kelley "Anatomizing Divinity: Studies in Science, Esotericism and Political Theology"]]> **Surviveandheal15 Lives On!!**
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." - Marie Curie

(*Author's note: this is NOT a QAnon Article. This author does not believe in QAnon AT ALL)

According to Nick Bryant, author of the "Franklin Scandal", Lawrence E. King, alleged high-powered child trafficker and abuser from “Franklin Scandal” infamy, was allegedly (or may still be?) employed as some kind of executive assistant at the BMW Dealership in Sterling, VA, owned by entrepreneur Thomas Moorehead. For those who want to investigate into the "Franklin Scandal" child trafficking scandal of the 80s, I cannot recommend enough the following two books specifically: Nick Bryant's "Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal," and also Nick Bryant & Henry Vinson's co-written 2015 book "Confessions of a DC Madam: The Politics of Sex, Lies and Blackmail." In both these books, adults interviewed by Bryant allege that as children in the 80s, Lawrence E King and his cronies subjected them to abuse so horrific that it is truly beyond the mind to comprehend. Henry Vinson alleges that on one occasion in the 80s in the Kalorama suburb of DC, Lawrence E. King, along with another unspeakably shady character named Craig Spence, both told him directly to his face that they (King & Spence) trafficked children to powerful pedophiles who "took pleasure" in murdering these children.

So how the hell can the mind react to this information? Beyond the inevitable shock and rage, what always remains, in my mind, is the absolute pressing need to shine as bright a light as possible on the disgustingly corrupt mechanisms of society that could ever enable this kind of abuse to happen in the first place. I do this in the hope, as ever small as it might be, that by shining a light on this corruption, we can at least hope that justice will someday be brought for the victims, and this abuse can someday stop forever.

In the spirit of all of this, I decided to personally dig into the question of why well over 20 years after the Franklin Scandal of the 80s, Lawrence E King had no problem at all finding himself a job selling cars at an extremely high-end Washington, DC. car dealership, without anyone apparently batting an eye. If you dig into the background of Larry King’s boss at this dealership, Thomas Moorehead, you will quickly find that back in the 80s he went through General Motor’s extremely selective dealership training program, which trains new dealership owners. In 1987, Moorehead opened his first car dealership, selling Buicks, in of all places (you guessed it)…. Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha is of course the epicenter of the Franklin Scandal child abuse allegations. By all accounts, Moorehead was an extremely successful car dealer, rapidly opening more dealerships after his initial one in Omaha. In 2002, he moved to Virginia to open a new BMW dealership in Sterling VA and went on to open a Rolls Royce Dealership right across the street. (Link to Moorehead’s profile in “Washington Life” Magazine)

According to the Washington Life article, Moorehead is very very concerned about providing the utmost customer service to his wealthy clients at his Rolls Royce dealership in Sterling. Apparently, he will even send “…homemade coffee cakes to clients whenever the dealership makes even a minor error.”
Using basic common sense, if a guy like Thomas Moorehead is so obsessed with “customer service” that he is baking coffee cakes in response to minor customer errors, does anyone really think he would ever hire someone at his dealership without performing the most thorough background check possible? Seeing all the horrible info about Lawrence E King that is out there on the internet without even needing to pay for a background check, obviously there is much more at play then meets the eye. In a radio interview, Franklin Scandal author Nick Bryant said that Larry King had gotten a “no-show job” at a car dealership in Virginia, and that clearly King was keeping his mouth shut and being rewarded for it.

Doug Valentine and The Phoenix Program
As bizarre as it is to see Larry King working at some random auto dealership in the DC suburbs, it made a lot more sense to me when I read author Doug Valentine’s 2017 book, “The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World.” Doug Valentine is a long-time researcher of the CIA, he is best known for his book “The Phoenix Program,” where he really exposed the Phoenix Program, a CIA-run assassination program during the Vietnam War that specifically targeted and sowed terror amongst the civilian population.
As Valentine documents, through the Phoenix Program the CIA operated torture centers all over South Vietnam, and assassination teams of Vietnamese mercenaries (many of them hardcore criminals) led by CIA paramilitary officers, were unleashed on the civilian population to wreak havok. Mass slaughter of civilians was commonplace, and apparently, some of these CIA kill teams were so depraved, members would actually “devour their enemies’ vital organs” after killing them.

Very much worth pointing out that a 1973 article in the Omaha Sun says that Larry King served as an Air Force “Information Specialist” in Thailand during the Vietnam war, and that he handled “top secret” military communications (from Nick Bryant’s “Franklin Scandal”). Doug Valentine also said in his "CIA as Organized Crime" book that during the Vietnam War era, Thailand was "awash with drug money." To better understand this history, I think it is very good to look at authors like Valentine, and at authors like researcher Alfred McCoy, with his book "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia." McCoy and Valentine both point out that during the Vietnam war, huge amount of opium was grown in the "Golden Triangle" region of Thailand, Burma and Laos as part of a massive heroin trafficking operation that operated under the protection and auspices of the CIA. Thailand in particular was known to be an important transit center for the huge amounts of drug money that flowed from the heroin trade. Book publisher Kris Millegan is the publisher of Nick Bryant's very important investigation of the Franklin Scandal; he runs TrineDay Publishing in Eugene OR, and himself is the son of a very high-ranking OSS and CIA intelligence analyst. Millegan has stated in interviews that Chiang Mai, a major city in northern Thailand, was known in the Vietnam War era to be a very important "heroin city," a place that hosted "all the major banks, and had a four-lane highway going to the Golden Triangle."

The reason I bring all this up, is because we can see from this accumulated evidence that Lawrence E. King was serving as some kind of very covert "intelligence messenger" of sorts for the Air Force in Thailand, in a country that at the very same time that King was there, was awash in heroin trafficking and huge amounts of money laundering, all of which just so happened to be operating under the protection of the... American intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA. If we then fast-foward to the 1980s, we then see Lawrence King directing a bank in Omaha NE, the Franklin Credit Union. Once the "Franklin" child abuse scandal started unfolding in the late '80s, one of the additional allegations that came out was the possibility that King was using his Credit Union to launder money for Ronald Reagan's illegal "Iran-Contra" operation. Iran-Contra was a scheme where financial proceeds from illegal operations, in particular drug trafficking and weapons sales, were used to pay to arm the Contras, a right-wing military group that fought the Sandinistas in El Salvador in the 80s.

As Nick Bryant writes in his "Franklin Scandal" book: "Rumors that Franklin Credit Union funds ended up in the Reagan administration illegal Contra war chest even made into the Lincoln Journal [Nebraska newspaper]..." Anyone who has studied the Iran-Contra scandal, knows the Contras were heavily implicated in trafficking huge amounts of cocaine from South America as a major means of funding their military operations. So clearly, laundering all the money this huge cocaine trafficking operation produced, had to be a very significant piece of the overall "Iran-Contra" scandal. So with Larry King, we see someone who is documented as being an actual intelligence agent in the Vietnam era. There is then the possibility that King may have played a very direct role in an "Iran-Contra" connected drug money laundering scheme in the 80s, through the operation of his Franklin credit union in Omaha. And then going back to the 60s, in King's role as a top secret intelligence messenger in Thailand in the 60s, at the very same time that country was awash in a US intelligence-protected heroin trafficking and money laundering operation... one can only wonder what King was up to in that era. As can be clearly seen, Doug Valentine, Alfred McCoy and Nick Bryant's information helps to give a bigger scope of the sinisterness of all this.

Getting back to Doug Valentine: In the 1980s, Valentine was in the process of writing “The Phoenix Program,” and he had managed to establish contacts with a number of “former” CIA officers who were leaking him bits of info about the Phoenix Program. As Doug describes it, the reason he was able to get a “foot in the door” to talk to some of these CIA people was because of a book he had written about his own father’s experiences in World War 2, called “The Hotel Tacloban” (I highly recommend the book).
Valentine’s father was a US military veteran who was captured by the Japanese and held in a POW camp in the Philippines during the war, that held mostly Australian enlisted men and British officers. He was part of a full-on mutiny by enlisted men in the POW camp, after the Australian enlisted men found out a British officer in the camp ratted out two attempted escapees who were then executed by the Japanese prison guards in the camp (beheaded on Christmas day). In response, there was a riot in the camp and the British officer was murdered by the enlisted men. After the POW camp was freed at the end of the war, Valentine’s father’s military records were altered, and he was ordered never to speak of the mutiny, under threat of being court-marshalled. Doug's father did eventually make it safely back to the US (eventually after his ordeals), where he married and had a family. The tribulations Valentine's father went through during WWII are a truly incredible story.

In the 1980s, Valentine sent a copy of “The Hotel Tacloban” to William Colby, then-Director of the CIA. Apparently, Colby was impressed by the book and what his father went through during the war and granted Doug Valentine an interview. Colby himself was a WW2 veteran, he served as an OSS Paratrooper (OSS was the predecessor to the CIA). He himself was also a major architect of the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. For whatever reason, Colby was willing to divulge some info about the Phoenix Program to Valentine, and other CIA agents followed suit, divulging info about some other aspects of CIA operations.

Exposing the CIA “Deep Cover Agent” Network in the US

In the 1980s, one of the CIA officers who came out of the woodwork to speak to Valentine was “Larry.” Larry was a former Marine who was recruited into the CIA during the Vietnam War. After Vietnam, Larry was set up by the CIA’s Central Cover Staff to be a “deep cover agent”. He was set up with a fake life and job history, and was assigned to the Philippines, where for 10 years he worked at management-level positions at American corporations all over the Philippines, all the while secretly reporting back to the CIA. These corporations include General Motors, Visa Card, and Westinghouse, and they all knowingly provided cover to this CIA agent.

On top of this, “Larry” actually managed to get himself elected as a politician and actually served in the Philippines legislature, all the while still being a CIA deep cover agent. Apparently, this was a bridge too far for the US State Department, so Larry was “whisked” out of the Philippines, his CIA assignment there ended.
In reward for his years of service in the Philippines, the CIA rewarded Larry, as a kind of cushy “retirement job” by making him the manager of the “Four Ways” Restaurant, a super-exclusive restaurant at DuPont Circle in DC. Larry invited Doug Valentine to meet at the restaurant, where he described what happened:

“This restaurant was the fanciest place I had ever been in my life. It was a place where striped pants State Department officials, foreign dignitaries and business tycoons met to make deals…each lavishly appointed room had its own dining table and waiter.
I was directed to a leather booth in the wood-paneled basement barroom, where Larry casually explained that each room was bugged by the CIA.
As we were talking, a group of well-dressed young men and women, chaperoned by an older man, took the booth next to us. The rest of the barroom was empty. They ordered drinks but remained silent and alert as Larry explained the ins and outs of his CIA experience to me.
At one point, Larry nodded to the older man at the next booth, then informed me that the young people listening to our conversation were [CIA] junior officer trainees from Langley.
Larry told me that the CIA manages a parallel society where deep-cover agents like him, as well as retired CIA officers and their agents, are provided with comfortable employment in their retirement years, or when they otherwise need sanctuary and recompense for their services.
Many of these agents […] are folded into this parallel universe as managers of the local Ford dealership, or proprietors of a Chinese restaurant, or in hundreds of other jobs held in abeyance by cooperating businesses.” Doug Valentine sums up this CIA-run “deep cover” network as “…the hidden geography of Top-Secret America, a subculture of highly trained operators with a dangerous set of skills that can be called upon at any moment. The one thing they have in common is that they are entirely dependent on the war criminals running the CIA.”

Relevance to Child Trafficking/Pedophile Ring Investigations
According to a number of sources, the CIA appears to have its tentacles extended into the horrifying world of child trafficking and pedophilia blackmail operations. Nick Bryant and Henry Vinson documented in their book “DC Madam,” the story of Craig Spence, who was allegedly running a sexual blackmail operation involving pimping underage children out of a mansion in the upscale DC suburb of Kalorama. Craig Spence apparently told people he worked for the CIA, and based on his sources, author and investigator Nick Bryant specifically describes Spence as some kind of "CIA asset." Furthermore, for people who don’t know about “The Finders” Case, the Finders were a bizarre satanic-type cult that was publicly exposed (briefly) in the ‘80s, that had operations in DC, including a warehouse that appeared to operate as a child trafficking hub where photos were found of naked children being ritualistically abused. Worth pointing out that the supposed leader of the “Finders” was a man named Marion Pettie. An article in US News Report stated that Marion Pettie’s wife worked for the CIA, and his son worked for Air America, a well-known CIA front company that was heavily involved in smuggling huge amounts of heroin during the Vietnam War as part of CIA-sanctioned drug trafficking operations.

Considering all these connections, Doug Valentine’s information about the CIA’s network of “deep cover agents” in businesses across the US, raises some big questions in regard to Pedogate-and Franklin Scandal-related research. As crazy as it may be to think, is it possible that Larry King himself has been tucked away into this very network? Clearly, King was given a cushy job in his older “retirement” years at a car dealership run by a man with a curious history that extends right back to Omaha. Honestly, this seems to fit right in with the network of “front” jobs described by Agent “Larry.” Could Thomas Moorehead be somehow beholden to the Agency for his enormous success, or an intelligence operative of sorts himself?

When it comes specifically to Pedogate-centered research, to be clear, Valentine never indicated that the Four Ways Restaurant where he met the agent was involved in anything related to child abuse. However, Valentine’s information certainly gives evidence that the CIA does in fact operate restaurants in DC as fronts, and bugs the rooms. Also, definitely have to point out that the Four Ways restaurant, when it was open in the ‘80s, was located in the Fraser Mansion, which is at 1701 20th St NW, at DuPont Circle in DC. Guess what’s going on there now?  The Church of Scientology owns the Fraser Mansion, and uses it as their “National Affairs” office. Can’t help thinking of Greta Van Susteren, a well-known Scientologist, who as an attorney reportedly played a major role in covering up Craig Spence’s child trafficking operations in DC in the early 90s (please see my other post on Deep Politics Forum about Van Susteren HERE.)

In conclusion, I’d encourage folks to look more into Doug Valentine’s research into the CIA. I have never heard of him researching into Pedogate-related topics, but I think the knowledge he provides about the reality of how the CIA operates, can be very valuable in this community. The very idea that this “deep cover agent” network Valentine exposes, could possibly function as a way of hiding “in plain sight” one of the worst child abusers imaginable, is obviously horrifying. However, knowledge is always power, and the more we can do to expose the specific machinations through which this evil network operates, clearly the better. Good luck with the digging everyone, take care and STAY SAFE!

"If there are computers, societies, and ecosystems that exist, 
this is not merely because new properties emerge (or, as 
reductionists would have it, seem to emerge) from atoms, 
but also because God has placed within each monad all of 
the possibilities of its individual development. In fact, God 
has harmonized all of the possible developmental paths of
all monads through his predeterminations, though He does
not coerce but rather "inclines" each monad towards its
telos."

    -from James L. Kelley "Anatomizing Divinity: Studies in Science, Esotericism and Political Theology"]]> <![CDATA[THE NEXT "PEARL HARBOR?"]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16219 Fri, 06 Nov 2020 19:40:16 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16219 ]]> ]]> <![CDATA[Engineering Contagion: UPMC, Corona-Thrax And “The Darkest Winter”]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16215 Fri, 25 Sep 2020 17:54:14 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16215 [b][i]Researchers at a BSL-3 lab tied to the organizers of the 2001 Dark Winter simulation, DARPA, and the post-9/11 biodefense industrial complex are genetically modifying anthrax to express Covid-19 components, according to FOIA documents.[/i][/b]
--Whitney Webb

Soon after having been fired from his post as secretary of the treasury in December 2002, after a policy clash with the president, Paul O’Neill became a trustee of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Despite having just worked under and clashed with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it wasn’t until O’Neill began answering to UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff as a member of the Center’s board that he chose to publicly denounce a superior as “evil.”

“He wants to destroy competition. He wants to be the only game in town,” O’Neill would later state of Romoff, adding that “after 18 months I quit [the UPMC board] in disgust” due to Romoff’s “absolute control” over the board’s actions. O’Neill subsequently noted that UPMC “board members who have wealth of hundreds of millions of dollars are not willing to take this guy on.” When pressed by a local reporter, O’Neill further elaborated that he had been told by other board members that they were “afraid” of Romoff because Romoff might “harm them in some way.”

O’Neill’s criticisms of Romoff are hardly an outlier, as local community activists and even a state attorney general have noted that UPMC’s board lets Romoff do as he pleases.

Jeffrey Romoff has ruled UPMC with an iron fist since his predecessor, Thomas Detre, had a heart attack in 1992. As a result of the Center’s massive wealth accumulation, at first spurred by his magic touch for receiving National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, Detre was able to use the financial power afforded to him to consolidate control over enough of the University of Pittsburgh to create his “own personal fiefdom,” which is now the stand-alone corporation known as UPMC.

Not long after Romoff took over the Center’s reins, he made his intentions clear to faculty and staff, stating at one 1995 UPMC meeting that his “vision” for the future of American health care was “the conversion of health care from social good to a commodity.” Motivated by profit above all else, Romoff aggressively expanded UPMC, gobbling up community hospitals, surgery centers, and private practices to create a “health-care network” that has expanded throughout much of Pennsylvania and even abroad to other countries, including China. Under Romoff, UPMC has also expanded into the health-insurance business, with 40 percent of the medical claims it pays out going straight back into places of care that are owned by UPMC—meaning UPMC is essentially paying itself.

In addition, since UPMC is officially a “charitable nonprofit corporation,” it is exempt from property taxes and has special access to the tax-exempt municipal bond market. UPMC can also solicit tax-deductible grants from private individuals and organizations, as well as governments. These grants totaled over $1 billion dollars between 2005 and 2017.

Despite these perks being officially justified because of UPMC’s “charitable institution” status, the UPMC board, with Romoff at the top, have seen their own multimillion-dollar-per-year salaries continue to climb. Perhaps this perk also comes from UPMC being a nonprofit corporation, as there are no stockholders to whom Romoff and the board must explain their increasingly exorbitant salaries. For instance, Romoff made $8.97 million last year as UPMC’s CEO, a marked increase over the $6.12 million he had raked in the prior year.

UPMC’s financial chicanery is so out of control that even Pennsylvania’s attorney general has taken action against it, suing UPMC in February 2019 for violations of the state’s charity laws based on their “unjust enrichment” and engaging in “unfair, fraudulent or deceptive acts or practices.” Though UPMC decided to settle out of court, the Center and Romoff came out of the affair relatively unscathed.

Now, thanks to the crisis caused by Covid-19, UPMC is once again on the path toward growing even larger and more powerful in pursuit of Romoff’s ultimate goal, which is, in his own words, to make UPMC the “Amazon of health care.”

In this fourth installment of the[i] The Last American Vagabond[/i] series[i] [/i]“Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex”, the “nonprofit” health-care behemoth that is UPMC is squarely placed at the intersection of post-9/11 “biodefense” public-private partnerships; corporate-funded academics who shape public policy on behalf of their private-sector benefactors; and risky research on dangerous pathogens that threatens to unleash the very “bioterror” that these institutions claim to guard against.

[b]The Odd Trajectory of UPMC’s Covid-19 Vaccine Efforts[/b]
[Image: f5309a48-36c7-4876-b182-71fd2e8910ab-upm...C338&ssl=1]

In January 2020, when much of the world remained blissfully unaware of the coming global pandemic, UPMC was already at work developing a vaccine to protect against the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, known as SARS-CoV-2. That month, before the state of Pennsylvania had a single case of Covid-19, UPMC formed a “coronavirus task force,” which was initially focused on lobbying the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to obtain samples of live SARS-CoV-2 for research purposes. That research was to be conducted at the Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL) housed within UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research. A day after the director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex, revealed UPMC’s efforts to access the SARS-CoV-2 virus, he announced that the virus samples, containing an estimated 50 to 60 million coronavirus particles, were already en route to the university. At the time, UPMC was one of only a handful of institutions on the CDC’s short list to receive live SARS-CoV-2 samples.

UPMC later stated that they began work on a vaccine for Covid-19 on January 21st, weeks before the February 14th announcement that the virus was on its way to the university. That original vaccine candidate used the published genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, released in early January 2020 by Chinese researchers, to synthetically produce SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins that would be transported into cells by an adenoviral vector, which is commonly used in a variety of vaccines. The vaccine candidate was nicknamed PittCoVacc, short for Pittsburgh Coronavirus Vaccine.

A little over a month after the live SARS-CoV-2 samples were received by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, UPMC received a $5 million grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international organization founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant was officially awarded to “an international academic-industry partnership” that the Center for Vaccine Research had recently formed with the Institut Pasteur in France and Austrian vaccine manufacturer Themis. Soon after, in May, Themis was acquired by vaccine giant Merck, which began recruiting volunteers for human trials earlier this month on September 11. Merck has incredibly close ties with UPMC, particularly its commercialization arm known as UPMC Enterprises.

The CEPI grant seems to have drastically altered the Center for Vaccine Research’s interest in the original adenovirus-vector vaccine candidate, PittCoVacc, as the CEPI grant was specifically aimed at funding a different vaccine candidate that instead uses the measles virus as a vector. The measles virus and the genetic manipulation of measles for use in the measles vaccine is, notably, the principal research interest and expertise of Center for Vaccine Research director Paul Duprex.

This measles-based vaccine candidate has been described as “a modified [genetically altered] measles virus that delivers bits of the new coronavirus into the body to prevent Covid-19” as well as an “attenuated [genetically modified yet weakened] measles virus as a vector with which to introduce genetic material from SARS-[CoV-]2 to the immune system.” The combination of this weakened measles virus and SARS-CoV-2, per Duprex, will produce a “more benign version of coronavirus [that] will acquaint a person’s immune system” with SARS-CoV-2. No vaccine using this modality has ever been licensed.

On April 2nd, less than a week after the CEPI award had been announced, the UPMC researchers who had developed the original vaccine candidate using the more traditional adenovirus-vector approach published a study in [i]EBioMedicine[/i] (a publication of the[i] [/i]medical journal[i] Lancet[/i]) that reported promising results of their vaccine candidate in animal studies. The news that a US institution was among the first in the world to develop a Covid-19 vaccine candidate with promising results from an animal study was heavily amplified by mainstream US media outlets, with those reports noting that UMPC was requesting government permission to quickly move onto human trials.

This original vaccine candidate, however, was mysteriously dropped from subsequent reports and statements from UPMC regarding its Covid-19 vaccine efforts. Indeed, in recent months, Duprex’s statements on the center’s Covid-19 vaccine candidates no longer mention the once-promising PittCoVacc at all. Instead, new reports, citing Duprex, claim that the only UPMC vaccine candidates are the CEPI-funded measles-vaccine candidate and another, more mysterious vaccine candidate, whose nature has only been recently revealed by documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Equally odd is that recent media reports on the original vaccine candidate have stopped mentioning UPMC at all, instead citing only Themis, its new owner Merck, and France’s Institut Pasteur. There are no reports indicating a break-up of the original “academic-industry partnership” that had received the CEPI grant. It seems that this is what may have come to pass, as Duprex stated that the UPMC measles-vector vaccine candidate had partnered with the Serum Institute of India for mass production, first for trials and then for public use, depending on how the vaccine advances through the regulatory process. In contrast, Themis/Merck have stated that their vaccine is being produced in France. It remains unclear what the relation is between these two, and apparently analogous, vaccine candidates.

Though Duprex has been relatively forthcoming about the nature of the first UPMC vaccine candidate (i. e., the CEPI-funded measles-vector vaccine), he has been much more tight-lipped about its second vaccine candidate. In late August, he told the [i]Pittsburgh Business Times[/i] that the second vaccine candidate that UPMC was developing “works by delivering genetic material coding for a viral protein instead of the entire weakened or killed virus as is standard in other vaccines.” Yet Duprex declined to state what vector will be used to deliver the genetic material into human cells. Recent FOIA revelations, nevertheless, have revealed that UPMC’s second vaccine candidate involves genetically engineering a combination of SARS-Cov-2 and anthrax, a substance better known for its potential use as a bioweapon.

[b]Corona-thrax[/b]
The recently obtained documents reveal that the BSL-3 lab that is part of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research is conducting eyebrow-raising research involving combining SARS-CoV-2 with [i]Bacillus anthracis[/i], the causative agent of anthrax infection. Per the documents, anthrax is being genetically engineered by a researcher, whose name was redacted in the release, so that it will express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is the part of the coronavirus that allows it to gain access into human cells. The researcher asserts that “the [genetically engineered anthrax/SARS-CoV-2 hybrid] can [be] used as a host strain to make SARS-CoV-2 recombinant S protein vaccine,” and the creation of said vaccine is the officially stated purpose of the research project. The documents were produced by the University of Pittsburgh’s Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which held an emergency meeting on June 22nd of this year to “discuss specific protocols involving research with the coronavirus,” which included a vote on the aforementioned proposal.

Edward Hammond, the former director of the Sunshine Project, an organization that opposed chemical and biological weapons and the expansion of “dual use” biodefense/bioweapon research, obtained the documents. Other FOIA documents recently obtained by Hammond have revealed an “explosion” of risky Covid-19-related research at other academic institutions, such as the University of North Carolina, which has already had lab accidents involving genetically engineered variants of SARS-CoV-2.

Hammond told [i]The Last American Vagabond[/i] that the experiment, which he dubs “Corona-thrax,” is “emblematic of the pointless research excesses that often characterize the response of scientists to the federal government throwing billions of dollars at health crises.” Hammond added, “While I don’t think that Corona-thrax would be infectious, it falls into the categories of pointless and crazy. The biggest immediate risk of all this activity is that a researcher will deliberately or inadvertently create a modified form of SARS-CoV-2 that is even more difficult to treat, or more deadly, and this virus will escape the lab. It only takes a stray droplet.”

Jonathan Latham, a virologist who previously taught at the University of Wisconsin and who is the current editor of [i]Independent Science News[/i], agreed with Hammond that the Corona-thrax experiment is odd and said that he was “concerned here specifically about the research process and the risks of these specific experiments at Pittsburgh.” In an interview with [i]The Last American Vagabond, [/i]Latham asserted that it is “unusual by historical standards . . . the combining of two highly pathogenic organisms in a single experiment.” He did note, however, that such studies for the purposes of vaccine research have become more common in recent years, as is made clear in a 2012 study.

Few experiments have been conducted that specifically utilize anthrax in this way. Since 2000, the studies that have examined the use of genetically modified anthrax as a potential vaccine vector have been affiliated with Harvard University. One of these studies was on the use of anthrax as a vector in a potential HIV vaccine and was jointly conducted in 2000 by Harvard researchers and the vaccine company Avant Immunotherapeutics (now part of Celldex).

Despite reporting positive preliminary results in their experiments, Avant/Celldex did not fund further experiments into a vaccine that used this anthrax-based modality, and it does not currently market or have any such vaccine in its product pipeline. This suggests that, for whatever reason, this company did not see much value in this vaccine, despite the preliminary study with Harvard claiming that the methodology was safe and effective.

The Harvard researchers involved in that 2000 study, however, continued to investigate the possibility of an anthrax-based HIV vaccine in 2003, 2004, and 2005, though without corporate sponsorship. Related yet different research has explored the use of “disarmed” anthrax components as an adjuvant in vaccines and as the basis for enzyme-linked immunospot assays.

The aforementioned Harvard researchers patented their methodology of using anthrax in this way for the production of a vaccine in 2002. This means that the anthrax-based “vaccine” currently being developed by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research would have to develop a [i]new[/i] method that utilizes anthrax in much the same way so as not to infringe on the patent, which is unlikely. The other alternative is that UPMC would pay the patent holders for use of their methodology if they want to commercialize it in a vaccine. Yet, given UPMC’s business model in general, as well as that of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research specifically, this also seems unlikely.

Also odd is what sort of incentive UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research possesses for the Corona-thrax experiment. There are currently over a hundred vaccine candidates that use existing and tested vaccine platforms in pursuit of a Covid-19 vaccine, a fact Duprex himself has acknowledged. As Hammond told [i]The Last American Vagabond[/i], “It is perfectly obvious that there are numerous existing vaccine platforms for Covid-19 and that some of them will, sooner or more likely later, succeed. There is no serious need for some sort of quite strange bacterial platform, much less one that happens to be anthrax. It’s completely unnecessary and frankly bizarre.”

[b]The Crown Jewel of the Biotech-Industrial Complex[/b]
[Image: new-chancellor-photo.jpg?resize=556%2C383&ssl=1]
[i]Ribbon cutting for the Center for Vaccine Research – From left: Donald S. Burke, U. S. Congressman Mike Doyle, Arthur S. Levine, Dan Onorato, Mark A. Nordenberg.[/i]

The Corona-thrax experiment is being conducted at the Center for Vaccine Research’s Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL), where the center’s work with pathogenic agents, such as anthrax and SARS-CoV-2, is conducted.

The creation of UPMC’s RBL was first announced in 2003, when the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, then and currently led by Anthony Fauci) stated it would fund the laboratory’s construction with an $18 million grant. It was originally planned to be mainly “dedicated to research on agents that cause naturally occurring and emerging infections, as well as potential agents of bioterrorism.” The plan to create the lab was part of the US government decision to dramatically ramp up “biodefense” research in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The lab was also intended to work on “developing a vaccine program focusing on basic and translational research” related to viruses of pandemic potential that are at risk of being “weaponized,” including SARS. After the creation of the lab was initially announced, the project expanded, eventually becoming UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, which was launched in 2007. The Center for Vaccine Research was the second such institution to be officially added to the NIAID’s “biodefense” RBL network.
The opening of both this lab and UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research was made reality thanks to the efforts of the main authors of the June 2001 Dark Winter bioterror simulation, a controversial exercise that eerily predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks as well as the initial, yet bogus, narrative that Iraq and Islamic extremist terror groups were responsible for those attacks. However, the anthrax used in the attacks was later revealed to be of US military origin. As noted in Part I of this series, participants in the Dark Winter exercise had foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks and others were involved in the subsequent “investigation,” which many experts and former FBI investigators describe as a cover-up.

Dark Winter was largely written by Tara O’Toole, Thomas Inglesby, and Randall Larsen, all three of whom played integral roles in the founding or operations of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, along with O’Toole’s mentor, D. A. Henderson. UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity was launched in September 2003, just days before the NIAID announced it would fund the RBL lab that would later become the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research.

Notably, just days after the attacks on September 11, 2001, O’Toole, Inglesby, and Larsen personally briefed Vice President Cheney on Dark Winter. Simultaneously, Cheney’s office at the White House began taking the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin to prevent anthrax infection. In the weeks between that briefing and the 2001 anthrax attacks, Dark Winter participants and several associates of Cheney, namely members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) like Donald Kagan and Richard Perle, asserted that a bioterror attack involving anthrax would soon take place.

In the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, Henderson “was tapped by the federal government to vastly increase the number of [biodefense] labs, both to detect suspected pathogens like anthrax and to conduct bio-defense research, such as developing vaccines,” with the announcement of UPMC’s RBL being part of the launch of the O’Toole-led Center for Biosecurity at UPMC, where Henderson was named senior adviser. In 2003, the Center for Biosecurity was set up at UPMC partially at the request of Jeffrey Romoff to be “the country’s only think tank and research center devoted to the prevention and handling of biological attacks,” with UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research being the hub of a new “biodefense research” lab network Henderson was setting up and managing at the time. That network remains technically managed by the Fauci-led NIAID.
Also noteworthy is that the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, from its opening in 2007 until 2016, was Donald Burke. Burke is a former biodefense researcher for the US military at Fort Detrick and other installations and, immediately prior to heading the UPMC center, was a program director at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he worked closely with O’Toole and Inglesby.

At the time of the 2003 announcement regarding the creation of what would become UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, Tara O’Toole stated:
Quote:[i][i]“This new laboratory will enable University of Pittsburgh medical researchers to delve further into possible treatments and to develop vaccines against diseases that might result from bioterrorist attack or from natural outbreaks.”[/i][/i]

A few years later, after she was nominated to a top post at the Department of Homeland Security, O’Toole was slammed by experts over her excessive lobbying “for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security.” Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright remarked at the time that “she makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” It was also noted in hearings that O’Toole had worked as a lobbyist for several “life sciences” companies specializing in the sale of biodefense products to the U.S. government, including Emergent Biosolutions – a very controversial company and a key suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The history of the Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL, particularly the network of people who prompted the lab’s creation, raises concerns about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment currently being conducted within the facility. This is especially true because the researcher conducting the experiment appears to be ignorant about key parts of the research he or she is conducting.

For instance, the FOIA-redacted researcher incorrectly states that a recombinant virus proposed for use in the study is incapable of infecting human cells, while the IBC members note that this is not the case. In addition, the unnamed researcher falsely claimed that one of the viral vectors for use in the investigator’s study did not express Cas9 (a protein associated with CRISPR gene editing) and gRNA (“guide RNA,” also used in CRISPR) and was unaware that handling those agents requires an enhanced BSL-2 lab (BSL-2+) as opposed to a typical BSL-2 lab.

Apparently such errors among researchers involved in Covid-19 research at UPMC is not an anomaly. During another UPMC IBC meeting included in the FOIA release, the IBC noted the following about a separate research proposal:
Quote:[i][i]“In the investigator’s notes in responses to changes requested by the IBC pre-reviewers, the investigator indicates that RNA from SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infected cells will be obtained from BEI resources. Genomic RNA isolated from cells infected with SARS-CoV-1 is regulated as a Select Agent by the Federal Select Agent Program and [/i][b][i]neither the University nor this investigator are registered for possession and use of these materials[/i][/b][i] [emphasis added] (SARS-CoV-1). The investigator must NOT obtain SARS-CoV-1 genomic RNA without prior consultation with the University’s RO/AROs for Select Agents.”[/i][/i]

This part, in particular, caught the attention of Jonathan Latham, who noted that it was odd that “a university researcher is trying to obtain approval for an experiment which no one at the university is allowed to do.” Latham added in an interview that “apparently this applicant is totally ignorant of the regulatory environment and by extension the risks of SARS-CoV, which is a highly infectious virus whose escape from a lab has already led to at least one death.”

While Latham assumed that this was a “university researcher,” it is worth noting that the use of the UPMC Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL is not exclusive to researchers affiliated with the university. Indeed, as noted on the NIH website, “Investigators in academia, not-for-profit organizations, industry, and government studying biodefense and emerging infectious diseases may request the use of biocontainment laboratories,” including the RBL managed by the Center for Vaccine Research.

In addition, the Center for Vaccine Research website notes that “scientists from outside the University of Pittsburgh can work in the RBL through a collaboration or contract. Outside scientists must comply with all University of Pittsburgh training, documentation, regulatory, and medical requirements.” This means that outside scientists using the facility are also subject to IBC review. Both the NIH and Center for Vaccine Research sites note that, for an outside researcher to use the UPMC RBL facility, approval from the center’s director must be obtained.

Since the name of the Corona-thrax researcher is redacted, there is no way of knowing if he or she is affiliated with the university or a separate institution, corporation, or government agency. Regardless of who is conducting this experiment, however, it is possible to examine the history and motivations of the man who ultimately signed off on it—the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, Paul Duprex.

[b]Paul Duprex: DARPA-Funded Researcher and Gain-of-Function Enthusiast[/b]
[Image: 20200212_Coronavirus_Press_0056_InsideDi...C317&ssl=1]
[i]Director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex[/i]

Paul Duprex is a former chief scientist for Johnson & Johnson whose subsequent foray into academia was largely funded with research grants from the NIH and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Much of Duprex’s research has focused on recombinant (i. e., genetically engineered) viruses or viral evolution.

In terms of his research funded by DARPA, Duprex was most closely associated with DARPA’s “Prophecy” program, the creation of which was overseen by Michael Callahan. Callahan’s suspect past and his ties to the origin of the current Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan, China, were the subject of a recent[i] [/i][i]Unlimited Hangout[/i] article by Raul Diego.

In that article, Diego notes that the now-defunct Prophecy program had “sought to ‘transform the vaccine and drug development enterprise from observational and reactive to predictive and preemptive’ through algorithmic programming techniques” and that the program further “proposed that ‘viral mutations and outbreaks’ could be predicted in advance to more rapidly counter the unknown disease with preemptive drug and vaccine development.”

By all indications, Prophecy was DARPA’s first major foray into “predictive” AI-powered health care, which has expanded considerably in the years since. It also involved a component, which Duprex was particularly involved in advancing, whereby the “predictive” viral evolutions algorithms would be “validated and tested . . . by using multiple selective pressures on at least three closely related virus strains in an experimental setting.”

Such experiments, like this study by Duprex, involved the genetic engineering of three viral pathogen strains and then seeing which would become most transmissible and virulent in an animal host. Such studies are often referred to as gain-of-function (GOF) research and are incredibly controversial given that they often create pathogens that are more virulent and/or transmissible than they otherwise would be. It is also worth noting that UPMC, before Duprex joined the center, had also received millions in funding from DARPA’s Prophecy program “to develop in vitro and computational models for predicting viral evolution under selection pressure from multiple evolutionary stressors.”

Duprex has also been involved in conducting research for DARPA’s current INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program, a successor to Prophecy that “aims to harness viral evolution to create a novel, adaptive form of medical countermeasure—therapeutic interfering particles (TIPs)—that outcompetes viruses in the body to prevent or treat infection.” TIPs are genetically engineered viruses with defective genomes that theoretically compete with real viruses for viral components in the human body but “evolve with” the viruses they are meant to protect the body against and are “susceptible to mutation over time.”

The goal of the INTERCEPT program is to use TIPs as “therapeutics” and have them injected into the human body to “preemptively” protect against the virus from which a particular TIP was developed. It is worth noting that, while DARPA frames much of its gene-editing research (including its “genetic extinction” technology research) as being aimed at promoting either human or environmental health, it has also openly admitted that these same technologies are of interest to DARPA for their ability to “subvert” the genes of human adversaries of the US military via “genetic weapons.”

Duprex led an INTERCEPT study published in February of this year in which he and his coauthors explored how to create a synthetic TIP of the Nipah virus, a deadly virus with a fatality rate of over 70 percent. In that study, they used both wild and genetically engineered strains of Nipah virus. Notably, the Clade X pandemic simulation, which will be discussed in detail in the next installment of this series, involved a genetically engineered combination of the Nipah virus and a parainfluenza disease.

Clade X took place in 2018 and was led by much of the same team that was responsible for the 2001 Dark Winter bioterrorism simulation, including former FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. Another notable participant at Clade X was Julie Gerberding, former CDC director and current executive vice president at Merck, which has close ties to UPMC as well as the Center for Biosecurity’s failed “21st Century Biodefense” project.

A few months after publishing the study funded by DARPA’s INTERCEPT program, Duprex coauthored another study on the use of synthetic “nanobodies” (i. e., bioengineered synthetic nanoparticles acting as antibodies) that was published in August. This effort mirrors other DARPA “health-focused” projects. That study was funded by the University of Pittsburgh, the NIH, and Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

In addition to his ties to DARPA programs involving the genetic engineering of viral pathogens, Duprex is a leading advocate for controversial gain-of-function research and was appointed to direct UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research less than three months after the federal moratorium on GOF research ended.

In October 2014, five days after that moratorium was first imposed, Duprex gave a talk to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity entitled “Gain-of-Function Studies: Their History, Their Utility, and What They Can Tell Us.” In the talk, he asserted that “cross-species infection studies have already helped to improve surveillance in the field, have shed new light on basic influenza virus biology, and could assist in growing vaccine viruses better” and argues against the recently imposed moratorium.

In 2014, Duprex also wrote in a paper published in[i] Nature[/i][i] [/i]that “GOF approaches are absolutely essential in infectious disease research; although alternative approaches can be very useful, these can never replace GOF experiments.” He added that, in his view, there were only two reasons for GOF research, the first being to “improve surveillance or to develop therapeutics” and the second being merely to learn “interesting biology.”

In that same paper, he also argued that “genetic engineering that is intended and likely to endow a low-pathogenicity, low-transmissibility agent with either enhanced pathogenicity or enhanced transmissibility may be appropriate if the benefits are substantial.” He also suggested in this 2014 paper that it “might” be necessary “to enhance pathogenicity of coronaviruses in order to develop a valid animal model for coronaviruses.” Years later, during the current coronavirus crisis, Duprex and other officials from the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research co-developed a Covid-19 research and development “blueprint” for the UN’s World Health Organization.

In addition, Duprex’s work for DARPA’s Prophecy program involved GOF research, as noted above, and the creator of that program, Michael Callahan – former head of DARPA’s biodefense therapeutics initiatives, is also a proponent of GOF who believes that such risky research is inseparable from “the research and development enterprise in the life sciences and for biotechnology.”

Duprex is also a founding member of Scientists for Science, a group of researchers (most of whom are involved in GOF research) who opposed the GOF moratorium and were “confident that biomedical research on potentially dangerous pathogens can be performed safely and is essential for a comprehensive understanding of microbial disease pathogenesis, prevention and treatment.” Another of the group’s founding members is Yoshihiro Kawaoka, whose controversial GOF experiments that made pathogenic viruses more deadly have garnered considerable media attention.

When the moratorium on GOF was lifted in December 2017, Duprex called it a “sign of progress,” adding that “on a personal level I’m really pleased these NIH funded scientists [conducting GOF research] get some clarity.” As previously mentioned, he became the Center for Vaccine Research’s director less than three months later, in March 2018.

[b]The “Darkest Winter” Looms[/b]
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After a cursory examination of the background of UPMC, its Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, and the man directing its Center for Vaccine Research, the question about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment becomes: Is this yet another ill-advised experiment by a lab led by a GOF enthusiast and fueled by a feeding frenzy over the billions of dollars thrown by the government and other entities into Covid-19 research? Or is there perhaps a more nefarious motive to genetically engineering something as bizarre as Corona-thrax?

While the latter question may appear conspiratorial, it is worth pointing out that the institutions most likely to have been the sources for the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks were conducting GOF research on anthrax funded by the Pentagon and the CIA that was justified as “improving” the controversial anthrax vaccine known as BioThrax.

For instance, Battelle Memorial Institute—a Pentagon and CIA contractor—began genetically engineering a more virulent form of anthrax “to see if the [anthrax] vaccine the United States intends to supply to its armed forces is effective against that strain.” While these experiments were going on, the embattled manufacturer of the anthrax vaccine now known as Emergent Biosolutions, entered into a contract with Battelle that gave Battelle “immediate exposure to the vaccine” it was using in connection with the genetically modified anthrax program.

As noted in Part II of this series, BioPort was set to lose its Pentagon contract for anthrax vaccine entirely in September 2001, and the entirety of its anthrax vaccine business was rescued by the 2001 anthrax attacks, which saw concerns over BioPort’s corruption and its horrendous safety track record replaced with fervent demands for more of its anthrax vaccine. Furthermore, as noted in detail in Part III of this series, Battelle was the most likely source of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks. The ties between UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, Battelle, and Emergent Biosolutions will be discussed in the next installment in the series.

What is also notable about these Corona-thrax experiments occurring at UPMC are the ties of UPMC’s RBL and Center for Vaccine Research to another key component of the center’s “biodefense” complex, the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. As previously mentioned, the people recruited to head this center at its founding in 2003 were intimately involved in the 2001 bioterror simulation Dark Winter, namely Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby.

While leading the UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, O’Toole and/or her successor Inglesby engaged in other notable bioterror simulations, including one that took place last year— Event 201, which eerily predicted the coronavirus crisis that began this year. Inglesby, who is also the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in addition to his post at UPMC, was the moderator at Event 201.

Though Event 201 has garnered considerable scrutiny in recent months, another but less well-known exercise in 2018 that involved O’Toole and Inglesby, examined how a bioterror attack involving a genetically engineered pathogen could trigger a Continuity of Government (CoG) scenario, a government roadmap for the imposition of martial law in the United States. As other investigative series of mine have noted, there have recently been a myriad of intelligence agency–linked simulations that predict the imminent imposition of martial law in the United States following the 2020 election.

It is also notable that George W. Bush’s controversial and classified update to CoG plans in 2007, known as Executive Directive 51, was directly inspired by Dark Winter, and Barack Obama’s subsequent executive orders on CoG gave near-complete control of American infrastructure to the Department of Homeland Security in a such a situation. At the time Obama issued those executive orders, O’Toole was the DHS undersecretary for science and technology and also influenced those updates to the CoG plans. O’Toole is currently the executive vice president of the CIA’s In-Q-tel.

The simulation known as Clade X will be examined in greater detail in the next installment of this series as will the numerous and recent “predictions” from US government sources, controversial billionaires such as Bill Gates, and a web of individuals tied to UPMC who have warned that a bioterror attack or related public health catastrophe is set to take place in the United States in the latter half of 2020. As one high-ranking government official put it earlier this year, this allegedly imminent event will result in “the darkest winter in modern history.”]]> [b][i]Researchers at a BSL-3 lab tied to the organizers of the 2001 Dark Winter simulation, DARPA, and the post-9/11 biodefense industrial complex are genetically modifying anthrax to express Covid-19 components, according to FOIA documents.[/i][/b]
--Whitney Webb

Soon after having been fired from his post as secretary of the treasury in December 2002, after a policy clash with the president, Paul O’Neill became a trustee of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Despite having just worked under and clashed with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it wasn’t until O’Neill began answering to UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff as a member of the Center’s board that he chose to publicly denounce a superior as “evil.”

“He wants to destroy competition. He wants to be the only game in town,” O’Neill would later state of Romoff, adding that “after 18 months I quit [the UPMC board] in disgust” due to Romoff’s “absolute control” over the board’s actions. O’Neill subsequently noted that UPMC “board members who have wealth of hundreds of millions of dollars are not willing to take this guy on.” When pressed by a local reporter, O’Neill further elaborated that he had been told by other board members that they were “afraid” of Romoff because Romoff might “harm them in some way.”

O’Neill’s criticisms of Romoff are hardly an outlier, as local community activists and even a state attorney general have noted that UPMC’s board lets Romoff do as he pleases.

Jeffrey Romoff has ruled UPMC with an iron fist since his predecessor, Thomas Detre, had a heart attack in 1992. As a result of the Center’s massive wealth accumulation, at first spurred by his magic touch for receiving National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, Detre was able to use the financial power afforded to him to consolidate control over enough of the University of Pittsburgh to create his “own personal fiefdom,” which is now the stand-alone corporation known as UPMC.

Not long after Romoff took over the Center’s reins, he made his intentions clear to faculty and staff, stating at one 1995 UPMC meeting that his “vision” for the future of American health care was “the conversion of health care from social good to a commodity.” Motivated by profit above all else, Romoff aggressively expanded UPMC, gobbling up community hospitals, surgery centers, and private practices to create a “health-care network” that has expanded throughout much of Pennsylvania and even abroad to other countries, including China. Under Romoff, UPMC has also expanded into the health-insurance business, with 40 percent of the medical claims it pays out going straight back into places of care that are owned by UPMC—meaning UPMC is essentially paying itself.

In addition, since UPMC is officially a “charitable nonprofit corporation,” it is exempt from property taxes and has special access to the tax-exempt municipal bond market. UPMC can also solicit tax-deductible grants from private individuals and organizations, as well as governments. These grants totaled over $1 billion dollars between 2005 and 2017.

Despite these perks being officially justified because of UPMC’s “charitable institution” status, the UPMC board, with Romoff at the top, have seen their own multimillion-dollar-per-year salaries continue to climb. Perhaps this perk also comes from UPMC being a nonprofit corporation, as there are no stockholders to whom Romoff and the board must explain their increasingly exorbitant salaries. For instance, Romoff made $8.97 million last year as UPMC’s CEO, a marked increase over the $6.12 million he had raked in the prior year.

UPMC’s financial chicanery is so out of control that even Pennsylvania’s attorney general has taken action against it, suing UPMC in February 2019 for violations of the state’s charity laws based on their “unjust enrichment” and engaging in “unfair, fraudulent or deceptive acts or practices.” Though UPMC decided to settle out of court, the Center and Romoff came out of the affair relatively unscathed.

Now, thanks to the crisis caused by Covid-19, UPMC is once again on the path toward growing even larger and more powerful in pursuit of Romoff’s ultimate goal, which is, in his own words, to make UPMC the “Amazon of health care.”

In this fourth installment of the[i] The Last American Vagabond[/i] series[i] [/i]“Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex”, the “nonprofit” health-care behemoth that is UPMC is squarely placed at the intersection of post-9/11 “biodefense” public-private partnerships; corporate-funded academics who shape public policy on behalf of their private-sector benefactors; and risky research on dangerous pathogens that threatens to unleash the very “bioterror” that these institutions claim to guard against.

[b]The Odd Trajectory of UPMC’s Covid-19 Vaccine Efforts[/b]
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In January 2020, when much of the world remained blissfully unaware of the coming global pandemic, UPMC was already at work developing a vaccine to protect against the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, known as SARS-CoV-2. That month, before the state of Pennsylvania had a single case of Covid-19, UPMC formed a “coronavirus task force,” which was initially focused on lobbying the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to obtain samples of live SARS-CoV-2 for research purposes. That research was to be conducted at the Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL) housed within UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research. A day after the director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex, revealed UPMC’s efforts to access the SARS-CoV-2 virus, he announced that the virus samples, containing an estimated 50 to 60 million coronavirus particles, were already en route to the university. At the time, UPMC was one of only a handful of institutions on the CDC’s short list to receive live SARS-CoV-2 samples.

UPMC later stated that they began work on a vaccine for Covid-19 on January 21st, weeks before the February 14th announcement that the virus was on its way to the university. That original vaccine candidate used the published genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, released in early January 2020 by Chinese researchers, to synthetically produce SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins that would be transported into cells by an adenoviral vector, which is commonly used in a variety of vaccines. The vaccine candidate was nicknamed PittCoVacc, short for Pittsburgh Coronavirus Vaccine.

A little over a month after the live SARS-CoV-2 samples were received by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, UPMC received a $5 million grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international organization founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant was officially awarded to “an international academic-industry partnership” that the Center for Vaccine Research had recently formed with the Institut Pasteur in France and Austrian vaccine manufacturer Themis. Soon after, in May, Themis was acquired by vaccine giant Merck, which began recruiting volunteers for human trials earlier this month on September 11. Merck has incredibly close ties with UPMC, particularly its commercialization arm known as UPMC Enterprises.

The CEPI grant seems to have drastically altered the Center for Vaccine Research’s interest in the original adenovirus-vector vaccine candidate, PittCoVacc, as the CEPI grant was specifically aimed at funding a different vaccine candidate that instead uses the measles virus as a vector. The measles virus and the genetic manipulation of measles for use in the measles vaccine is, notably, the principal research interest and expertise of Center for Vaccine Research director Paul Duprex.

This measles-based vaccine candidate has been described as “a modified [genetically altered] measles virus that delivers bits of the new coronavirus into the body to prevent Covid-19” as well as an “attenuated [genetically modified yet weakened] measles virus as a vector with which to introduce genetic material from SARS-[CoV-]2 to the immune system.” The combination of this weakened measles virus and SARS-CoV-2, per Duprex, will produce a “more benign version of coronavirus [that] will acquaint a person’s immune system” with SARS-CoV-2. No vaccine using this modality has ever been licensed.

On April 2nd, less than a week after the CEPI award had been announced, the UPMC researchers who had developed the original vaccine candidate using the more traditional adenovirus-vector approach published a study in [i]EBioMedicine[/i] (a publication of the[i] [/i]medical journal[i] Lancet[/i]) that reported promising results of their vaccine candidate in animal studies. The news that a US institution was among the first in the world to develop a Covid-19 vaccine candidate with promising results from an animal study was heavily amplified by mainstream US media outlets, with those reports noting that UMPC was requesting government permission to quickly move onto human trials.

This original vaccine candidate, however, was mysteriously dropped from subsequent reports and statements from UPMC regarding its Covid-19 vaccine efforts. Indeed, in recent months, Duprex’s statements on the center’s Covid-19 vaccine candidates no longer mention the once-promising PittCoVacc at all. Instead, new reports, citing Duprex, claim that the only UPMC vaccine candidates are the CEPI-funded measles-vaccine candidate and another, more mysterious vaccine candidate, whose nature has only been recently revealed by documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Equally odd is that recent media reports on the original vaccine candidate have stopped mentioning UPMC at all, instead citing only Themis, its new owner Merck, and France’s Institut Pasteur. There are no reports indicating a break-up of the original “academic-industry partnership” that had received the CEPI grant. It seems that this is what may have come to pass, as Duprex stated that the UPMC measles-vector vaccine candidate had partnered with the Serum Institute of India for mass production, first for trials and then for public use, depending on how the vaccine advances through the regulatory process. In contrast, Themis/Merck have stated that their vaccine is being produced in France. It remains unclear what the relation is between these two, and apparently analogous, vaccine candidates.

Though Duprex has been relatively forthcoming about the nature of the first UPMC vaccine candidate (i. e., the CEPI-funded measles-vector vaccine), he has been much more tight-lipped about its second vaccine candidate. In late August, he told the [i]Pittsburgh Business Times[/i] that the second vaccine candidate that UPMC was developing “works by delivering genetic material coding for a viral protein instead of the entire weakened or killed virus as is standard in other vaccines.” Yet Duprex declined to state what vector will be used to deliver the genetic material into human cells. Recent FOIA revelations, nevertheless, have revealed that UPMC’s second vaccine candidate involves genetically engineering a combination of SARS-Cov-2 and anthrax, a substance better known for its potential use as a bioweapon.

[b]Corona-thrax[/b]
The recently obtained documents reveal that the BSL-3 lab that is part of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research is conducting eyebrow-raising research involving combining SARS-CoV-2 with [i]Bacillus anthracis[/i], the causative agent of anthrax infection. Per the documents, anthrax is being genetically engineered by a researcher, whose name was redacted in the release, so that it will express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is the part of the coronavirus that allows it to gain access into human cells. The researcher asserts that “the [genetically engineered anthrax/SARS-CoV-2 hybrid] can [be] used as a host strain to make SARS-CoV-2 recombinant S protein vaccine,” and the creation of said vaccine is the officially stated purpose of the research project. The documents were produced by the University of Pittsburgh’s Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which held an emergency meeting on June 22nd of this year to “discuss specific protocols involving research with the coronavirus,” which included a vote on the aforementioned proposal.

Edward Hammond, the former director of the Sunshine Project, an organization that opposed chemical and biological weapons and the expansion of “dual use” biodefense/bioweapon research, obtained the documents. Other FOIA documents recently obtained by Hammond have revealed an “explosion” of risky Covid-19-related research at other academic institutions, such as the University of North Carolina, which has already had lab accidents involving genetically engineered variants of SARS-CoV-2.

Hammond told [i]The Last American Vagabond[/i] that the experiment, which he dubs “Corona-thrax,” is “emblematic of the pointless research excesses that often characterize the response of scientists to the federal government throwing billions of dollars at health crises.” Hammond added, “While I don’t think that Corona-thrax would be infectious, it falls into the categories of pointless and crazy. The biggest immediate risk of all this activity is that a researcher will deliberately or inadvertently create a modified form of SARS-CoV-2 that is even more difficult to treat, or more deadly, and this virus will escape the lab. It only takes a stray droplet.”

Jonathan Latham, a virologist who previously taught at the University of Wisconsin and who is the current editor of [i]Independent Science News[/i], agreed with Hammond that the Corona-thrax experiment is odd and said that he was “concerned here specifically about the research process and the risks of these specific experiments at Pittsburgh.” In an interview with [i]The Last American Vagabond, [/i]Latham asserted that it is “unusual by historical standards . . . the combining of two highly pathogenic organisms in a single experiment.” He did note, however, that such studies for the purposes of vaccine research have become more common in recent years, as is made clear in a 2012 study.

Few experiments have been conducted that specifically utilize anthrax in this way. Since 2000, the studies that have examined the use of genetically modified anthrax as a potential vaccine vector have been affiliated with Harvard University. One of these studies was on the use of anthrax as a vector in a potential HIV vaccine and was jointly conducted in 2000 by Harvard researchers and the vaccine company Avant Immunotherapeutics (now part of Celldex).

Despite reporting positive preliminary results in their experiments, Avant/Celldex did not fund further experiments into a vaccine that used this anthrax-based modality, and it does not currently market or have any such vaccine in its product pipeline. This suggests that, for whatever reason, this company did not see much value in this vaccine, despite the preliminary study with Harvard claiming that the methodology was safe and effective.

The Harvard researchers involved in that 2000 study, however, continued to investigate the possibility of an anthrax-based HIV vaccine in 2003, 2004, and 2005, though without corporate sponsorship. Related yet different research has explored the use of “disarmed” anthrax components as an adjuvant in vaccines and as the basis for enzyme-linked immunospot assays.

The aforementioned Harvard researchers patented their methodology of using anthrax in this way for the production of a vaccine in 2002. This means that the anthrax-based “vaccine” currently being developed by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research would have to develop a [i]new[/i] method that utilizes anthrax in much the same way so as not to infringe on the patent, which is unlikely. The other alternative is that UPMC would pay the patent holders for use of their methodology if they want to commercialize it in a vaccine. Yet, given UPMC’s business model in general, as well as that of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research specifically, this also seems unlikely.

Also odd is what sort of incentive UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research possesses for the Corona-thrax experiment. There are currently over a hundred vaccine candidates that use existing and tested vaccine platforms in pursuit of a Covid-19 vaccine, a fact Duprex himself has acknowledged. As Hammond told [i]The Last American Vagabond[/i], “It is perfectly obvious that there are numerous existing vaccine platforms for Covid-19 and that some of them will, sooner or more likely later, succeed. There is no serious need for some sort of quite strange bacterial platform, much less one that happens to be anthrax. It’s completely unnecessary and frankly bizarre.”

[b]The Crown Jewel of the Biotech-Industrial Complex[/b]
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[i]Ribbon cutting for the Center for Vaccine Research – From left: Donald S. Burke, U. S. Congressman Mike Doyle, Arthur S. Levine, Dan Onorato, Mark A. Nordenberg.[/i]

The Corona-thrax experiment is being conducted at the Center for Vaccine Research’s Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL), where the center’s work with pathogenic agents, such as anthrax and SARS-CoV-2, is conducted.

The creation of UPMC’s RBL was first announced in 2003, when the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, then and currently led by Anthony Fauci) stated it would fund the laboratory’s construction with an $18 million grant. It was originally planned to be mainly “dedicated to research on agents that cause naturally occurring and emerging infections, as well as potential agents of bioterrorism.” The plan to create the lab was part of the US government decision to dramatically ramp up “biodefense” research in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The lab was also intended to work on “developing a vaccine program focusing on basic and translational research” related to viruses of pandemic potential that are at risk of being “weaponized,” including SARS. After the creation of the lab was initially announced, the project expanded, eventually becoming UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, which was launched in 2007. The Center for Vaccine Research was the second such institution to be officially added to the NIAID’s “biodefense” RBL network.
The opening of both this lab and UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research was made reality thanks to the efforts of the main authors of the June 2001 Dark Winter bioterror simulation, a controversial exercise that eerily predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks as well as the initial, yet bogus, narrative that Iraq and Islamic extremist terror groups were responsible for those attacks. However, the anthrax used in the attacks was later revealed to be of US military origin. As noted in Part I of this series, participants in the Dark Winter exercise had foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks and others were involved in the subsequent “investigation,” which many experts and former FBI investigators describe as a cover-up.

Dark Winter was largely written by Tara O’Toole, Thomas Inglesby, and Randall Larsen, all three of whom played integral roles in the founding or operations of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, along with O’Toole’s mentor, D. A. Henderson. UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity was launched in September 2003, just days before the NIAID announced it would fund the RBL lab that would later become the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research.

Notably, just days after the attacks on September 11, 2001, O’Toole, Inglesby, and Larsen personally briefed Vice President Cheney on Dark Winter. Simultaneously, Cheney’s office at the White House began taking the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin to prevent anthrax infection. In the weeks between that briefing and the 2001 anthrax attacks, Dark Winter participants and several associates of Cheney, namely members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) like Donald Kagan and Richard Perle, asserted that a bioterror attack involving anthrax would soon take place.

In the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, Henderson “was tapped by the federal government to vastly increase the number of [biodefense] labs, both to detect suspected pathogens like anthrax and to conduct bio-defense research, such as developing vaccines,” with the announcement of UPMC’s RBL being part of the launch of the O’Toole-led Center for Biosecurity at UPMC, where Henderson was named senior adviser. In 2003, the Center for Biosecurity was set up at UPMC partially at the request of Jeffrey Romoff to be “the country’s only think tank and research center devoted to the prevention and handling of biological attacks,” with UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research being the hub of a new “biodefense research” lab network Henderson was setting up and managing at the time. That network remains technically managed by the Fauci-led NIAID.
Also noteworthy is that the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, from its opening in 2007 until 2016, was Donald Burke. Burke is a former biodefense researcher for the US military at Fort Detrick and other installations and, immediately prior to heading the UPMC center, was a program director at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he worked closely with O’Toole and Inglesby.

At the time of the 2003 announcement regarding the creation of what would become UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, Tara O’Toole stated:
Quote:[i][i]“This new laboratory will enable University of Pittsburgh medical researchers to delve further into possible treatments and to develop vaccines against diseases that might result from bioterrorist attack or from natural outbreaks.”[/i][/i]

A few years later, after she was nominated to a top post at the Department of Homeland Security, O’Toole was slammed by experts over her excessive lobbying “for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security.” Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright remarked at the time that “she makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” It was also noted in hearings that O’Toole had worked as a lobbyist for several “life sciences” companies specializing in the sale of biodefense products to the U.S. government, including Emergent Biosolutions – a very controversial company and a key suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The history of the Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL, particularly the network of people who prompted the lab’s creation, raises concerns about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment currently being conducted within the facility. This is especially true because the researcher conducting the experiment appears to be ignorant about key parts of the research he or she is conducting.

For instance, the FOIA-redacted researcher incorrectly states that a recombinant virus proposed for use in the study is incapable of infecting human cells, while the IBC members note that this is not the case. In addition, the unnamed researcher falsely claimed that one of the viral vectors for use in the investigator’s study did not express Cas9 (a protein associated with CRISPR gene editing) and gRNA (“guide RNA,” also used in CRISPR) and was unaware that handling those agents requires an enhanced BSL-2 lab (BSL-2+) as opposed to a typical BSL-2 lab.

Apparently such errors among researchers involved in Covid-19 research at UPMC is not an anomaly. During another UPMC IBC meeting included in the FOIA release, the IBC noted the following about a separate research proposal:
Quote:[i][i]“In the investigator’s notes in responses to changes requested by the IBC pre-reviewers, the investigator indicates that RNA from SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infected cells will be obtained from BEI resources. Genomic RNA isolated from cells infected with SARS-CoV-1 is regulated as a Select Agent by the Federal Select Agent Program and [/i][b][i]neither the University nor this investigator are registered for possession and use of these materials[/i][/b][i] [emphasis added] (SARS-CoV-1). The investigator must NOT obtain SARS-CoV-1 genomic RNA without prior consultation with the University’s RO/AROs for Select Agents.”[/i][/i]

This part, in particular, caught the attention of Jonathan Latham, who noted that it was odd that “a university researcher is trying to obtain approval for an experiment which no one at the university is allowed to do.” Latham added in an interview that “apparently this applicant is totally ignorant of the regulatory environment and by extension the risks of SARS-CoV, which is a highly infectious virus whose escape from a lab has already led to at least one death.”

While Latham assumed that this was a “university researcher,” it is worth noting that the use of the UPMC Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL is not exclusive to researchers affiliated with the university. Indeed, as noted on the NIH website, “Investigators in academia, not-for-profit organizations, industry, and government studying biodefense and emerging infectious diseases may request the use of biocontainment laboratories,” including the RBL managed by the Center for Vaccine Research.

In addition, the Center for Vaccine Research website notes that “scientists from outside the University of Pittsburgh can work in the RBL through a collaboration or contract. Outside scientists must comply with all University of Pittsburgh training, documentation, regulatory, and medical requirements.” This means that outside scientists using the facility are also subject to IBC review. Both the NIH and Center for Vaccine Research sites note that, for an outside researcher to use the UPMC RBL facility, approval from the center’s director must be obtained.

Since the name of the Corona-thrax researcher is redacted, there is no way of knowing if he or she is affiliated with the university or a separate institution, corporation, or government agency. Regardless of who is conducting this experiment, however, it is possible to examine the history and motivations of the man who ultimately signed off on it—the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, Paul Duprex.

[b]Paul Duprex: DARPA-Funded Researcher and Gain-of-Function Enthusiast[/b]
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[i]Director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex[/i]

Paul Duprex is a former chief scientist for Johnson & Johnson whose subsequent foray into academia was largely funded with research grants from the NIH and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Much of Duprex’s research has focused on recombinant (i. e., genetically engineered) viruses or viral evolution.

In terms of his research funded by DARPA, Duprex was most closely associated with DARPA’s “Prophecy” program, the creation of which was overseen by Michael Callahan. Callahan’s suspect past and his ties to the origin of the current Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan, China, were the subject of a recent[i] [/i][i]Unlimited Hangout[/i] article by Raul Diego.

In that article, Diego notes that the now-defunct Prophecy program had “sought to ‘transform the vaccine and drug development enterprise from observational and reactive to predictive and preemptive’ through algorithmic programming techniques” and that the program further “proposed that ‘viral mutations and outbreaks’ could be predicted in advance to more rapidly counter the unknown disease with preemptive drug and vaccine development.”

By all indications, Prophecy was DARPA’s first major foray into “predictive” AI-powered health care, which has expanded considerably in the years since. It also involved a component, which Duprex was particularly involved in advancing, whereby the “predictive” viral evolutions algorithms would be “validated and tested . . . by using multiple selective pressures on at least three closely related virus strains in an experimental setting.”

Such experiments, like this study by Duprex, involved the genetic engineering of three viral pathogen strains and then seeing which would become most transmissible and virulent in an animal host. Such studies are often referred to as gain-of-function (GOF) research and are incredibly controversial given that they often create pathogens that are more virulent and/or transmissible than they otherwise would be. It is also worth noting that UPMC, before Duprex joined the center, had also received millions in funding from DARPA’s Prophecy program “to develop in vitro and computational models for predicting viral evolution under selection pressure from multiple evolutionary stressors.”

Duprex has also been involved in conducting research for DARPA’s current INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program, a successor to Prophecy that “aims to harness viral evolution to create a novel, adaptive form of medical countermeasure—therapeutic interfering particles (TIPs)—that outcompetes viruses in the body to prevent or treat infection.” TIPs are genetically engineered viruses with defective genomes that theoretically compete with real viruses for viral components in the human body but “evolve with” the viruses they are meant to protect the body against and are “susceptible to mutation over time.”

The goal of the INTERCEPT program is to use TIPs as “therapeutics” and have them injected into the human body to “preemptively” protect against the virus from which a particular TIP was developed. It is worth noting that, while DARPA frames much of its gene-editing research (including its “genetic extinction” technology research) as being aimed at promoting either human or environmental health, it has also openly admitted that these same technologies are of interest to DARPA for their ability to “subvert” the genes of human adversaries of the US military via “genetic weapons.”

Duprex led an INTERCEPT study published in February of this year in which he and his coauthors explored how to create a synthetic TIP of the Nipah virus, a deadly virus with a fatality rate of over 70 percent. In that study, they used both wild and genetically engineered strains of Nipah virus. Notably, the Clade X pandemic simulation, which will be discussed in detail in the next installment of this series, involved a genetically engineered combination of the Nipah virus and a parainfluenza disease.

Clade X took place in 2018 and was led by much of the same team that was responsible for the 2001 Dark Winter bioterrorism simulation, including former FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. Another notable participant at Clade X was Julie Gerberding, former CDC director and current executive vice president at Merck, which has close ties to UPMC as well as the Center for Biosecurity’s failed “21st Century Biodefense” project.

A few months after publishing the study funded by DARPA’s INTERCEPT program, Duprex coauthored another study on the use of synthetic “nanobodies” (i. e., bioengineered synthetic nanoparticles acting as antibodies) that was published in August. This effort mirrors other DARPA “health-focused” projects. That study was funded by the University of Pittsburgh, the NIH, and Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

In addition to his ties to DARPA programs involving the genetic engineering of viral pathogens, Duprex is a leading advocate for controversial gain-of-function research and was appointed to direct UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research less than three months after the federal moratorium on GOF research ended.

In October 2014, five days after that moratorium was first imposed, Duprex gave a talk to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity entitled “Gain-of-Function Studies: Their History, Their Utility, and What They Can Tell Us.” In the talk, he asserted that “cross-species infection studies have already helped to improve surveillance in the field, have shed new light on basic influenza virus biology, and could assist in growing vaccine viruses better” and argues against the recently imposed moratorium.

In 2014, Duprex also wrote in a paper published in[i] Nature[/i][i] [/i]that “GOF approaches are absolutely essential in infectious disease research; although alternative approaches can be very useful, these can never replace GOF experiments.” He added that, in his view, there were only two reasons for GOF research, the first being to “improve surveillance or to develop therapeutics” and the second being merely to learn “interesting biology.”

In that same paper, he also argued that “genetic engineering that is intended and likely to endow a low-pathogenicity, low-transmissibility agent with either enhanced pathogenicity or enhanced transmissibility may be appropriate if the benefits are substantial.” He also suggested in this 2014 paper that it “might” be necessary “to enhance pathogenicity of coronaviruses in order to develop a valid animal model for coronaviruses.” Years later, during the current coronavirus crisis, Duprex and other officials from the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research co-developed a Covid-19 research and development “blueprint” for the UN’s World Health Organization.

In addition, Duprex’s work for DARPA’s Prophecy program involved GOF research, as noted above, and the creator of that program, Michael Callahan – former head of DARPA’s biodefense therapeutics initiatives, is also a proponent of GOF who believes that such risky research is inseparable from “the research and development enterprise in the life sciences and for biotechnology.”

Duprex is also a founding member of Scientists for Science, a group of researchers (most of whom are involved in GOF research) who opposed the GOF moratorium and were “confident that biomedical research on potentially dangerous pathogens can be performed safely and is essential for a comprehensive understanding of microbial disease pathogenesis, prevention and treatment.” Another of the group’s founding members is Yoshihiro Kawaoka, whose controversial GOF experiments that made pathogenic viruses more deadly have garnered considerable media attention.

When the moratorium on GOF was lifted in December 2017, Duprex called it a “sign of progress,” adding that “on a personal level I’m really pleased these NIH funded scientists [conducting GOF research] get some clarity.” As previously mentioned, he became the Center for Vaccine Research’s director less than three months later, in March 2018.

[b]The “Darkest Winter” Looms[/b]
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After a cursory examination of the background of UPMC, its Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, and the man directing its Center for Vaccine Research, the question about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment becomes: Is this yet another ill-advised experiment by a lab led by a GOF enthusiast and fueled by a feeding frenzy over the billions of dollars thrown by the government and other entities into Covid-19 research? Or is there perhaps a more nefarious motive to genetically engineering something as bizarre as Corona-thrax?

While the latter question may appear conspiratorial, it is worth pointing out that the institutions most likely to have been the sources for the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks were conducting GOF research on anthrax funded by the Pentagon and the CIA that was justified as “improving” the controversial anthrax vaccine known as BioThrax.

For instance, Battelle Memorial Institute—a Pentagon and CIA contractor—began genetically engineering a more virulent form of anthrax “to see if the [anthrax] vaccine the United States intends to supply to its armed forces is effective against that strain.” While these experiments were going on, the embattled manufacturer of the anthrax vaccine now known as Emergent Biosolutions, entered into a contract with Battelle that gave Battelle “immediate exposure to the vaccine” it was using in connection with the genetically modified anthrax program.

As noted in Part II of this series, BioPort was set to lose its Pentagon contract for anthrax vaccine entirely in September 2001, and the entirety of its anthrax vaccine business was rescued by the 2001 anthrax attacks, which saw concerns over BioPort’s corruption and its horrendous safety track record replaced with fervent demands for more of its anthrax vaccine. Furthermore, as noted in detail in Part III of this series, Battelle was the most likely source of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks. The ties between UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, Battelle, and Emergent Biosolutions will be discussed in the next installment in the series.

What is also notable about these Corona-thrax experiments occurring at UPMC are the ties of UPMC’s RBL and Center for Vaccine Research to another key component of the center’s “biodefense” complex, the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. As previously mentioned, the people recruited to head this center at its founding in 2003 were intimately involved in the 2001 bioterror simulation Dark Winter, namely Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby.

While leading the UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, O’Toole and/or her successor Inglesby engaged in other notable bioterror simulations, including one that took place last year— Event 201, which eerily predicted the coronavirus crisis that began this year. Inglesby, who is also the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in addition to his post at UPMC, was the moderator at Event 201.

Though Event 201 has garnered considerable scrutiny in recent months, another but less well-known exercise in 2018 that involved O’Toole and Inglesby, examined how a bioterror attack involving a genetically engineered pathogen could trigger a Continuity of Government (CoG) scenario, a government roadmap for the imposition of martial law in the United States. As other investigative series of mine have noted, there have recently been a myriad of intelligence agency–linked simulations that predict the imminent imposition of martial law in the United States following the 2020 election.

It is also notable that George W. Bush’s controversial and classified update to CoG plans in 2007, known as Executive Directive 51, was directly inspired by Dark Winter, and Barack Obama’s subsequent executive orders on CoG gave near-complete control of American infrastructure to the Department of Homeland Security in a such a situation. At the time Obama issued those executive orders, O’Toole was the DHS undersecretary for science and technology and also influenced those updates to the CoG plans. O’Toole is currently the executive vice president of the CIA’s In-Q-tel.

The simulation known as Clade X will be examined in greater detail in the next installment of this series as will the numerous and recent “predictions” from US government sources, controversial billionaires such as Bill Gates, and a web of individuals tied to UPMC who have warned that a bioterror attack or related public health catastrophe is set to take place in the United States in the latter half of 2020. As one high-ranking government official put it earlier this year, this allegedly imminent event will result in “the darkest winter in modern history.”]]> <![CDATA[Coronavirus Quarantine at Ontario Airport]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16191 Fri, 17 Apr 2020 18:14:45 +0000 William Weston]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16191
Mr. X was in Tulsa, Oklahoma and in the morning of March 14 he was going home on a Southwest Airlines plane for a non-stop flight to the Ontario Airport in California. His home is about five miles from the Ontario Airport.

Upon landing, men in police uniforms beckoned to the passengers to come with them. There were 135 passengers. They took them to a large hangar that had been converted into an assembly hall. They also took the flight crew, pilot, co-pilot, a male flight attendant and a female flight attendant, to this same area. There were many cots in the assembly hall, spaced six feet apart, and the people picked out cots at random to sit on. In the process of a large crowd making their choices, inevitably some people got separated from their loved ones. Of course, they believed this to be temporary. The flight crew however remained together in their choice of cots.

One of the men in uniform told the assembled people that the flight crew had been tested for the coronavirus “previously” and the results came in while the plane was in flight. Both attendants had tested positive for the virus.

Mr. X as well as others on the flight remembered the female attendant as especially energetic and bubbly, getting very close to people in serving their needs or asking if they needed anything. She did not appear at all to be sick. Neither did the male attendant.

The assembled people were told that they were going to be quarantined. They could not change cots and had to remain where they were, even if that meant not being close to their loved ones. They did not want people talking with one another. They were told they would eventually be assigned rooms but there were two groups ahead of them. One group came from a plane going from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. It had been diverted to the Ontario Airport. Another plane that was headed for Los Angeles was also diverted to Ontario. Of the three planes that were being quarantined, only Mr. X’s plane was scheduled to go to Ontario. During the 30 to 45 minute talk, the word “germs” came up many times. They took everyone’s cell phones, saying that they had to be “disinfected.” They were then told that they would be allowed one phone call and that they had to take turns using the phone. Mr. X used his one phone call to call a friend who was there to pick him at the airport and tell this person that he was being detained because of the virus. Among the passengers there were businessmen who needed to make many telephone calls, but they were denied. People of course were getting angry and asking a lot of questions such as when would they get their cell phones back or when would they be allowed to leave. To all questions the uniformed men said “Sorry, we cannot tell you. You will find out later.”

Everyone in the assembly area were tested with a nose and throat swab. The ones testing them wore heavy duty protective suits.

The people remained in the assembly hall for several days waiting for the results of their tests. No one showed any symptoms of sickness even the flight attendants showed no symptoms. In fact, judging by her energetic nature, the stewardess seemed to be the healthiest of any of them. Although discouraged from talking with one another, the uniformed men of course could not stop them. People were heard saying if the reason for being quarantined was to stop the spread of disease why were the flight attendants not separated out from among them. Mr. X heard a lot of conspiracy talk, which by nature he was inclined to doubt, attributing good intentions to the ones quarantining them. A lot of people complained about the situation they were in. The loudest and most persistent complainers were the teenage girls who demanded their cell phones back. They were told to shut up and endure the situation like everyone else.

After one week the first two groups got their test results. None tested positive and they were allowed to leave. Mr. X’s group had to wait three more days. It took ten days altogether to get their results back. In the meantime, they were given rooms somewhere that was on the grounds of the airport. Mr. X described the rooms as like those used by company executives meeting at a conference. The rooms were exceptionally lavish, and the people had access to cable TV and the Internet. What they did not have access to was their emails. Mr. X tried repeatedly to access his email or post a comment on a forum, but was blocked with a message that “You are not authorized to go this website.” While in his room, he had no interaction with the other passengers. Food was brought to him by means of a tray that was left outside the door. When he was finished, he put the tray back outside the door. Since he was allergic to peanuts, he could not eat the peanut butter sandwich given to him. However, he had no way of communicating with anyone that he could not eat it. Eventually he got a message that if he had any food issues, he could write a message and leave it on the tray. The rooms were not locked, but if he tried to leave there would be guards in the hallway who would tell him to go back into his room.

At the end of ten days, the results came back and everyone tested was negative for the virus. They were still not allowed to go however and had to wait four more days to be released. Two weeks after arriving at Ontario, he was given his cell phone back and other belongings and told he could leave, like he was leaving a prison. After going home, he was monitored by phone. They wanted to know what his activities were and where he was going. Since he was by nature a home body, the only thing he needed to got out for was to get food. They called him frequently throughout the day. By the time I talked with him on April 16, he said he was cleared and no longer had to account for his comings and goings.

With three planes quarantined, there must have been hundreds of people involved. Mr. X could not find anything on the Internet about any of this and neither could I. Since this story is so strange, it needs either to be verified or disproven. It would seem to be easy to do, but I am not sure how to go about it.


It does not make sense that they did not separate the flight attendants unless thier intent was not to stop the spread of the virus but to foster its spread for some sinister purpose.]]>
Mr. X was in Tulsa, Oklahoma and in the morning of March 14 he was going home on a Southwest Airlines plane for a non-stop flight to the Ontario Airport in California. His home is about five miles from the Ontario Airport.

Upon landing, men in police uniforms beckoned to the passengers to come with them. There were 135 passengers. They took them to a large hangar that had been converted into an assembly hall. They also took the flight crew, pilot, co-pilot, a male flight attendant and a female flight attendant, to this same area. There were many cots in the assembly hall, spaced six feet apart, and the people picked out cots at random to sit on. In the process of a large crowd making their choices, inevitably some people got separated from their loved ones. Of course, they believed this to be temporary. The flight crew however remained together in their choice of cots.

One of the men in uniform told the assembled people that the flight crew had been tested for the coronavirus “previously” and the results came in while the plane was in flight. Both attendants had tested positive for the virus.

Mr. X as well as others on the flight remembered the female attendant as especially energetic and bubbly, getting very close to people in serving their needs or asking if they needed anything. She did not appear at all to be sick. Neither did the male attendant.

The assembled people were told that they were going to be quarantined. They could not change cots and had to remain where they were, even if that meant not being close to their loved ones. They did not want people talking with one another. They were told they would eventually be assigned rooms but there were two groups ahead of them. One group came from a plane going from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. It had been diverted to the Ontario Airport. Another plane that was headed for Los Angeles was also diverted to Ontario. Of the three planes that were being quarantined, only Mr. X’s plane was scheduled to go to Ontario. During the 30 to 45 minute talk, the word “germs” came up many times. They took everyone’s cell phones, saying that they had to be “disinfected.” They were then told that they would be allowed one phone call and that they had to take turns using the phone. Mr. X used his one phone call to call a friend who was there to pick him at the airport and tell this person that he was being detained because of the virus. Among the passengers there were businessmen who needed to make many telephone calls, but they were denied. People of course were getting angry and asking a lot of questions such as when would they get their cell phones back or when would they be allowed to leave. To all questions the uniformed men said “Sorry, we cannot tell you. You will find out later.”

Everyone in the assembly area were tested with a nose and throat swab. The ones testing them wore heavy duty protective suits.

The people remained in the assembly hall for several days waiting for the results of their tests. No one showed any symptoms of sickness even the flight attendants showed no symptoms. In fact, judging by her energetic nature, the stewardess seemed to be the healthiest of any of them. Although discouraged from talking with one another, the uniformed men of course could not stop them. People were heard saying if the reason for being quarantined was to stop the spread of disease why were the flight attendants not separated out from among them. Mr. X heard a lot of conspiracy talk, which by nature he was inclined to doubt, attributing good intentions to the ones quarantining them. A lot of people complained about the situation they were in. The loudest and most persistent complainers were the teenage girls who demanded their cell phones back. They were told to shut up and endure the situation like everyone else.

After one week the first two groups got their test results. None tested positive and they were allowed to leave. Mr. X’s group had to wait three more days. It took ten days altogether to get their results back. In the meantime, they were given rooms somewhere that was on the grounds of the airport. Mr. X described the rooms as like those used by company executives meeting at a conference. The rooms were exceptionally lavish, and the people had access to cable TV and the Internet. What they did not have access to was their emails. Mr. X tried repeatedly to access his email or post a comment on a forum, but was blocked with a message that “You are not authorized to go this website.” While in his room, he had no interaction with the other passengers. Food was brought to him by means of a tray that was left outside the door. When he was finished, he put the tray back outside the door. Since he was allergic to peanuts, he could not eat the peanut butter sandwich given to him. However, he had no way of communicating with anyone that he could not eat it. Eventually he got a message that if he had any food issues, he could write a message and leave it on the tray. The rooms were not locked, but if he tried to leave there would be guards in the hallway who would tell him to go back into his room.

At the end of ten days, the results came back and everyone tested was negative for the virus. They were still not allowed to go however and had to wait four more days to be released. Two weeks after arriving at Ontario, he was given his cell phone back and other belongings and told he could leave, like he was leaving a prison. After going home, he was monitored by phone. They wanted to know what his activities were and where he was going. Since he was by nature a home body, the only thing he needed to got out for was to get food. They called him frequently throughout the day. By the time I talked with him on April 16, he said he was cleared and no longer had to account for his comings and goings.

With three planes quarantined, there must have been hundreds of people involved. Mr. X could not find anything on the Internet about any of this and neither could I. Since this story is so strange, it needs either to be verified or disproven. It would seem to be easy to do, but I am not sure how to go about it.


It does not make sense that they did not separate the flight attendants unless thier intent was not to stop the spread of the virus but to foster its spread for some sinister purpose.]]> <![CDATA[COVID-19 IS A 'STRUCTURAL DEEP EVENT']]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16189 Fri, 03 Apr 2020 21:52:42 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16189
Quote:To the great discomfort of some of my closest friends, I have continued to post articles I m not fully able to corroborate about our current Covid-19 crisis. I do so in the same spirit that I did during Russiagate -- that we seem to be in the midst of a deep event in which it is important to keep an open mind. In the case of this latest article from Whitney Webb, I agree with the comment below of Ellen Corley that this may be "Whitney Webb's most important article ever." Webb's article is hyperlinked; and I have done enough research into Fort Detrick to find credible what she writes. I have written myself about Fort Detrick and the false flag anthrax scare of 2001, which was a significant factor in the embedding of COG in the 2001 Patriot Act, whose legacy is still with us. To learn more about this important .topic, see The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, by Graeme MacQueen.

In fact, PDS elsewhere has called what is happening a "systemic deep event."

Quote:Since then I have written about deep events, by which I mean mysterious events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which  repeatedly  involve  law-breaking  or violence, and are embedded in fact in deep politics. Some of these may be low-level, as when data is filched from a personal computer, or  mid-level,  like  the  murder  of  Karen Silkwood.  But  what  I  have  called  structural deep  events  are  large  enough  to  affect  the whole  fabric  of  society,  with  “consequences that  enlarge  covert  government,  and  are subsequently  covered  up  by  systematic falsifications in media and internal government records.” We still live in the official state of emergency imposed after the last great deep event  –  9/11;  and  this  has  left  us  in  a deconstitutionalized  era  of  warrantless surveillance,  warrantless  detentions,  and militarized  homeland  security.

Whereas Whitney Webb focuses on the virus benefiting the vaccine makers, I suggest the virus is meant as the Final Solution to existence of liberal democracy and beginning of a New World Order, a wedding of Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.  ]]>
Quote:To the great discomfort of some of my closest friends, I have continued to post articles I m not fully able to corroborate about our current Covid-19 crisis. I do so in the same spirit that I did during Russiagate -- that we seem to be in the midst of a deep event in which it is important to keep an open mind. In the case of this latest article from Whitney Webb, I agree with the comment below of Ellen Corley that this may be "Whitney Webb's most important article ever." Webb's article is hyperlinked; and I have done enough research into Fort Detrick to find credible what she writes. I have written myself about Fort Detrick and the false flag anthrax scare of 2001, which was a significant factor in the embedding of COG in the 2001 Patriot Act, whose legacy is still with us. To learn more about this important .topic, see The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, by Graeme MacQueen.

In fact, PDS elsewhere has called what is happening a "systemic deep event."

Quote:Since then I have written about deep events, by which I mean mysterious events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which  repeatedly  involve  law-breaking  or violence, and are embedded in fact in deep politics. Some of these may be low-level, as when data is filched from a personal computer, or  mid-level,  like  the  murder  of  Karen Silkwood.  But  what  I  have  called  structural deep  events  are  large  enough  to  affect  the whole  fabric  of  society,  with  “consequences that  enlarge  covert  government,  and  are subsequently  covered  up  by  systematic falsifications in media and internal government records.” We still live in the official state of emergency imposed after the last great deep event  –  9/11;  and  this  has  left  us  in  a deconstitutionalized  era  of  warrantless surveillance,  warrantless  detentions,  and militarized  homeland  security.

Whereas Whitney Webb focuses on the virus benefiting the vaccine makers, I suggest the virus is meant as the Final Solution to existence of liberal democracy and beginning of a New World Order, a wedding of Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.  ]]> <![CDATA[COVID-19 AS A BLACK OP]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16184 Wed, 25 Mar 2020 22:12:25 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16184
Therefore, I suggest as a starting point that we accept that there are trans-national entities that wish to create a new world order through global terror -- and to make a lot of money in the meantime. Is it conceivable that deep state operators intentionally unleashed the virus in various places in the world. Or is the virus an accidental release from a biolab or whether it was from someone eating bat soup.]]>
Therefore, I suggest as a starting point that we accept that there are trans-national entities that wish to create a new world order through global terror -- and to make a lot of money in the meantime. Is it conceivable that deep state operators intentionally unleashed the virus in various places in the world. Or is the virus an accidental release from a biolab or whether it was from someone eating bat soup.]]> <![CDATA[Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16048 Sun, 07 Apr 2019 14:57:39 +0000 Lauren Johnson]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=16048 Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia: Overview of the book by Paul L. Williams

by Antony C. Black

On the hot summer morning of Aug. 2, 1980 a massive explosion ripped apart the main waiting room of the Bologna railway station. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more injured. Though at first blamed on Italy's legendary urban guerrillas, The Red Brigades, it soon emerged that the attack had, in fact, originated from within the deep state' of the Italian government itself.

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The full nature of this secret parallel state would only come to light a decade later when the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti, under questioning from a special commission of inquiry, revealed the existence of arms caches stashed all around the country and which were at the disposal of an organization which later came to be identified as Gladio'.

The members of this group turned out to include not only hundreds of far-right figures in the intelligence, military, government, media, Church and corporate sectors, but a motley assortment of unreconstructed WW2 fascists, psychopaths and criminal underworld types to boot. And despite Andreotti's attempts to airbrush the group as patriots' it appeared evident to much of the rest of the Italian polity that these seemed rather more like pretty bad folk indeed. Little did they know. Follow-up research by the likes of Daniele Ganser, Claudio Celani, Jurgen Roth and Henrik Kruger traced connections to similar groups spread throughout Europe of which all were found to be deep state terrorist organizations, and all of which were found, ultimately, to be subservient unto the highest levels of the CIA and NATO command structures.

The moniker Gladio' (after the two-edged sword used in classical Rome) was eventually broadened to include a bewildering host of related deep state terrorist structures including: P2' In Italy, P26' in Switzerland, Sveaborg' in Sweden, Counter-Guerrilla' in Turkey and Sheepskin' in Greece. This (hardly definitive) European list was then found to have connections not only to virtually every US sponsored secret state terrorist organization the world over (including the likes of Operation Condor in Latin America), but also to many of the global drug cartels that provided the secretive wealth needed to fund and otherwise lubricate the whole rotting, corrupt shebang.

If all this sounds sinister enough, it pales in light of the detailed structure of the dazzlingly diabolical Gladio edifice. And it is to those details we now repair vis a vis an overview of the remarkable, if otherwise unheralded, 2015 work by journalist Paul L. Williams entitled, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia'. Though there are other books on the subject worthy of honourable mention (including Daniele Ganser's seminal tome, NATO's Secret Armies', and Richard Cottrell's recent and stylishly written, Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe'), it is to Williams that I believe we owe a particular debt of gratitude in having provided a more or less fully integrated portrait of the global machinations of Operation Gladio.

Before embarking on our grim, if yet fascinating, journey it is worth first noting that whilst Gladio' was officially acknowledged and condemned by the European Parliament (in Nov., 1990; Washington and NATO having ever after refused comment' on the matter), and its multifarious organs and factions ordered dismantled, it is hardly likely that the latter was ever fully enacted. The historical context of Gladio', then, is really the quintessential backdrop to understanding the trademark false flag events of the modern era.

OF SPOOKS AND MADE MEN

The general origins of this labyrinthine network of deep state actors lay in the so-called stay-behind-armies' set up at the end of WW2 by the Allied powers (principally the US) ostensibly to act as resistance forces should the Soviets ever decide to invade Europe. Quickly, however, the raison d'etre of the armies' transmogrified into a mission to counteract, not external invasion, but internal subversion'. Such would eventually result in the undermining not just of post-war European socialism, but of Italian, Greek and later global democracy itself.

But we get ahead of ourselves.

The primal author of the stay-behind-armies', Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had "concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics" ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as werewolves'.

Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William Wild Bill' Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources.

The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles, the first president (in 1927) of the Council on Foreign Relations, and later the first head of the CIA. Duly incorporated into the American fold, the werewolves' were, given that their initial meddling took place in Italy, rebranded as gladiators'. Operation Gladio was born.

In 1947 the CIA (having, that year, superseded the OSS) was faced with its first daunting task, i.e. how to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from forming the next government. Elections were scheduled for 1948 and the PCI was a virtual shoe-in not just in Italy proper, but in Sicily as well. Fortunately, Gladio' was ready and waiting. The gladiators had been training in a special camp set up in Sardinia under the local command of the former WW2 Italian fascist leader, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese.

In addition, hundreds of American mafioso began to arrive on the shores of Italy to lend a hand with the communist problem'. The arrival of the made men' was the result of Donovan's efforts from 1943 onward in working with American mobsters Charles Lucky' Luciano and Vito Genovese to conger new (drug) funding for the OSS's off-books' operations, and to reinstall the Sicilian mafia on the island in the leadup to Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily). These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power.

Still, the threat remained. Fully half the Italian electorate were communist sympathizers and, moreover, leftist politics pervaded much of the rest of the diseased European body. More would have to be done. The problem, however, was money. There simply wasn't enough of it. Thus, the initial $200 million in funding for Gladio (which had come from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations) was quickly exhausted. And though the National Security Act of 1947 had provided the loophole that allowed for the CIA's covert operations, it had not allowed for their overt Congressional funding. There lay the rub. Thankfully, Paul Helliwell knew how to salve the itch.

Paul Helliwell was an inner member of the original OSS (along with key scions of the Morgan, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, DuPont and Ryan families) and, according to Williams, likely the greatest unsung hero of the nicknamed Oh-So-Social' club. It was he, who having cut his teeth in the drugs-for-arms trade by shepherding opium deals with the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese National Army fighting against Mao Zedung), conjured the brilliant inspiration to do the very same thing in the United States itself.

Thus, it was at his suggestion that Donovan elected to forge the deep bond (and that exists to this day) between the nation's intelligence services and organized crime. Enter stage left such notables as Lucky' Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and the Trafficante and Gambino crime clans. Quickly the streets of, first, New York, and later many an American metropolis, were flooded with heroin. These early, halcyon days would soon lead to the infamous French Connection', thence to the Golden Triangle' (where the CIA's very own Air America' transported drugs out of South East Asia during the Vietnam War) and, later, to the Balkan, Mexican, and Colombian drug cartels.

All very well and good. But, to begin with, there was yet a fly in the whole drugs-for-arms-for-terror ointment. To wit: how to pay off the mafioso without anyone noticing; indeed, how to stash, launder and hide all of this financial derring-do from the prying eyes of the authorities; you know, the real-enough authorities, the Treasury cops and so forth. How do you do that?

THE VATICAN CONNECTION

Article 2 of the Lateran Treaty of 1929 was clear and unequivocal. The Article, which served to regulate matters between the Holy See and the Italian state, expressly forbade any interference of the latter in the affairs of the former. It is hardly conceivable, of course, that the framers of the Treaty ever foresaw what such immunity could actually mean in practice. But then they probably hadn't reckoned on the fiendish formation of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), or more colloquially, the Vatican Bank.

Established by Pope Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara in 1942, the Bank would quickly come to serve as the principal repository post-war both for the Sicilian Mafia and for the OSS/CIA wherein all of the monies and documents relating to drug trafficking and to Gladio would be stored and laundered. Already in 1945 the pope had held private audiences with Donovan to discuss the implementation of Gladio and where, as Williams reports, Donovan was knighted as an anti-Communist crusader with the Grand Cross of the Order of Sylvester. Prior to this time Pius XII had proven himself a loyal ally in working with Dulles and the OSS to establish the ratlines used to help prominent Nazis escape Europe. Now, new horizons beckoned. The first duty at hand, of course, was to destroy the communist menace in respect of the 1948 elections. To this end the pope authorized his own terror squads (under Monsignor Bicchierai) to assist the gladiators and the made men' in intimidating the Italian electorate. Task accomplished.

The second duty at hand, however, was longer term. Communism, socialism and, indeed, any Godless form of progressive government, anywhere, had to be stamped out at source. For this money would be needed. Lots of money. Untraceable money. Drug money. Now in the months before the 1948 election the CIA deposited some $65 million into the Vatican Bank. The source of these monies came from heroin produced by the Italian pharmaceutical giant, Schiaparelli, and which was then transported by the Sicilian mob into Cuba where it was cut and then distributed to New Orleans, Miami and New York by the Santo Trafficante family. Lucrative though this trade was, it was not nearly enough to suit the needs of the CIA and Gladio'. More would be required. More drug networks and more banks. Gladio was about to global.

To start with a new alliance was forged with the Corsican mafia. Unlike the Sicilian mob, the Corsicans had extensive experience in processing heroin, a skill they had picked up through years of working with Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese technicians in French Indochina. A supply route then emerged running from Burma through Turkey to Beirut and thence to Marseille. Alas, there was a slight hitch when the leftist dockworkers in Marseille, being sympathetic to the rebel army under Ho Chi Minh, refused to load and unload the boats from Indochina. No worries. A deft bit of terror administered by the Corsican boys (and funded by the CIA), and problem solved. By 1951, then, Marseille had become the center of the Western heroin industry. Voila, the French Connection'.

Meanwhile, Wild Bill Donovan had resigned' from the CIA to form the World Commerce Corporation (WCC) whose primary function was to facilitate the arms-for-drugs deals with the KMT. Paul Helliwell lent a needed hand at the helm by heading up Sea Supply, Inc., a CIA front company gainfully employed in shipping heroin from Bangkok. By 1958 the whole operation was so successful that a second supply route was established running through Saigon. Here, the help of Ngo Dinh Diem, the US installed despot of South Vietnam, proved invaluable.

Still, there was a potential cloud on the horizon, i.e. word of all these shenanigans was bound to leak out. What to do? The first reflex, naturally, was to pin the blame for the West's growing heroin problem on the Communist Chinese under Mao Zedung. Check. The second, more considered response, was to organize an ongoing campaign to deflect attention away from, and burnish the image of, the CIA. And to this end, in 1953, did the CIA establish Operation Mockingbird'. Under Mockingbird' the Agency recruited hundreds of American journalists to spread false stories and propaganda about the Company's benign' activities. Eventually, this depraved fabric of anti-journalism enlisted entire news networks including ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and The Saturday Evening Post. Now the guys and gals at Langley could relax. Henceforth, American (and global) eyes were dutifully prismed through the rose-coloured lens of Mockingbird'.

But back to the Vatican. The IOR, solid banking pillar of the Gladio community that it was, could hardly be expected to do all the heavy lifting itself. After all, the global heroin industry would, by 1980, be pulling in a cool $400 billion annually. En route an extensive and orchestrated financial network would be required to supplement God's Bank. As with any fine orchestra it helps to have a maestro of exquisite genius to run the show. A nice round of applause, then, for one Michele Sindona. The biography of Sindona begins, humbly enough, with his degree in tax law from the University of Messina in 1942 after which, in quick succession, he rockets to stardom as a leading financial adviser to the Sicilian mafia, an agent for the CIA, and, thereafter, a financial intimate of the Holy See. By the late 1950s Sindona had become the lynchpin in a nexus between the mob, the CIA and the Vatican that would eventually, as Williams chillingly puts it, "result in the toppling of governments, wholesale slaughter and financial devastation."

Though a full elaboration of this bewilderingly complex financial system is best left to the author, it is worth briefly savouring a few highlights. To begin with Sindona purchased Fasco AG, a Liechtenstein holding company and through which he purchased his first bank the Banca Privata Finanziaria (BPF). The BPF then became, by way of a Chicago-based intermediary bank, Continental Illinois, a principal conduit for transferring drug money from the IOR for the purposes of Gladio. In fact, it was this banking pipeline in particular which provided the filthy lucre that fueled the 1967 coup d'etat in Greece. But more on this heady stuff in a bit.

It was through his Chicago contacts that Sindona first met Monsignor Paul Marcinkus, popularly known as the Gorilla'. The Gorilla was six foot four, "a gifted street fighter…and a lover of bourbon, fine cigars and young women". Under Sindona's patronage Marcinkus would soon rise to become both Pope Paul VI's personal body guard and the head of the IOR. A third musketeer in the person of Roberto Calvi (the assistant and later full director of the famous, Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano) came to complete the three Vatican amigos. Together they would cut a dramatic, collective figure in the global banking underworld all through the anni di Piombo' (the Gladio years of lead' in Italy from 1969 to 1987). Exactly how dramatic is illustrated, par excellence, by Calvi's eventual dark demise. Who among us, old enough to remember, can forget the macabre spectacle (June, 1982) of Calvi's body hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, his feet dangling in the Thames and pockets stuffed with five masonry bricks. Sindona would also later be murdered (1986) by means of a cyanide-laced cup of coffee whilst in jail and under maximum protective custody'.

Calvi was a key figure in establishing a series of eight shell companies (six in Panama, two in Europe) through which drug lords like Pablo Escobar in South America were encouraged to deposit their ill-gotten loot. (The CIA put shoulder to wheel by helping ferry the Escobar cocaine in a fleet of planes operating out of Scranton airport in Pennsylvania). The monies were then transferred via Banco Ambrosiano to the IOR which took a 15 to 20 percent processing fee. From there funds were distributed to a host of European banks set up by Sindona for use by Gladio units spread throughout the continent. In addition to the flow of cash from the cartels, funds were bled from Banco Ambrosiano into the eight shell companies again for use by the CIA in funding its covert operations.

This points up a general operating procedure of the entire Gladio banking' system, i.e. the system, far from being designed to turn a profit, was expressly designed to lose' money; that is, to have it siphoned off into covert ops. Such explains the regular and spectacular failure of a host of CIA-related banks including: Franklin National Bank (purchased by Sindona), Castle Bank & Trust, Mercantile Bank & Trust (both set up by the ubiquitous Paul Helliwell), Nugan Hand Bank (in Australia, and from which funds were diverted to undermine Prime Minister Gough Whitlam during the Vietnam War), and the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (based in Karachi in aid, primarily, of the Southeast Asian heroin trade). Indeed, it was precisely the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano itself that brought both Calvi and Sindona to their untimely ends.

Finally, it is worth noting here that these august institutions were linked in a tight criminal embrace with many of the most prestigious financial firms in America including Citibank, the Bank of New York, and the Bank of Boston. The base of the iceberg, in short, extended far and wide. But then, what was all this money really doing?

THE TERROR

Following the thwarting of Italian democracy in 1948 the Gladio secret armies' entered into a period of what one might characterize as pregnant incubation. Thus, it was during the 1950s that the various drug supply routes and financial networks were being created, as were some of the principal political organizations. Probably the most important of the latter was Propaganda Due' otherwise known as P2'.

Created in 1877 as a Freemasonry lodge for the Piedmont nobility, it was banned by Mussolini in 1924 only to be resurrected post-war with the approval of Allen Dulles, himself a thirty-third degree Mason. The lodge, though at first dominated mainly by spooks, spies, military and mafia figures, would soon encompass a who's who of Italian political, corporate, banking and media supremos to boot. Indeed, the organization would eventually spread shoots throughout Europe as well as North and South America, and its members would come to include such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig.

A P2' denizen of especial significance was Licio Gelli. The latter's pedigree was impressive: a former volunteer in the 735th Black Shirts Battalion, a former member of the elite SS Division under Field Marshall Goering and, thereafter, a chummy employee of the US Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army. Working with William Colby, the OSS agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the OSS director, Gelli soon gained entry to the Vatican where he helped set up the Nazi escape routes to Argentina. His ties with Argentina would later prove critical in facilitating Operation Condor (the US-backed mass assassination program in 1970s and 80s South America). Moreover, in 1972, Gelli would emerge as P2's supreme Worshipful Master' under whose leadership the lodge would reach its full, horrific flowering. Finally, it is worth mentioning at this juncture that it was as a result of a police raid on Gelli's villa in 1981 that the full, tentacled structure of Gladio would come to light. But we digress.

One of the first substantive actions of Gladio was the Turkish coup of 1960. Here the incumbent Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, made the fatal mistake of believing he was really in charge and thereafter initiating a visit to Moscow to secure economic aid. The stay-behind-army' in Turkey known as Counter-Guerilla, in alliance with the Turkish military, quickly disabused him of any such delusions by arresting and executing him. Throughout the 1970s both Counter-Guerilla and its youth wing, the Grey Wolves, would stage "ongoing terror attacks…that resulted in the deaths of over five thousand students, teachers, trade union leaders, booksellers and politicians".

Counter-Guerilla would also figure in the Turkish coup of 1980 when its commander, General Kenan Evren, toppled the moderate government of Bulent Ecevit. According to Williams, US President Jimmy Carter phoned in his approval to the CIA station-chief in Ankara, Paul Henze, with a jubilant, Your boys have done it!' What they had done, of course, was set up a tyranny in which thousands more would be tortured while incarcerated. The Turkish Gladio boys would also be unleashed in the 1980s upon the PKK the Kurdistan Workers Party. All of this was in keeping with Zbigniew Brzezinski's (Carter's national security advisor) core vision of the importance of controlling Central Asia to which Turkey was both a vital portal and, thus, a key NATO ally.

Alas, Gladio would prove something of a disappointment in France, where, after having backed a series of assassination attempts against the regrettably too independent President Charles de Gaulle, it found itself on the receiving end of de Gaulle's boot. Actually, it was NATO itself at the time, headquartered in Paris that was unceremoniously kicked out of France (in 1966, whence it took up its present cozy and famously corrupt abode in Brussels). But, of course, de Gaulle was ahead of the curve and understood all too well who was really behind the mayhem and murder.

Greece, unfortunately, did not fare as well. In 1967 the Hellenic Raiding Force', a franchise of Gladio and playing to a NATO authored script entitled Operation Prometheus, overthrew the left-leaning government of George Papandreou. The ensuing military dictatorship would last until 1974 though this would hardly signal the end of Greece's tribulations. From 1980 until near the turn of the millennium, the nation would suffer under a reign of terror and political assassinations nominally attributed to November 17', an alleged Marxist revolutionary group, but which in fact (and here I briefly tag-team with authors Cottrell and Ganser) was yet another faction of Greek-Gladio known as Sheepskin'.

This illustrates a point originally brought home by Ganser's research to the effect that virtually every alleged leftist revolutionary' group said to have been operating in Europe throughout the post-war years was, in truth, either a Gladio secret army' unit or else had been completely infiltrated by state intelligence services, and was subsequently being steered by them for Gladio-style state-terrorist ends.

Such is well documented for the Red Brigades' in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof Gang' in Germany (the gang' being conveniently and cold-bloodedly exterminated on the night of the long knives', Oct.18, 1977, whilst under custody in Stammheim prison). It also, just by the by, speaks to the universally attested prior association of many a modern-day terrorist' and their police and intelligence handlers.

In Spain, during the early 70s, Stefano delle Chiaie and fellow Gladio agents from Italy provided their consulting expertise to General Francisco Franco's secret police who conducted over a thousand violent acts and some fifty murders. Following Franco's death in 1975, delle Chiaie moved to Chile to lend a fatherly hand in helping the CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet set up his death squads. In later years the Spanish Gladio unit would find gainful employment hunting down and assassinating the leaders of the Basque separatist movement.

Of Italy we have already mentioned the years of lead', but just to capture a few highlights. The strategy of tension' unleashed in 1969 in Italy the same year Condor' was unleashed in Latin America was in response to the renewed popularity of Communism throughout the country and which, itself, was partly in response to the uptick in revolutionary sentiment globally as a result of antipathy towards the US war on Vietnam. The antidote, naturally, to this woeful state of progressive affairs was a healthy dose of terror. According to Williams, "Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, issued orders to Licio Gelli through his deputy, General Alexander Haig, for the implementation of terror attacks and coup attempts." The terror attacks began on December 12, 1969 when a bomb exploded in the crowded lobby of a bank in Milan's Piazza Fontana in which seventeen people were killed and eighty-eight injured. Over the ensuing years (from 1969 to 1987) there followed more than 14,000 acts of violence with a political motivation'. The most infamous of these was, of course, the Bologna bombing in August of 1980 and which led to the initial exposure of Gladio in Italy.

Of the many attempted coups and related high-level political machinations engineered by Gladio forces in Italy (1963, 1970, 1976) and Sicily (more or less continually on tap throughout the decade), the kidnapping on March 16, 1978 and murder a month or so later of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was likely the most sensational. Moro had dared to include communists in his new coalition government. At first blamed on the usual suspects, i.e. the Red Brigades, further investigation (to begin with by journalist Carmine Mino' Pecorelli who paid with his life) led to the real usual suspects including CIA operative Mario Moretti (eventually convicted of the killing) and thence up the line to Gelli, then to Italy's interior minister Francesco Cossiga and onwards to Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The high-level intrigue did not stop at the murder of a prime minister however. At least two Popes felt the sharp end of the Gladio sword as well. In August of 1978, Pope Paul VI died. His successor, the preternaturally timid John Paul I, soon gave his handlers a very real shock when, after looking at the IOR accounts, he issued a call for reform'. The very next day the otherwise fastidiously health-conscious pontiff in office barely a month was dead. Not just dead but expired with the telltale bulging eyes and horrific grimace of acute poisoning. His autopsy was definitively thwarted by an illegal and hastily contrived embalming, and his personal papers disappeared without a trace. Archbishop Marcinkus, having been temporarily removed prior, was returned to office whilst Calvi and Sindona, also under scrutiny at the time, breathed a (temporary) sigh of relief.

Having been (almost) burned once the overseers of Gladio made sure to engineer the follow-up Papal succession. Thus did Cardinal Karol Wojtyla shuffle onto the historical proscenium as Pope John Paul II. Now, at first, John Paul worked seamlessly with the CIA and Gladio. Together they oversaw the destruction of Liberation Theology in Latin America, the continued undermining of Italian democracy, and the dispensing of black funds for Solidarity in Poland. Ah, but how the best laid plans do oft go astray. By the spring of 1981 not only were events spinning out of control for Gladio itself, but so too were they for Banco Ambrosiano, and by extension, the IOR. The Pope, inexplicably, refused to act.

Compounding this lapse was an unaccountable trifecta of moral turpitude that witnessed the Holy Father suddenly breaking into treasonous song singing the benefits of rapprochement with the Soviets; recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization; and, egads, nuclear disarmament. The order from on high was given: Kill the Pope'.

But best blame it on the Soviets. So issued the Bulgarian Thesis' wherein a lowly Bulgarian airline employee (Sergei Antonov) was set up as the patsy. In truth, the key actors in the Papal plot came straight from Gladio central casting. The starring role in the drama fell to General Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italy's military intelligence (SISMI) and the commander of the Italian Gladio units. His co-star, Theodore Shackley, was the infamous CIA mastermind who had already served as executive producer on such epics as Operation Phoenix (involving the murder of some 40,000 non-combatants in Vietnam), Operation Condor, the setting up of Nugan Hand Bank, and, along with delle Chiaie, the murder of Salvador Allende. West Germany's BND (the national security services) garnered a significant credit by harbouring and financing the two actual assassins, Mehmet Agca and Abdullah Cath (both from Turkish Gladio). And, of course, the Mighty Wurlitzer, i.e. Operation Mockingbird, figured prominently in the aftermath grinding out endless tunes on the Bulgarian Thesis' despite the fact of Agca's eventual (lone) conviction in the shooting.

The production ended all somewhat anticlimactically when the Pope (on May 13, 1981) was only seriously wounded. In a fascinating denouement, however, on Christmas Day 1983, the Pope opted to publicly forgive Agca. Italian state television was allowed to record the moment when John Paul asked his assassin from whom he had received his orders. Leaning forward to hear Agca's response the Pope appeared momentarily frozen, then clasped his hands to his face.
Though the Pontiff kept it secret, there was little need to guess at the answer.

The adventures of both Agca and Cath are the stuff of legend. Indeed, Cath figures in events well beyond the time line of Gladio proper, enough to suggest that Gladio never really shut down at all. But that, as they say, is a whole other story and one I leave to the author to take up.
* * *
Paul Williams has made a fine contribution here. Certainly, if the day ever comes when, seated across from some smug establishment interlocutor, you are taken to task for being a conspiracy monger' well, you need only lean back, smile gently, and utter but two words….'Operation Gladio'.]]> Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia: Overview of the book by Paul L. Williams

by Antony C. Black

On the hot summer morning of Aug. 2, 1980 a massive explosion ripped apart the main waiting room of the Bologna railway station. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more injured. Though at first blamed on Italy's legendary urban guerrillas, The Red Brigades, it soon emerged that the attack had, in fact, originated from within the deep state' of the Italian government itself.

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The full nature of this secret parallel state would only come to light a decade later when the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti, under questioning from a special commission of inquiry, revealed the existence of arms caches stashed all around the country and which were at the disposal of an organization which later came to be identified as Gladio'.

The members of this group turned out to include not only hundreds of far-right figures in the intelligence, military, government, media, Church and corporate sectors, but a motley assortment of unreconstructed WW2 fascists, psychopaths and criminal underworld types to boot. And despite Andreotti's attempts to airbrush the group as patriots' it appeared evident to much of the rest of the Italian polity that these seemed rather more like pretty bad folk indeed. Little did they know. Follow-up research by the likes of Daniele Ganser, Claudio Celani, Jurgen Roth and Henrik Kruger traced connections to similar groups spread throughout Europe of which all were found to be deep state terrorist organizations, and all of which were found, ultimately, to be subservient unto the highest levels of the CIA and NATO command structures.

The moniker Gladio' (after the two-edged sword used in classical Rome) was eventually broadened to include a bewildering host of related deep state terrorist structures including: P2' In Italy, P26' in Switzerland, Sveaborg' in Sweden, Counter-Guerrilla' in Turkey and Sheepskin' in Greece. This (hardly definitive) European list was then found to have connections not only to virtually every US sponsored secret state terrorist organization the world over (including the likes of Operation Condor in Latin America), but also to many of the global drug cartels that provided the secretive wealth needed to fund and otherwise lubricate the whole rotting, corrupt shebang.

If all this sounds sinister enough, it pales in light of the detailed structure of the dazzlingly diabolical Gladio edifice. And it is to those details we now repair vis a vis an overview of the remarkable, if otherwise unheralded, 2015 work by journalist Paul L. Williams entitled, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia'. Though there are other books on the subject worthy of honourable mention (including Daniele Ganser's seminal tome, NATO's Secret Armies', and Richard Cottrell's recent and stylishly written, Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe'), it is to Williams that I believe we owe a particular debt of gratitude in having provided a more or less fully integrated portrait of the global machinations of Operation Gladio.

Before embarking on our grim, if yet fascinating, journey it is worth first noting that whilst Gladio' was officially acknowledged and condemned by the European Parliament (in Nov., 1990; Washington and NATO having ever after refused comment' on the matter), and its multifarious organs and factions ordered dismantled, it is hardly likely that the latter was ever fully enacted. The historical context of Gladio', then, is really the quintessential backdrop to understanding the trademark false flag events of the modern era.

OF SPOOKS AND MADE MEN

The general origins of this labyrinthine network of deep state actors lay in the so-called stay-behind-armies' set up at the end of WW2 by the Allied powers (principally the US) ostensibly to act as resistance forces should the Soviets ever decide to invade Europe. Quickly, however, the raison d'etre of the armies' transmogrified into a mission to counteract, not external invasion, but internal subversion'. Such would eventually result in the undermining not just of post-war European socialism, but of Italian, Greek and later global democracy itself.

But we get ahead of ourselves.

The primal author of the stay-behind-armies', Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had "concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics" ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as werewolves'.

Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William Wild Bill' Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources.

The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles, the first president (in 1927) of the Council on Foreign Relations, and later the first head of the CIA. Duly incorporated into the American fold, the werewolves' were, given that their initial meddling took place in Italy, rebranded as gladiators'. Operation Gladio was born.

In 1947 the CIA (having, that year, superseded the OSS) was faced with its first daunting task, i.e. how to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from forming the next government. Elections were scheduled for 1948 and the PCI was a virtual shoe-in not just in Italy proper, but in Sicily as well. Fortunately, Gladio' was ready and waiting. The gladiators had been training in a special camp set up in Sardinia under the local command of the former WW2 Italian fascist leader, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese.

In addition, hundreds of American mafioso began to arrive on the shores of Italy to lend a hand with the communist problem'. The arrival of the made men' was the result of Donovan's efforts from 1943 onward in working with American mobsters Charles Lucky' Luciano and Vito Genovese to conger new (drug) funding for the OSS's off-books' operations, and to reinstall the Sicilian mafia on the island in the leadup to Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily). These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power.

Still, the threat remained. Fully half the Italian electorate were communist sympathizers and, moreover, leftist politics pervaded much of the rest of the diseased European body. More would have to be done. The problem, however, was money. There simply wasn't enough of it. Thus, the initial $200 million in funding for Gladio (which had come from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations) was quickly exhausted. And though the National Security Act of 1947 had provided the loophole that allowed for the CIA's covert operations, it had not allowed for their overt Congressional funding. There lay the rub. Thankfully, Paul Helliwell knew how to salve the itch.

Paul Helliwell was an inner member of the original OSS (along with key scions of the Morgan, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, DuPont and Ryan families) and, according to Williams, likely the greatest unsung hero of the nicknamed Oh-So-Social' club. It was he, who having cut his teeth in the drugs-for-arms trade by shepherding opium deals with the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese National Army fighting against Mao Zedung), conjured the brilliant inspiration to do the very same thing in the United States itself.

Thus, it was at his suggestion that Donovan elected to forge the deep bond (and that exists to this day) between the nation's intelligence services and organized crime. Enter stage left such notables as Lucky' Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and the Trafficante and Gambino crime clans. Quickly the streets of, first, New York, and later many an American metropolis, were flooded with heroin. These early, halcyon days would soon lead to the infamous French Connection', thence to the Golden Triangle' (where the CIA's very own Air America' transported drugs out of South East Asia during the Vietnam War) and, later, to the Balkan, Mexican, and Colombian drug cartels.

All very well and good. But, to begin with, there was yet a fly in the whole drugs-for-arms-for-terror ointment. To wit: how to pay off the mafioso without anyone noticing; indeed, how to stash, launder and hide all of this financial derring-do from the prying eyes of the authorities; you know, the real-enough authorities, the Treasury cops and so forth. How do you do that?

THE VATICAN CONNECTION

Article 2 of the Lateran Treaty of 1929 was clear and unequivocal. The Article, which served to regulate matters between the Holy See and the Italian state, expressly forbade any interference of the latter in the affairs of the former. It is hardly conceivable, of course, that the framers of the Treaty ever foresaw what such immunity could actually mean in practice. But then they probably hadn't reckoned on the fiendish formation of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), or more colloquially, the Vatican Bank.

Established by Pope Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara in 1942, the Bank would quickly come to serve as the principal repository post-war both for the Sicilian Mafia and for the OSS/CIA wherein all of the monies and documents relating to drug trafficking and to Gladio would be stored and laundered. Already in 1945 the pope had held private audiences with Donovan to discuss the implementation of Gladio and where, as Williams reports, Donovan was knighted as an anti-Communist crusader with the Grand Cross of the Order of Sylvester. Prior to this time Pius XII had proven himself a loyal ally in working with Dulles and the OSS to establish the ratlines used to help prominent Nazis escape Europe. Now, new horizons beckoned. The first duty at hand, of course, was to destroy the communist menace in respect of the 1948 elections. To this end the pope authorized his own terror squads (under Monsignor Bicchierai) to assist the gladiators and the made men' in intimidating the Italian electorate. Task accomplished.

The second duty at hand, however, was longer term. Communism, socialism and, indeed, any Godless form of progressive government, anywhere, had to be stamped out at source. For this money would be needed. Lots of money. Untraceable money. Drug money. Now in the months before the 1948 election the CIA deposited some $65 million into the Vatican Bank. The source of these monies came from heroin produced by the Italian pharmaceutical giant, Schiaparelli, and which was then transported by the Sicilian mob into Cuba where it was cut and then distributed to New Orleans, Miami and New York by the Santo Trafficante family. Lucrative though this trade was, it was not nearly enough to suit the needs of the CIA and Gladio'. More would be required. More drug networks and more banks. Gladio was about to global.

To start with a new alliance was forged with the Corsican mafia. Unlike the Sicilian mob, the Corsicans had extensive experience in processing heroin, a skill they had picked up through years of working with Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese technicians in French Indochina. A supply route then emerged running from Burma through Turkey to Beirut and thence to Marseille. Alas, there was a slight hitch when the leftist dockworkers in Marseille, being sympathetic to the rebel army under Ho Chi Minh, refused to load and unload the boats from Indochina. No worries. A deft bit of terror administered by the Corsican boys (and funded by the CIA), and problem solved. By 1951, then, Marseille had become the center of the Western heroin industry. Voila, the French Connection'.

Meanwhile, Wild Bill Donovan had resigned' from the CIA to form the World Commerce Corporation (WCC) whose primary function was to facilitate the arms-for-drugs deals with the KMT. Paul Helliwell lent a needed hand at the helm by heading up Sea Supply, Inc., a CIA front company gainfully employed in shipping heroin from Bangkok. By 1958 the whole operation was so successful that a second supply route was established running through Saigon. Here, the help of Ngo Dinh Diem, the US installed despot of South Vietnam, proved invaluable.

Still, there was a potential cloud on the horizon, i.e. word of all these shenanigans was bound to leak out. What to do? The first reflex, naturally, was to pin the blame for the West's growing heroin problem on the Communist Chinese under Mao Zedung. Check. The second, more considered response, was to organize an ongoing campaign to deflect attention away from, and burnish the image of, the CIA. And to this end, in 1953, did the CIA establish Operation Mockingbird'. Under Mockingbird' the Agency recruited hundreds of American journalists to spread false stories and propaganda about the Company's benign' activities. Eventually, this depraved fabric of anti-journalism enlisted entire news networks including ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and The Saturday Evening Post. Now the guys and gals at Langley could relax. Henceforth, American (and global) eyes were dutifully prismed through the rose-coloured lens of Mockingbird'.

But back to the Vatican. The IOR, solid banking pillar of the Gladio community that it was, could hardly be expected to do all the heavy lifting itself. After all, the global heroin industry would, by 1980, be pulling in a cool $400 billion annually. En route an extensive and orchestrated financial network would be required to supplement God's Bank. As with any fine orchestra it helps to have a maestro of exquisite genius to run the show. A nice round of applause, then, for one Michele Sindona. The biography of Sindona begins, humbly enough, with his degree in tax law from the University of Messina in 1942 after which, in quick succession, he rockets to stardom as a leading financial adviser to the Sicilian mafia, an agent for the CIA, and, thereafter, a financial intimate of the Holy See. By the late 1950s Sindona had become the lynchpin in a nexus between the mob, the CIA and the Vatican that would eventually, as Williams chillingly puts it, "result in the toppling of governments, wholesale slaughter and financial devastation."

Though a full elaboration of this bewilderingly complex financial system is best left to the author, it is worth briefly savouring a few highlights. To begin with Sindona purchased Fasco AG, a Liechtenstein holding company and through which he purchased his first bank the Banca Privata Finanziaria (BPF). The BPF then became, by way of a Chicago-based intermediary bank, Continental Illinois, a principal conduit for transferring drug money from the IOR for the purposes of Gladio. In fact, it was this banking pipeline in particular which provided the filthy lucre that fueled the 1967 coup d'etat in Greece. But more on this heady stuff in a bit.

It was through his Chicago contacts that Sindona first met Monsignor Paul Marcinkus, popularly known as the Gorilla'. The Gorilla was six foot four, "a gifted street fighter…and a lover of bourbon, fine cigars and young women". Under Sindona's patronage Marcinkus would soon rise to become both Pope Paul VI's personal body guard and the head of the IOR. A third musketeer in the person of Roberto Calvi (the assistant and later full director of the famous, Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano) came to complete the three Vatican amigos. Together they would cut a dramatic, collective figure in the global banking underworld all through the anni di Piombo' (the Gladio years of lead' in Italy from 1969 to 1987). Exactly how dramatic is illustrated, par excellence, by Calvi's eventual dark demise. Who among us, old enough to remember, can forget the macabre spectacle (June, 1982) of Calvi's body hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, his feet dangling in the Thames and pockets stuffed with five masonry bricks. Sindona would also later be murdered (1986) by means of a cyanide-laced cup of coffee whilst in jail and under maximum protective custody'.

Calvi was a key figure in establishing a series of eight shell companies (six in Panama, two in Europe) through which drug lords like Pablo Escobar in South America were encouraged to deposit their ill-gotten loot. (The CIA put shoulder to wheel by helping ferry the Escobar cocaine in a fleet of planes operating out of Scranton airport in Pennsylvania). The monies were then transferred via Banco Ambrosiano to the IOR which took a 15 to 20 percent processing fee. From there funds were distributed to a host of European banks set up by Sindona for use by Gladio units spread throughout the continent. In addition to the flow of cash from the cartels, funds were bled from Banco Ambrosiano into the eight shell companies again for use by the CIA in funding its covert operations.

This points up a general operating procedure of the entire Gladio banking' system, i.e. the system, far from being designed to turn a profit, was expressly designed to lose' money; that is, to have it siphoned off into covert ops. Such explains the regular and spectacular failure of a host of CIA-related banks including: Franklin National Bank (purchased by Sindona), Castle Bank & Trust, Mercantile Bank & Trust (both set up by the ubiquitous Paul Helliwell), Nugan Hand Bank (in Australia, and from which funds were diverted to undermine Prime Minister Gough Whitlam during the Vietnam War), and the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (based in Karachi in aid, primarily, of the Southeast Asian heroin trade). Indeed, it was precisely the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano itself that brought both Calvi and Sindona to their untimely ends.

Finally, it is worth noting here that these august institutions were linked in a tight criminal embrace with many of the most prestigious financial firms in America including Citibank, the Bank of New York, and the Bank of Boston. The base of the iceberg, in short, extended far and wide. But then, what was all this money really doing?

THE TERROR

Following the thwarting of Italian democracy in 1948 the Gladio secret armies' entered into a period of what one might characterize as pregnant incubation. Thus, it was during the 1950s that the various drug supply routes and financial networks were being created, as were some of the principal political organizations. Probably the most important of the latter was Propaganda Due' otherwise known as P2'.

Created in 1877 as a Freemasonry lodge for the Piedmont nobility, it was banned by Mussolini in 1924 only to be resurrected post-war with the approval of Allen Dulles, himself a thirty-third degree Mason. The lodge, though at first dominated mainly by spooks, spies, military and mafia figures, would soon encompass a who's who of Italian political, corporate, banking and media supremos to boot. Indeed, the organization would eventually spread shoots throughout Europe as well as North and South America, and its members would come to include such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig.

A P2' denizen of especial significance was Licio Gelli. The latter's pedigree was impressive: a former volunteer in the 735th Black Shirts Battalion, a former member of the elite SS Division under Field Marshall Goering and, thereafter, a chummy employee of the US Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army. Working with William Colby, the OSS agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the OSS director, Gelli soon gained entry to the Vatican where he helped set up the Nazi escape routes to Argentina. His ties with Argentina would later prove critical in facilitating Operation Condor (the US-backed mass assassination program in 1970s and 80s South America). Moreover, in 1972, Gelli would emerge as P2's supreme Worshipful Master' under whose leadership the lodge would reach its full, horrific flowering. Finally, it is worth mentioning at this juncture that it was as a result of a police raid on Gelli's villa in 1981 that the full, tentacled structure of Gladio would come to light. But we digress.

One of the first substantive actions of Gladio was the Turkish coup of 1960. Here the incumbent Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, made the fatal mistake of believing he was really in charge and thereafter initiating a visit to Moscow to secure economic aid. The stay-behind-army' in Turkey known as Counter-Guerilla, in alliance with the Turkish military, quickly disabused him of any such delusions by arresting and executing him. Throughout the 1970s both Counter-Guerilla and its youth wing, the Grey Wolves, would stage "ongoing terror attacks…that resulted in the deaths of over five thousand students, teachers, trade union leaders, booksellers and politicians".

Counter-Guerilla would also figure in the Turkish coup of 1980 when its commander, General Kenan Evren, toppled the moderate government of Bulent Ecevit. According to Williams, US President Jimmy Carter phoned in his approval to the CIA station-chief in Ankara, Paul Henze, with a jubilant, Your boys have done it!' What they had done, of course, was set up a tyranny in which thousands more would be tortured while incarcerated. The Turkish Gladio boys would also be unleashed in the 1980s upon the PKK the Kurdistan Workers Party. All of this was in keeping with Zbigniew Brzezinski's (Carter's national security advisor) core vision of the importance of controlling Central Asia to which Turkey was both a vital portal and, thus, a key NATO ally.

Alas, Gladio would prove something of a disappointment in France, where, after having backed a series of assassination attempts against the regrettably too independent President Charles de Gaulle, it found itself on the receiving end of de Gaulle's boot. Actually, it was NATO itself at the time, headquartered in Paris that was unceremoniously kicked out of France (in 1966, whence it took up its present cozy and famously corrupt abode in Brussels). But, of course, de Gaulle was ahead of the curve and understood all too well who was really behind the mayhem and murder.

Greece, unfortunately, did not fare as well. In 1967 the Hellenic Raiding Force', a franchise of Gladio and playing to a NATO authored script entitled Operation Prometheus, overthrew the left-leaning government of George Papandreou. The ensuing military dictatorship would last until 1974 though this would hardly signal the end of Greece's tribulations. From 1980 until near the turn of the millennium, the nation would suffer under a reign of terror and political assassinations nominally attributed to November 17', an alleged Marxist revolutionary group, but which in fact (and here I briefly tag-team with authors Cottrell and Ganser) was yet another faction of Greek-Gladio known as Sheepskin'.

This illustrates a point originally brought home by Ganser's research to the effect that virtually every alleged leftist revolutionary' group said to have been operating in Europe throughout the post-war years was, in truth, either a Gladio secret army' unit or else had been completely infiltrated by state intelligence services, and was subsequently being steered by them for Gladio-style state-terrorist ends.

Such is well documented for the Red Brigades' in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof Gang' in Germany (the gang' being conveniently and cold-bloodedly exterminated on the night of the long knives', Oct.18, 1977, whilst under custody in Stammheim prison). It also, just by the by, speaks to the universally attested prior association of many a modern-day terrorist' and their police and intelligence handlers.

In Spain, during the early 70s, Stefano delle Chiaie and fellow Gladio agents from Italy provided their consulting expertise to General Francisco Franco's secret police who conducted over a thousand violent acts and some fifty murders. Following Franco's death in 1975, delle Chiaie moved to Chile to lend a fatherly hand in helping the CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet set up his death squads. In later years the Spanish Gladio unit would find gainful employment hunting down and assassinating the leaders of the Basque separatist movement.

Of Italy we have already mentioned the years of lead', but just to capture a few highlights. The strategy of tension' unleashed in 1969 in Italy the same year Condor' was unleashed in Latin America was in response to the renewed popularity of Communism throughout the country and which, itself, was partly in response to the uptick in revolutionary sentiment globally as a result of antipathy towards the US war on Vietnam. The antidote, naturally, to this woeful state of progressive affairs was a healthy dose of terror. According to Williams, "Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, issued orders to Licio Gelli through his deputy, General Alexander Haig, for the implementation of terror attacks and coup attempts." The terror attacks began on December 12, 1969 when a bomb exploded in the crowded lobby of a bank in Milan's Piazza Fontana in which seventeen people were killed and eighty-eight injured. Over the ensuing years (from 1969 to 1987) there followed more than 14,000 acts of violence with a political motivation'. The most infamous of these was, of course, the Bologna bombing in August of 1980 and which led to the initial exposure of Gladio in Italy.

Of the many attempted coups and related high-level political machinations engineered by Gladio forces in Italy (1963, 1970, 1976) and Sicily (more or less continually on tap throughout the decade), the kidnapping on March 16, 1978 and murder a month or so later of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was likely the most sensational. Moro had dared to include communists in his new coalition government. At first blamed on the usual suspects, i.e. the Red Brigades, further investigation (to begin with by journalist Carmine Mino' Pecorelli who paid with his life) led to the real usual suspects including CIA operative Mario Moretti (eventually convicted of the killing) and thence up the line to Gelli, then to Italy's interior minister Francesco Cossiga and onwards to Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The high-level intrigue did not stop at the murder of a prime minister however. At least two Popes felt the sharp end of the Gladio sword as well. In August of 1978, Pope Paul VI died. His successor, the preternaturally timid John Paul I, soon gave his handlers a very real shock when, after looking at the IOR accounts, he issued a call for reform'. The very next day the otherwise fastidiously health-conscious pontiff in office barely a month was dead. Not just dead but expired with the telltale bulging eyes and horrific grimace of acute poisoning. His autopsy was definitively thwarted by an illegal and hastily contrived embalming, and his personal papers disappeared without a trace. Archbishop Marcinkus, having been temporarily removed prior, was returned to office whilst Calvi and Sindona, also under scrutiny at the time, breathed a (temporary) sigh of relief.

Having been (almost) burned once the overseers of Gladio made sure to engineer the follow-up Papal succession. Thus did Cardinal Karol Wojtyla shuffle onto the historical proscenium as Pope John Paul II. Now, at first, John Paul worked seamlessly with the CIA and Gladio. Together they oversaw the destruction of Liberation Theology in Latin America, the continued undermining of Italian democracy, and the dispensing of black funds for Solidarity in Poland. Ah, but how the best laid plans do oft go astray. By the spring of 1981 not only were events spinning out of control for Gladio itself, but so too were they for Banco Ambrosiano, and by extension, the IOR. The Pope, inexplicably, refused to act.

Compounding this lapse was an unaccountable trifecta of moral turpitude that witnessed the Holy Father suddenly breaking into treasonous song singing the benefits of rapprochement with the Soviets; recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization; and, egads, nuclear disarmament. The order from on high was given: Kill the Pope'.

But best blame it on the Soviets. So issued the Bulgarian Thesis' wherein a lowly Bulgarian airline employee (Sergei Antonov) was set up as the patsy. In truth, the key actors in the Papal plot came straight from Gladio central casting. The starring role in the drama fell to General Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italy's military intelligence (SISMI) and the commander of the Italian Gladio units. His co-star, Theodore Shackley, was the infamous CIA mastermind who had already served as executive producer on such epics as Operation Phoenix (involving the murder of some 40,000 non-combatants in Vietnam), Operation Condor, the setting up of Nugan Hand Bank, and, along with delle Chiaie, the murder of Salvador Allende. West Germany's BND (the national security services) garnered a significant credit by harbouring and financing the two actual assassins, Mehmet Agca and Abdullah Cath (both from Turkish Gladio). And, of course, the Mighty Wurlitzer, i.e. Operation Mockingbird, figured prominently in the aftermath grinding out endless tunes on the Bulgarian Thesis' despite the fact of Agca's eventual (lone) conviction in the shooting.

The production ended all somewhat anticlimactically when the Pope (on May 13, 1981) was only seriously wounded. In a fascinating denouement, however, on Christmas Day 1983, the Pope opted to publicly forgive Agca. Italian state television was allowed to record the moment when John Paul asked his assassin from whom he had received his orders. Leaning forward to hear Agca's response the Pope appeared momentarily frozen, then clasped his hands to his face.
Though the Pontiff kept it secret, there was little need to guess at the answer.

The adventures of both Agca and Cath are the stuff of legend. Indeed, Cath figures in events well beyond the time line of Gladio proper, enough to suggest that Gladio never really shut down at all. But that, as they say, is a whole other story and one I leave to the author to take up.
* * *
Paul Williams has made a fine contribution here. Certainly, if the day ever comes when, seated across from some smug establishment interlocutor, you are taken to task for being a conspiracy monger' well, you need only lean back, smile gently, and utter but two words….'Operation Gladio'.]]> <![CDATA[USS Liberty and how LBJ committed Treason and almost started WWIII]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15989 Wed, 26 Dec 2018 07:33:41 +0000 Peter Lemkin]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15989 [Image: Masthead1.jpg] [Image: Screen-Shot-2018-09-10-at-8.47.52-PM.png]

Review of "Blood in the Water", by Eileen Fleming, Arab Daily News

"Blood in the Water" by Joan Mellen Ends the USS LIBERTY Cover-Up

"Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty" details the USA-Israeli collusion of the attack on the USS LIBERTY during the Six-Day War and is the definitive work to end the over fifty-year long cover-up.
By Eileen Fleming
In the Synopsis of "Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty", author Joan Mellen explains:
In 2014 I was completing a book exposing dark truths about President Lyndon Johnson that had been suppressed by Johnson's official biographers whose goal in recent years was to provide cover for an official whose actions not infrequently bordered on the criminal. One day I received an email from a fellow researcher who offered a challenging question: will you be including Johnson's role in the attack on the USS Liberty? I had never heard of the USS Liberty. When I learned of the ambush of this unarmed USS Intelligence ship, and of Johnson's role in planning it and then covering it up, I was at once committed to a course that resulted in a new book, "Blood in the Water," whose subtitle is "How the US and Israel Conspired in the Ambush of the USS Liberty" devoted entirely to the events surrounding the LIBERTY. My goal was to discover who had planned the attack and what was their motive.
Temple University Professor Mellen has published 24 books and researched voraciously regarding the USS Liberty. However "none of the books or articles" she read could answer WHY Israel would attack an American ship and a few hours later admit that they had been behind the attack, but that it was an "accident."
Mellen asserts that the virtually unarmed USS Liberty was brutally attacked with the intent to send that spy "ship and everyone on it to the bottom of the sea, because the perpetrators were determined to unseat the premier of Egypt, Gamal Abel Nasser by blaming him for the attack. Nasser was highly influential among powers in the Middle East as a neutral, a thorn in the side of the U.S. and Israel. The motive was to so discredit Nasser that he would fall easily from power, leaving his adversaries to maintain political control over the region."
Mellen credits Commander David Edwin Lewis, who had been the chief intelligence officer on LIBERTY for providing "the most astonishing piece of evidence in the Liberty story: that Lyndon Johnson, defying the military code to leave no man behind, had abandoned the wounded sailors on the Liberty by cancelling the air support the Admirals had dispatched to the ship once they received an SOS: Johnson's explanation was that: he did not want to "embarrass an ally."
Mellen writes "Dave Lewis turned out to be humble, modest, brilliant, and yet at the same time forceful and determined that the truth be told about the USS Liberty. He felt personally responsible for two of the 34 who died because they had applied for retirement only for Dave to urge them to participate in one last mission, one that cost them their lives. Over the next four years, with Dave's help, I was initiated into the intricacies of Navy protocols… I figured out what had happened, and why it had to be covered up by Johnson and all the presidents who succeeded him. The planning of the attack on these young sailors by rockets, torpedoes, napalm and machine gun fire would remain a secret from history and from the American public, and even from the surviving sailors themselves."
Mellen's "Blood In The Water" begins at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, on the top floor presided over by the CIA chief of station John Hadden. Despite this American's over eleven years of research regarding the USS Liberty cover-up, I had not been aware of the deep CIA connections beginning with John Hadden who Mellon discovered' when she uncovered a memorandum of a meeting between Hadden and Meir Amit, chief of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence services.
One of Hadden's mantras was "never trust anyone" and the chapter introducing the then chief of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angelton titled "Treason At The Top" exemplifies WHY Hadden's mantra is also a warning for today. By 1954, James Jesus Angelton was the only person authorized to talk to Israeli intelligence and he began helping Israel build its atomic bomb soon thereafter.
Mellen writes that during the 1960's "Angleton handled the Israeli desk always within the Cold War anti-Soviet ideology that was his stock in trade. It was Angleton who would view Israel's instigation of the Six Day War as necessary to protect Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona from a grand Soviet design' that included a nuclear attack on the United States."
Mellen uncovered the fact that it was Angelton who "sabotaged John F. Kennedy's policy to send international inspectors to Dimona, where false walls were erected, elevators hidden, and dummy installations built to conceal evidence of the nuclear weapons program" just as nuclear whistle blower Mordechai Vanunu informed me a few weeks after his under-reported freedom of speech trial began in 2006:
As this American read Mellen's chilling historical insights, which continue to fuel USA foreign policies in the Middle East, I was reminded of George Washington's warning:
"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all…and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave…a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils."-George Washington's Farewell Address 1796
"BLOOD IN THE WATER" proves one can speak and write honestly regarding Israel without being anti-Israel or anti-Semitic; and its release after the Brett Favre furor was right on time yet recalls Pogo from the 1960's: We have seen the enemy and he is US!


[Image: Masthead1.jpg]
[Image: Screen-Shot-2018-09-10-at-8.47.52-PM.png]

Review of "Blood in the Water", by Eileen Fleming, Arab Daily News

"Blood in the Water" by Joan Mellen Ends the USS LIBERTY Cover-Up

"Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty" details the USA-Israeli collusion of the attack on the USS LIBERTY during the Six-Day War and is the definitive work to end the over fifty-year long cover-up.
By Eileen Fleming
In the Synopsis of "Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty", author Joan Mellen explains:
In 2014 I was completing a book exposing dark truths about President Lyndon Johnson that had been suppressed by Johnson's official biographers whose goal in recent years was to provide cover for an official whose actions not infrequently bordered on the criminal. One day I received an email from a fellow researcher who offered a challenging question: will you be including Johnson's role in the attack on the USS Liberty? I had never heard of the USS Liberty. When I learned of the ambush of this unarmed USS Intelligence ship, and of Johnson's role in planning it and then covering it up, I was at once committed to a course that resulted in a new book, "Blood in the Water," whose subtitle is "How the US and Israel Conspired in the Ambush of the USS Liberty" devoted entirely to the events surrounding the LIBERTY. My goal was to discover who had planned the attack and what was their motive.
Temple University Professor Mellen has published 24 books and researched voraciously regarding the USS Liberty. However "none of the books or articles" she read could answer WHY Israel would attack an American ship and a few hours later admit that they had been behind the attack, but that it was an "accident."
Mellen asserts that the virtually unarmed USS Liberty was brutally attacked with the intent to send that spy "ship and everyone on it to the bottom of the sea, because the perpetrators were determined to unseat the premier of Egypt, Gamal Abel Nasser by blaming him for the attack. Nasser was highly influential among powers in the Middle East as a neutral, a thorn in the side of the U.S. and Israel. The motive was to so discredit Nasser that he would fall easily from power, leaving his adversaries to maintain political control over the region."
Mellen credits Commander David Edwin Lewis, who had been the chief intelligence officer on LIBERTY for providing "the most astonishing piece of evidence in the Liberty story: that Lyndon Johnson, defying the military code to leave no man behind, had abandoned the wounded sailors on the Liberty by cancelling the air support the Admirals had dispatched to the ship once they received an SOS: Johnson's explanation was that: he did not want to "embarrass an ally."
Mellen writes "Dave Lewis turned out to be humble, modest, brilliant, and yet at the same time forceful and determined that the truth be told about the USS Liberty. He felt personally responsible for two of the 34 who died because they had applied for retirement only for Dave to urge them to participate in one last mission, one that cost them their lives. Over the next four years, with Dave's help, I was initiated into the intricacies of Navy protocols… I figured out what had happened, and why it had to be covered up by Johnson and all the presidents who succeeded him. The planning of the attack on these young sailors by rockets, torpedoes, napalm and machine gun fire would remain a secret from history and from the American public, and even from the surviving sailors themselves."
Mellen's "Blood In The Water" begins at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, on the top floor presided over by the CIA chief of station John Hadden. Despite this American's over eleven years of research regarding the USS Liberty cover-up, I had not been aware of the deep CIA connections beginning with John Hadden who Mellon discovered' when she uncovered a memorandum of a meeting between Hadden and Meir Amit, chief of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence services.
One of Hadden's mantras was "never trust anyone" and the chapter introducing the then chief of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angelton titled "Treason At The Top" exemplifies WHY Hadden's mantra is also a warning for today. By 1954, James Jesus Angelton was the only person authorized to talk to Israeli intelligence and he began helping Israel build its atomic bomb soon thereafter.
Mellen writes that during the 1960's "Angleton handled the Israeli desk always within the Cold War anti-Soviet ideology that was his stock in trade. It was Angleton who would view Israel's instigation of the Six Day War as necessary to protect Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona from a grand Soviet design' that included a nuclear attack on the United States."
Mellen uncovered the fact that it was Angelton who "sabotaged John F. Kennedy's policy to send international inspectors to Dimona, where false walls were erected, elevators hidden, and dummy installations built to conceal evidence of the nuclear weapons program" just as nuclear whistle blower Mordechai Vanunu informed me a few weeks after his under-reported freedom of speech trial began in 2006:
As this American read Mellen's chilling historical insights, which continue to fuel USA foreign policies in the Middle East, I was reminded of George Washington's warning:
"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all…and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave…a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils."-George Washington's Farewell Address 1796
"BLOOD IN THE WATER" proves one can speak and write honestly regarding Israel without being anti-Israel or anti-Semitic; and its release after the Brett Favre furor was right on time yet recalls Pogo from the 1960's: We have seen the enemy and he is US!

http://www.blackopradio.com/pod/black917a.mp3]]> [Image: Masthead1.jpg] [Image: Screen-Shot-2018-09-10-at-8.47.52-PM.png]

Review of "Blood in the Water", by Eileen Fleming, Arab Daily News

"Blood in the Water" by Joan Mellen Ends the USS LIBERTY Cover-Up

"Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty" details the USA-Israeli collusion of the attack on the USS LIBERTY during the Six-Day War and is the definitive work to end the over fifty-year long cover-up.
By Eileen Fleming
In the Synopsis of "Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty", author Joan Mellen explains:
In 2014 I was completing a book exposing dark truths about President Lyndon Johnson that had been suppressed by Johnson's official biographers whose goal in recent years was to provide cover for an official whose actions not infrequently bordered on the criminal. One day I received an email from a fellow researcher who offered a challenging question: will you be including Johnson's role in the attack on the USS Liberty? I had never heard of the USS Liberty. When I learned of the ambush of this unarmed USS Intelligence ship, and of Johnson's role in planning it and then covering it up, I was at once committed to a course that resulted in a new book, "Blood in the Water," whose subtitle is "How the US and Israel Conspired in the Ambush of the USS Liberty" devoted entirely to the events surrounding the LIBERTY. My goal was to discover who had planned the attack and what was their motive.
Temple University Professor Mellen has published 24 books and researched voraciously regarding the USS Liberty. However "none of the books or articles" she read could answer WHY Israel would attack an American ship and a few hours later admit that they had been behind the attack, but that it was an "accident."
Mellen asserts that the virtually unarmed USS Liberty was brutally attacked with the intent to send that spy "ship and everyone on it to the bottom of the sea, because the perpetrators were determined to unseat the premier of Egypt, Gamal Abel Nasser by blaming him for the attack. Nasser was highly influential among powers in the Middle East as a neutral, a thorn in the side of the U.S. and Israel. The motive was to so discredit Nasser that he would fall easily from power, leaving his adversaries to maintain political control over the region."
Mellen credits Commander David Edwin Lewis, who had been the chief intelligence officer on LIBERTY for providing "the most astonishing piece of evidence in the Liberty story: that Lyndon Johnson, defying the military code to leave no man behind, had abandoned the wounded sailors on the Liberty by cancelling the air support the Admirals had dispatched to the ship once they received an SOS: Johnson's explanation was that: he did not want to "embarrass an ally."
Mellen writes "Dave Lewis turned out to be humble, modest, brilliant, and yet at the same time forceful and determined that the truth be told about the USS Liberty. He felt personally responsible for two of the 34 who died because they had applied for retirement only for Dave to urge them to participate in one last mission, one that cost them their lives. Over the next four years, with Dave's help, I was initiated into the intricacies of Navy protocols… I figured out what had happened, and why it had to be covered up by Johnson and all the presidents who succeeded him. The planning of the attack on these young sailors by rockets, torpedoes, napalm and machine gun fire would remain a secret from history and from the American public, and even from the surviving sailors themselves."
Mellen's "Blood In The Water" begins at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, on the top floor presided over by the CIA chief of station John Hadden. Despite this American's over eleven years of research regarding the USS Liberty cover-up, I had not been aware of the deep CIA connections beginning with John Hadden who Mellon discovered' when she uncovered a memorandum of a meeting between Hadden and Meir Amit, chief of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence services.
One of Hadden's mantras was "never trust anyone" and the chapter introducing the then chief of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angelton titled "Treason At The Top" exemplifies WHY Hadden's mantra is also a warning for today. By 1954, James Jesus Angelton was the only person authorized to talk to Israeli intelligence and he began helping Israel build its atomic bomb soon thereafter.
Mellen writes that during the 1960's "Angleton handled the Israeli desk always within the Cold War anti-Soviet ideology that was his stock in trade. It was Angleton who would view Israel's instigation of the Six Day War as necessary to protect Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona from a grand Soviet design' that included a nuclear attack on the United States."
Mellen uncovered the fact that it was Angelton who "sabotaged John F. Kennedy's policy to send international inspectors to Dimona, where false walls were erected, elevators hidden, and dummy installations built to conceal evidence of the nuclear weapons program" just as nuclear whistle blower Mordechai Vanunu informed me a few weeks after his under-reported freedom of speech trial began in 2006:
As this American read Mellen's chilling historical insights, which continue to fuel USA foreign policies in the Middle East, I was reminded of George Washington's warning:
"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all…and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave…a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils."-George Washington's Farewell Address 1796
"BLOOD IN THE WATER" proves one can speak and write honestly regarding Israel without being anti-Israel or anti-Semitic; and its release after the Brett Favre furor was right on time yet recalls Pogo from the 1960's: We have seen the enemy and he is US!


[Image: Masthead1.jpg]
[Image: Screen-Shot-2018-09-10-at-8.47.52-PM.png]

Review of "Blood in the Water", by Eileen Fleming, Arab Daily News

"Blood in the Water" by Joan Mellen Ends the USS LIBERTY Cover-Up

"Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty" details the USA-Israeli collusion of the attack on the USS LIBERTY during the Six-Day War and is the definitive work to end the over fifty-year long cover-up.
By Eileen Fleming
In the Synopsis of "Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty", author Joan Mellen explains:
In 2014 I was completing a book exposing dark truths about President Lyndon Johnson that had been suppressed by Johnson's official biographers whose goal in recent years was to provide cover for an official whose actions not infrequently bordered on the criminal. One day I received an email from a fellow researcher who offered a challenging question: will you be including Johnson's role in the attack on the USS Liberty? I had never heard of the USS Liberty. When I learned of the ambush of this unarmed USS Intelligence ship, and of Johnson's role in planning it and then covering it up, I was at once committed to a course that resulted in a new book, "Blood in the Water," whose subtitle is "How the US and Israel Conspired in the Ambush of the USS Liberty" devoted entirely to the events surrounding the LIBERTY. My goal was to discover who had planned the attack and what was their motive.
Temple University Professor Mellen has published 24 books and researched voraciously regarding the USS Liberty. However "none of the books or articles" she read could answer WHY Israel would attack an American ship and a few hours later admit that they had been behind the attack, but that it was an "accident."
Mellen asserts that the virtually unarmed USS Liberty was brutally attacked with the intent to send that spy "ship and everyone on it to the bottom of the sea, because the perpetrators were determined to unseat the premier of Egypt, Gamal Abel Nasser by blaming him for the attack. Nasser was highly influential among powers in the Middle East as a neutral, a thorn in the side of the U.S. and Israel. The motive was to so discredit Nasser that he would fall easily from power, leaving his adversaries to maintain political control over the region."
Mellen credits Commander David Edwin Lewis, who had been the chief intelligence officer on LIBERTY for providing "the most astonishing piece of evidence in the Liberty story: that Lyndon Johnson, defying the military code to leave no man behind, had abandoned the wounded sailors on the Liberty by cancelling the air support the Admirals had dispatched to the ship once they received an SOS: Johnson's explanation was that: he did not want to "embarrass an ally."
Mellen writes "Dave Lewis turned out to be humble, modest, brilliant, and yet at the same time forceful and determined that the truth be told about the USS Liberty. He felt personally responsible for two of the 34 who died because they had applied for retirement only for Dave to urge them to participate in one last mission, one that cost them their lives. Over the next four years, with Dave's help, I was initiated into the intricacies of Navy protocols… I figured out what had happened, and why it had to be covered up by Johnson and all the presidents who succeeded him. The planning of the attack on these young sailors by rockets, torpedoes, napalm and machine gun fire would remain a secret from history and from the American public, and even from the surviving sailors themselves."
Mellen's "Blood In The Water" begins at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, on the top floor presided over by the CIA chief of station John Hadden. Despite this American's over eleven years of research regarding the USS Liberty cover-up, I had not been aware of the deep CIA connections beginning with John Hadden who Mellon discovered' when she uncovered a memorandum of a meeting between Hadden and Meir Amit, chief of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence services.
One of Hadden's mantras was "never trust anyone" and the chapter introducing the then chief of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angelton titled "Treason At The Top" exemplifies WHY Hadden's mantra is also a warning for today. By 1954, James Jesus Angelton was the only person authorized to talk to Israeli intelligence and he began helping Israel build its atomic bomb soon thereafter.
Mellen writes that during the 1960's "Angleton handled the Israeli desk always within the Cold War anti-Soviet ideology that was his stock in trade. It was Angleton who would view Israel's instigation of the Six Day War as necessary to protect Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona from a grand Soviet design' that included a nuclear attack on the United States."
Mellen uncovered the fact that it was Angelton who "sabotaged John F. Kennedy's policy to send international inspectors to Dimona, where false walls were erected, elevators hidden, and dummy installations built to conceal evidence of the nuclear weapons program" just as nuclear whistle blower Mordechai Vanunu informed me a few weeks after his under-reported freedom of speech trial began in 2006:
As this American read Mellen's chilling historical insights, which continue to fuel USA foreign policies in the Middle East, I was reminded of George Washington's warning:
"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all…and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave…a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils."-George Washington's Farewell Address 1796
"BLOOD IN THE WATER" proves one can speak and write honestly regarding Israel without being anti-Israel or anti-Semitic; and its release after the Brett Favre furor was right on time yet recalls Pogo from the 1960's: We have seen the enemy and he is US!

http://www.blackopradio.com/pod/black917a.mp3]]> <![CDATA[Anonymous document dump: Britain's Special Hybrid Warfare Op in the EU]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15975 Fri, 23 Nov 2018 14:54:21 +0000 David Guyatt]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15975 Sputnik calls a "Covert UK Special Ops on Hybrid Warfare in the EU". I thought Anonymous had disbanded however? Perhaps I'm wrong.

Quote:Anonymous Reveals Covert UK Special Ops on Hybrid Warfare in EU

Anonymous Reveals Covert UK Special Ops on Hybrid Warfare in EU


CC0


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[Image: 1070070145.jpg]







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The Anonymous statement can be viewed at: https://www.cyberguerrilla.org/blog/oper...ainst-all/

The documents can be freely downloaded at: https://www.scribd.com/document/392195906/x-Country#download

Anonymous says that the British government has to come clean about this covert operation and if they don't further more sensitive documents will be made public.

Watch this space I guess...]]> Sputnik calls a "Covert UK Special Ops on Hybrid Warfare in the EU". I thought Anonymous had disbanded however? Perhaps I'm wrong.

Quote:Anonymous Reveals Covert UK Special Ops on Hybrid Warfare in EU

Anonymous Reveals Covert UK Special Ops on Hybrid Warfare in EU


CC0


[/FONT]


[Image: 1070070137.png]



[Image: 1070070145.jpg]







[/FONT]

The Anonymous statement can be viewed at: https://www.cyberguerrilla.org/blog/oper...ainst-all/

The documents can be freely downloaded at: https://www.scribd.com/document/392195906/x-Country#download

Anonymous says that the British government has to come clean about this covert operation and if they don't further more sensitive documents will be made public.

Watch this space I guess...]]> <![CDATA[Zodiac Killer was a Member of the International White Guard]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15949 Mon, 15 Oct 2018 19:42:55 +0000 William Weston]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15949 The fiftieth anniversary of the Zodiac Killer's first acknowledged murder is coming up this December.

According to a letter read by Mae Brussell, the Zodiac Killer was not a deranged killer working alone, but a member of a group of fascist, white supremacist killers called the International White Guard. She read excerpts of the letter on her program [FONT=&amp]Dialogue Conspiracy[/FONT] of July 14, 1978. The Worldwatchers Archive has this program available for listening.

The letter itself was dated November 21, 1971, and written by a woman who wrote to a judge presiding over a trial of John Frazier, the accused murderer of the Ohta family. The letter contains interesting details. The letter writer knew who the Zodiac was and she refers to him by the name of Robert. (Brussell kept the last name confidential.) The letter writer also says that the Zodiac was present in the home of Sharon Tate along with Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian the night of the murders and that he lost his glasses there. The Zodiac had a sister who read his first message, the one that had a cryptogram. Three days after reading the message, the sister "committed suicide." The woman also says the Zodiac was involved in the slaying of the Ohta family in October 1970. I have transcribed the letter as read by Brussell on her program:

[FONT=&amp]"The Los Angeles Times of today finally had a story about the trial and murder of the Ohtas and their secretary. You asked if I was certain it was John Frazier who was with Robert ---------. They were here in Woodland Hills less than a month prior to those killings. He looked exactly like Frazier, when they were arrested, except for one thing. He also wears glasses. About the van, there were two people in the car and it was Robert who was driving it. I do not recall something in the newspaper about that at the time. [/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]I have some reason to believe that Robert was driving north just last Thursday[/FONT][FONT=&amp]. [/FONT][FONT=&amp]So if you are observant, you will see him snickering in the courtroom to see how his murders are done and taken care of. He is the man that John Frazier is trying to find at the rear of the courtroom. Does Frazier know about the organization of killers called the International White Guard? Does he fear his wife will be killed if he were to name Robert and his father as being heavy in this honorable organization of killers? [/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Robert was also identified as the Zodiac by his sister three days before her death. She had read his first message, that was partly coded. I never believed that she committed suicide any more than their brother-in-law was shot down. These two children were witnesses the night of the Tate murders. These are the kind of killers that this state has been cultivating and nurturing.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]This particular man, Robert, is 27. Sometimes he lets his beard grow. Within the past two years, I have seen him in all colors and wig lengths. I know him as Robert and also as the Zodiac. In Los Angeles he sometimes waits for me on Ventura Boulevard, driving on my way to pick up some children from school. He follows behind and then moves to the side until he is sure I recognize him. Someone must know how smart he is.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]He stays sometimes at Lake Tahoe with his older sister, who is a widow, and belongs to the Sierra Club, which is interested in the misuse of the environment.

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]This Robert, may I say, has the eyes and fingerprints that should be checked. Also I believe Dr. Ohta must have prescribed those glasses that were lost the night of the Tate murders.

A[/FONT][FONT=&amp] plea of not guilty by reason of insanity is no defense at all [/FONT][referring to Frazier][FONT=&amp], because of the horror of those murders. They should convict everyone who is brought in before the courts[/FONT]]]> The fiftieth anniversary of the Zodiac Killer's first acknowledged murder is coming up this December.

According to a letter read by Mae Brussell, the Zodiac Killer was not a deranged killer working alone, but a member of a group of fascist, white supremacist killers called the International White Guard. She read excerpts of the letter on her program [FONT=&amp]Dialogue Conspiracy[/FONT] of July 14, 1978. The Worldwatchers Archive has this program available for listening.

The letter itself was dated November 21, 1971, and written by a woman who wrote to a judge presiding over a trial of John Frazier, the accused murderer of the Ohta family. The letter contains interesting details. The letter writer knew who the Zodiac was and she refers to him by the name of Robert. (Brussell kept the last name confidential.) The letter writer also says that the Zodiac was present in the home of Sharon Tate along with Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian the night of the murders and that he lost his glasses there. The Zodiac had a sister who read his first message, the one that had a cryptogram. Three days after reading the message, the sister "committed suicide." The woman also says the Zodiac was involved in the slaying of the Ohta family in October 1970. I have transcribed the letter as read by Brussell on her program:

[FONT=&amp]"The Los Angeles Times of today finally had a story about the trial and murder of the Ohtas and their secretary. You asked if I was certain it was John Frazier who was with Robert ---------. They were here in Woodland Hills less than a month prior to those killings. He looked exactly like Frazier, when they were arrested, except for one thing. He also wears glasses. About the van, there were two people in the car and it was Robert who was driving it. I do not recall something in the newspaper about that at the time. [/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]I have some reason to believe that Robert was driving north just last Thursday[/FONT][FONT=&amp]. [/FONT][FONT=&amp]So if you are observant, you will see him snickering in the courtroom to see how his murders are done and taken care of. He is the man that John Frazier is trying to find at the rear of the courtroom. Does Frazier know about the organization of killers called the International White Guard? Does he fear his wife will be killed if he were to name Robert and his father as being heavy in this honorable organization of killers? [/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Robert was also identified as the Zodiac by his sister three days before her death. She had read his first message, that was partly coded. I never believed that she committed suicide any more than their brother-in-law was shot down. These two children were witnesses the night of the Tate murders. These are the kind of killers that this state has been cultivating and nurturing.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]This particular man, Robert, is 27. Sometimes he lets his beard grow. Within the past two years, I have seen him in all colors and wig lengths. I know him as Robert and also as the Zodiac. In Los Angeles he sometimes waits for me on Ventura Boulevard, driving on my way to pick up some children from school. He follows behind and then moves to the side until he is sure I recognize him. Someone must know how smart he is.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]He stays sometimes at Lake Tahoe with his older sister, who is a widow, and belongs to the Sierra Club, which is interested in the misuse of the environment.

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]This Robert, may I say, has the eyes and fingerprints that should be checked. Also I believe Dr. Ohta must have prescribed those glasses that were lost the night of the Tate murders.

A[/FONT][FONT=&amp] plea of not guilty by reason of insanity is no defense at all [/FONT][referring to Frazier][FONT=&amp], because of the horror of those murders. They should convict everyone who is brought in before the courts[/FONT]]]> <![CDATA[Is President Trump a false flag operation ?]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15942 Sat, 06 Oct 2018 19:33:58 +0000 Henry Rietberg]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15942 <![CDATA[Britain's new Jihadi Operation Gladio]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15937 Tue, 25 Sep 2018 13:38:15 +0000 David Guyatt]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15937
From [URL="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/09/importing-jihadi-terror-to-the-uk-cui-bono/"]Craig Murray.
[/URL]
Quote:

Importing Jihadi Terror to the UK Cui Bono? 29

25 Sep, 2018 in Uncategorized by craig
If Osama Bin Laden was not sufficient warning that decades of money, arms and other support from the Western security services does not render a jihadi a friend of the West, then the Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, should have opened British eyes forever to the danger. In collaboration with MI5, Abedi had been fighting in the ongoing proxy war for Western oil interests in Libya, before being rescued by the Royal Navy. Back home in Manchester, he carried out an attack of appalling violence against a primarily young and female target group.
So it would be very foolish indeed to rely on the fact that the jihadi logistic support and propaganda group the White Helmets is largely British government funded, to expect its members who are now, like Abedi, being brought into the UK, to behave as quiet citizens. The links ofthe White Helmets to Al-Nusra and Al-Shams and other jihadi groups are deep they chose to be evacuated to Idlib together from numerous sites. The reason there is no substantial corpus of independently filmed evidence of the White Helmets' work is that they co-operate with people who would chop off western journalists' heads on sight. In many well-attested cases, they are the same people.
In endingall funding to the White Helmets, the Dutch government did not wish to be confrontational towards the other neo-conservative governments who are funding and exploiting the propaganda from the White Helmets. Their report was therefore diplomatically phrased. Funding for the White Helmets may have "inadvertently" fallen into the hands of armed extremists, while unacceptable contact between the White Helmets and extreme jihadists was "inevitable" in the ares they operated.
Thanks to social media, there is an awareness among the UK's general population of who the White Helmets really are, that belies the solidarity of the entire political and media class in maintaining the official fiction. Even the arch government supporting Daily Telegraph inreporting the storyof White Helmets' admittance to the UK, has a majority of readers' comments pointing out the true nature of the White Helmets. (Being a Tory paper, there are naturally other comments which are simply Islamophobic).
Which is of course the irony of this. Entirely innocent British Muslims face the day to day surveillance state harassment of the Prevent programme, where Muslim students pursuing security studies are reported to the police for reading books on terrorism, and school pupils are reported for expressing opposition to the mass bombing of Libya by NATO or arms sales to Saudi Arabia. I cannot give a talk in a university about Palestine without a Prevent strategy risk assessment being formally compiled by the university authorities and approved by the police.
Yet not only has the largest terrorist attack of the last decade been committed by somebody working with MI5 and brought into the country by the Royal Navy, we are now importing jihadis with no prior connection to the UK other than receipt of British government funding.
Britain has never had largeror better-fundedsecurity services. As a major economic interestin its own right, the "security industry" has grown into a major component of the military industrial complex. Just as the arms industry requires external enemies, the security industry requires internal enemies. It is notable that many of the "foiled" terrorist plots of the last decade involved prior MI5 contact, sometimes bordering on agent provocateur operations. "Prevent" produces enemies who are not actually enemies at all.
Nobody has consciously decided to import the White Helmets to maintain the internal terrorist threat in the UK. But institutions, on analysis over time, almost always promote their institutional interest. Increasing the terrorist threat in the UK undeniably serves the economic self-interest of the security industry. Just as the promotion of war and internal tension has always benefited the arms industry and the rest of the military industrial complex. Importing the White Helmets into the UK is obviously nuts if your purpose is to minimise jihadi activity in the UK. So we have to ask, is that really the purpose?
]]>
From [URL="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/09/importing-jihadi-terror-to-the-uk-cui-bono/"]Craig Murray.
[/URL]
Quote:

Importing Jihadi Terror to the UK Cui Bono? 29

25 Sep, 2018 in Uncategorized by craig
If Osama Bin Laden was not sufficient warning that decades of money, arms and other support from the Western security services does not render a jihadi a friend of the West, then the Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, should have opened British eyes forever to the danger. In collaboration with MI5, Abedi had been fighting in the ongoing proxy war for Western oil interests in Libya, before being rescued by the Royal Navy. Back home in Manchester, he carried out an attack of appalling violence against a primarily young and female target group.
So it would be very foolish indeed to rely on the fact that the jihadi logistic support and propaganda group the White Helmets is largely British government funded, to expect its members who are now, like Abedi, being brought into the UK, to behave as quiet citizens. The links ofthe White Helmets to Al-Nusra and Al-Shams and other jihadi groups are deep they chose to be evacuated to Idlib together from numerous sites. The reason there is no substantial corpus of independently filmed evidence of the White Helmets' work is that they co-operate with people who would chop off western journalists' heads on sight. In many well-attested cases, they are the same people.
In endingall funding to the White Helmets, the Dutch government did not wish to be confrontational towards the other neo-conservative governments who are funding and exploiting the propaganda from the White Helmets. Their report was therefore diplomatically phrased. Funding for the White Helmets may have "inadvertently" fallen into the hands of armed extremists, while unacceptable contact between the White Helmets and extreme jihadists was "inevitable" in the ares they operated.
Thanks to social media, there is an awareness among the UK's general population of who the White Helmets really are, that belies the solidarity of the entire political and media class in maintaining the official fiction. Even the arch government supporting Daily Telegraph inreporting the storyof White Helmets' admittance to the UK, has a majority of readers' comments pointing out the true nature of the White Helmets. (Being a Tory paper, there are naturally other comments which are simply Islamophobic).
Which is of course the irony of this. Entirely innocent British Muslims face the day to day surveillance state harassment of the Prevent programme, where Muslim students pursuing security studies are reported to the police for reading books on terrorism, and school pupils are reported for expressing opposition to the mass bombing of Libya by NATO or arms sales to Saudi Arabia. I cannot give a talk in a university about Palestine without a Prevent strategy risk assessment being formally compiled by the university authorities and approved by the police.
Yet not only has the largest terrorist attack of the last decade been committed by somebody working with MI5 and brought into the country by the Royal Navy, we are now importing jihadis with no prior connection to the UK other than receipt of British government funding.
Britain has never had largeror better-fundedsecurity services. As a major economic interestin its own right, the "security industry" has grown into a major component of the military industrial complex. Just as the arms industry requires external enemies, the security industry requires internal enemies. It is notable that many of the "foiled" terrorist plots of the last decade involved prior MI5 contact, sometimes bordering on agent provocateur operations. "Prevent" produces enemies who are not actually enemies at all.
Nobody has consciously decided to import the White Helmets to maintain the internal terrorist threat in the UK. But institutions, on analysis over time, almost always promote their institutional interest. Increasing the terrorist threat in the UK undeniably serves the economic self-interest of the security industry. Just as the promotion of war and internal tension has always benefited the arms industry and the rest of the military industrial complex. Importing the White Helmets into the UK is obviously nuts if your purpose is to minimise jihadi activity in the UK. So we have to ask, is that really the purpose?
]]> <![CDATA[US Southcom Plan to Regime Change Venezuela Published by Latin Journalist, Stella Calloni]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15839 Fri, 18 May 2018 07:39:20 +0000 David Guyatt]]> https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/showthread.php?tid=15839 Voltaire Org has published an article written by journalist Stella Calloni, a highly regarded Latin journalist for her work on Operation Condor, that reveals that US Southcom has developed a plan named "Masterstroke" that sets out the steps to take to regime change President Nicolas Maduro. The article is accompanied by an 11 page copy of the US Southcom plan that contains the words "Top Secret" and dated 23rd February 2018.

A full copy of the purported 11 page "Masterstroke" plan can be read and downloaded HERE

Quote:

The United States "Master Stroke" against Venezuela

by Stella Calloni
Stella Calloni reveals SouthCom's secret plan to overthrow the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. This document, which we have already published, contradicts President Trump's engagements to put an end to the régime changes which have characterised US imperial policy. It demonstrates that the international image of chaos in Venezuela is entirely fabricated and is an exclusive invention of Anglo-Saxon propaganda.
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VOLTAIRE NETWORK | BUENOS AIRES (ARGENTINA) | 17 MAY 2018 [Image: ligne-rouge.gif]ESPAÑOL FRANÇAIS ITALIANO PORTUGUÊS DEUTSCH
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[Image: 201114-e0b13.jpg]Admiral Kurt Walter Tidd, Commander-in-Chief of US SouthComThe United States and their allies are preparing in silence a brutal plan to « put an end to the dictatorship » in Venezuela. This « Master Stroke », which is already well under way, will see its first instalment become operational before the next elections, and, if they are unable to eliminate President Nicolás Maduro during the offensive, which will be accompanied by the total machinery of propaganda, the medias, and certain acts of violence « for the defence of democracy», then Plan B is ready, and will implicate several countries, in order to impose a « multilateral force » for military intervention.Panama, Colombia, Brazil and Guyana will play a key role, with the support of Argentina and other « friends », under the control of the Pentagon. Neighbouring countries will provide bases for the combat forces, and direct support, including hospitals and stocks of supplies for the soldiers - everything is ready.All this is set out in an 11-page document which bears the signature of Admiral Kurt Walter Tidd, the current Commander-in-Chief of US SouthCom, but has not yet been made public [1].The document analyses the current situation and validates a war of counter-insurgency against Venezuela, supported by the paraphernalia of psychological warfare, revealing the use of persecution, harassment, belittlement, and lies used as means to get rid not only of the popular leaders, but also the People as such.The report affirms that « the Venezuelan Chavista dictatorship staggers as a result of its frequent internal problems, there is a great shortage of foodstuffs, an exhaustion of the sources of foreign currency and a rampant corruption. The international support, won with petrodollars, becomes scarcer each time and the purchasing power of its national currency is in a constant downfall ».They admit having created this situation out of whole cloth, with shocking impunity, and consider that it will not change. They justify their actions by claiming that the Venezuelan government will take new « populist » measures in order to stay in power.We may be amazed at the treatment reserved for the opposition, which is manipulated, advised and paid for by the United States, because in the report we read that « Maduro's corrupt regimen will collapse but regrettably, the divided opposing forces, legitimate defenders of democracy and the well-being of their people, do note have power enough to put an end to the Venezuelan nightmare », because of their internal quarrels, and a « corruption similar to that of their rivals; as well as the scarcity of rooting, do not grant them the opportunity to make the most of this situation and to give the necessary step to overturn the state of penury and precariousness in which the pressure group, that exercices the leftist dictatorship has submerged the country ».They consider that we are facing « unprecedented criminal action in Latin America », although the government of Venezuela has never acted against its neighbours, but rather demonstrates intense solidarity, at both the regional and international level. The US plan claims that « democracy spreads out in America, continent in which radical populism was intended to take over ». Argentina, Ecuador and Brazil are given as examples of this. « This rebirth of democracy has the support of the most valuable determinations, and the conditions in the region run in its favour. It is the time for the Unites States to prove, with concrete actions, that they are implicated in that process, where overthrowing Venezuelan Dictatorship will surely mean a continental turning point ».They are also pushing US President Donald Trump to act, on the grounds that « It is the first opportunity of the Trump Administration to bring forward its vision in reference to security and democracy. Showing its active commiment is crucial, not only for the administration, but also for the continent and the world. The time has come to act ».This implies apart from the definitive eradication of Chavism and the expulsion of his representative working to « encourage popular dissatisfaction, by increasing scarcity and rise in price » in order to make the rejection of the current dictator irreversible.If we should seek to understand the art of counter-insurgent perversion, it would suffice to read the part of the document which recommends « to besiege [President Maduro], ridicule him and to pose him as symbol of awkwardness and incompetence. To expose him as a puppet of Cuba ».The document also suggests exacerbating the divisions between certain members of the group in power, by underlining the differences in the quality of life of the population compared with that of their leaders, and making sure that these differences are amplified.The idea consists of carrying out lightning operations, in the same way that Mauricio Macri in Argentina and Michel Temer in Brazil had taken certain measures in their own countries. These two valets obey the orders of Washington, and are both corrupt, but now, by imperial grace, they are presented as « examples of transparency » - within a matter of hours, they took measures to ensure the destruction of nation states with the precision of a missile strike.The document, signed by the head of SouthCom, demands that Maduro's government be made unbearable, in order to force him to hesitate, negotiate or flee. This plan, which is intended to get rid of the alleged dictatorship of Venezuela in short notice, calls for an « increase the internal instability to a critical level, by intensifying the undercapitalization of the country, the leaking out of foreign currency and the deterioration of its monetary base, bringing about the application of new inflationnary measures ».Another objective - « fully obstructing imports, and at the same time discouraging potential foreign investors in order to make more critical the situation for the population ».We may also find in this 11-page plan « appealing to domestic alllies as well as other people inserted from abroad in the national scenario in order to generate protests, riots and insecurity, plunders, thefts, assaults and highjacking of vessels as well as other means of transportation with the intention of deserting this country in crisis through all borderlands and other possible ways, jeopardizing in such a way the National Security of neighbouring frontier nations ». It would also be useful to create « victims » and accuse the leaders for this by magnifying the dimensions of the humanitarian crisis before the eyes of the whole world - for that, it will be necessary to deal in lies, and talk of generalised corruption amongst the leaders and link the government to narco-trafficking in order to dirty its image not only on the internal level, but in the eyes of international opinion - without forgetting to « promote fatigue inside the members of the PSUV [Unified Socialist Party], inciting the annoyance and nonconformity among themselves, for them to break noisily away from the line of the Governement, for them to refuse the measures and restrictions which also affect them […] making it as weak as the opposition is. Creating frictions between the PSUV and "Somos Venezuela" ».That's not all. It is also necessary to structure « a plan to get the profuse desertion of the most qualified professionnals from the country, in order to "to leave it with no professionnals at all", which will aggravate even more the internal situation and along these lines putting the blame on of Government ».

Military interference

[Image: 201114-2-b4947.jpg]Just like in a suspense novel, the document calls for « using the army officers as an alternative for a definitive solution » and « continuing hardening the conditions inside the Armes Forces to carry out a coup d'état before concluding 2018, if the crisis does not make the dictatorship to collapse and the dictator does not decide to move aside».Considering that all of the above may not succeed, and with outright contempt for the Venezuelan opposition, the plan suggests « continuing setting fire to the common frontier with Colombia. Multiplying the traffic of fuel and other goods. The movement of paramilitaries, armed raids and drug trafficking. Provoked armed incidents with the Venezuelan frontier security forces » and besides this, to « recruit paramilitaries mainly in the campsites of refugees in Cúcuta, La Guajira and the north of Santander, areas largely populated by Colombian citizens who emigrated to Venezuela and now return, run away from the regimen to intensify the destabilizing activities in the common frontier between both countries. Making use of the empty space left by the FARC, the belligerency of the ELN and the activities in the area of the Gulf cartel ».And here is the template for the final blow - « to prepare the involvment of allied forces in support the Venezuelan army officiers or to control the internal crisis in the event they delay too much in taking the initiative. Establishing a speedy time line that prevents the Dictator to continue winning control on the international scenario. If it is necessary, act before the elections stipulated for next April ».In fact, these elections will be held on 20 May, and the United States and their associates refuse in advance to recognise the result. The crux of the matter is « to get the support of the cooperation of the allied authorities of friendly countries (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Panama and Guyana); to organise the provisionning, relief of troops, medical and logistic support from Panama. Making good use of the facilities of electronic surveillance and signals intelligence, the hospitals and its deployed endowments in Darien [in the Panamanian jungle], the quipped airdromes for the Colombian Plan, as well as the landing fields of the old-time military bases of Howard and Albrook [Pananma], as well as the one belonging to "Rio Hato" in addition, the Humanitarian Regional Center of the United Nations, designed for situations of catastrophes and humanitarian emergency, which has an aerial landing field and its own warehouse ».We are faced with the setting up of an intervention which includes « the basification of combat airplanes and choppers, armored conveyances, intelligence positions and specail military and logistics units (police, and military district attorneys and prisons) ». […] It will be necessary to « develop the military operation under international flag, patronized by the Conference of American Armies, under the protection of the OAS and the supervision, in the legal and media context, of the General Secretary, Luis Almagro». lt will also be necessary to « declare the necessity that the continental commandement be strengthened to act, using the instrument of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, in order to avoid the democratic rupture », and above all it will be necessary to « bind Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Panama to the contribution of greater number of troops, to make use of their geographic proximity and experience in operations in forest regions. Strenghtening their international condition with the presence of combat units from the United States of America and the other named countries, under the command of a Joint General Staff led by the USA ».One is astounded by the impunity in which all this is being plotted, behind the backs of the People, in absolute illegality, revealing as it does the reasons for recent US military manoeuvres at the border between Brazil and Venezuela (Brazil, Peru, Colombia), and in the South Atlantic (United States, Chile, United Kingdom, Argentina) in the case of Argentina, these plans have been progressing since October-November 2017 without the slightest authorisation of the National Congress.« Use the facilities of the Panamanian territory for the rear guard and the capacities of Argentina for the securing of the ports and the maritime positions,
[Image: puce-cebf5.gif] Lean on Brazil and Guyana to make use of the migratory situation that we intend to encourage in the border with Guyana.
[Image: puce-cebf5.gif] Coordinate the support to Colombia, Brazil, Guyana, in Aruba, Curaçao, Trinidad and Tobago, and other States, in front of the flow of Venezuelan immigrants in the event of the crisis ».It is also planned to favour international participation in this effort, as part of the multilateral operation with the contribution of states and non-governmental and international organisations, and furnish whatever is necessary in terms of logistics and intelligence it will also be necessary to « anticipate, specialy, the most vulnerable points of Aruba, Puerto Carreño, Inirida, Maicao, Barranquilla and Sincelejo in Colombia, as well as Roraima, Manaos and Boavista in Brazil ». So here we have laid out before us the map of an announced war of intervention.

Strategic Information

As far as the strategic perspective is concerned, it will be necessary to « silence the symbolic presence of Chavez-representative of unit and popular support » while pursuing the harassing of the dictator « as the only responsible, in the first place, for the prevaling crisis due to his inability to find the way out that the Venezuelans are in need of » as well as his closest executives, who will be blamed for the crisis and the impossibility of recovery.In another paragraph, the text calls for the intensification of « the denouncement toward Maduro's regimem, […] high-lighting the incompetence of the mechanisms of integration created by the regimens of Cuba and Venezuela, specialy the ALBA [Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America] and Petrocaribe ».As far as the medias are concerned, the plan drawn up by the United States calls for an increase in the broadcasting, inside the country, by local media and foreign media, of invented messages based on witness reports and publications from the country itself, making use of all means of dissemination, including the social networks, of messages « claming, though the mas media, the need to put an end to this situation because of its unsustainable essence ».In one of the last paragraphs of the document, there is mention of claiming or showing the use of violent means by the dictatorship, in order to gain international support, by using « all the capacities of the psychological war of the US ARMY ».In other words, this means setting up the same scenarios based on lies, news montages, falsified photos and videos, everything that was used during the colonial wars of the 16th century.Another question, « The United States should entirely back up the OAS, strenghtening the image of the OAS and offer multilateral institutions of the inter-American system, as instruments for the solution to regional problems. Promoting the respect of the dispatch of the UNO military force for the imposition of peace, only Nicolas Maduro's corrupt dictatorship is defeated ».
Stella Calloni
Translation
Pete Kimberley

[Image: rien.gif]" class="" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: none; width: 15px; height: 15px; background-image: url(http://www.voltairenet.org/local/cache-s...26623255); background-position: 0px 0px;"> ][Image: rien.gif] ][Image: rien.gif] &notes=Stella%20Calloni%20reveals%20SouthCom%27s%20secret%20plan%20to%20overthrow%20the%20Bolivarian%20Republic%20of%20Venezuela.%20This%20document,%20which%20we%20have%20already%20published,%20contradicts%20President%20Trump%27s%20engagements%20to%20put%20an%20end%20to%20the%20r%C3%A9gime%20changes%20which%20have%20characterised%20US%20imperial%20policy.%20It%20demonstrates%20that%20the%20international%20image%20of%20chaos%20in%20Venezuela%20is%20entirely%20fabricated%20and%20is%20an%20exclusive%20invention%20of%20Anglo-Saxon%20propaganda.][Image: rien.gif] [Image: rien.gif] ][Image: rien.gif] [Image: rien.gif]


[1] "Plan to overthrow the Venezuelan Dictatorship "Masterstroke"", by Kurt W. Tidd, Voltaire Network, 23 February 2018.


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]]> Voltaire Org has published an article written by journalist Stella Calloni, a highly regarded Latin journalist for her work on Operation Condor, that reveals that US Southcom has developed a plan named "Masterstroke" that sets out the steps to take to regime change President Nicolas Maduro. The article is accompanied by an 11 page copy of the US Southcom plan that contains the words "Top Secret" and dated 23rd February 2018.

A full copy of the purported 11 page "Masterstroke" plan can be read and downloaded HERE

Quote:

The United States "Master Stroke" against Venezuela

by Stella Calloni
Stella Calloni reveals SouthCom's secret plan to overthrow the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. This document, which we have already published, contradicts President Trump's engagements to put an end to the régime changes which have characterised US imperial policy. It demonstrates that the international image of chaos in Venezuela is entirely fabricated and is an exclusive invention of Anglo-Saxon propaganda.
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VOLTAIRE NETWORK | BUENOS AIRES (ARGENTINA) | 17 MAY 2018 [Image: ligne-rouge.gif]ESPAÑOL FRANÇAIS ITALIANO PORTUGUÊS DEUTSCH
[Image: zoom-32.png]
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[Image: 201114-e0b13.jpg]Admiral Kurt Walter Tidd, Commander-in-Chief of US SouthComThe United States and their allies are preparing in silence a brutal plan to « put an end to the dictatorship » in Venezuela. This « Master Stroke », which is already well under way, will see its first instalment become operational before the next elections, and, if they are unable to eliminate President Nicolás Maduro during the offensive, which will be accompanied by the total machinery of propaganda, the medias, and certain acts of violence « for the defence of democracy», then Plan B is ready, and will implicate several countries, in order to impose a « multilateral force » for military intervention.Panama, Colombia, Brazil and Guyana will play a key role, with the support of Argentina and other « friends », under the control of the Pentagon. Neighbouring countries will provide bases for the combat forces, and direct support, including hospitals and stocks of supplies for the soldiers - everything is ready.All this is set out in an 11-page document which bears the signature of Admiral Kurt Walter Tidd, the current Commander-in-Chief of US SouthCom, but has not yet been made public [1].The document analyses the current situation and validates a war of counter-insurgency against Venezuela, supported by the paraphernalia of psychological warfare, revealing the use of persecution, harassment, belittlement, and lies used as means to get rid not only of the popular leaders, but also the People as such.The report affirms that « the Venezuelan Chavista dictatorship staggers as a result of its frequent internal problems, there is a great shortage of foodstuffs, an exhaustion of the sources of foreign currency and a rampant corruption. The international support, won with petrodollars, becomes scarcer each time and the purchasing power of its national currency is in a constant downfall ».They admit having created this situation out of whole cloth, with shocking impunity, and consider that it will not change. They justify their actions by claiming that the Venezuelan government will take new « populist » measures in order to stay in power.We may be amazed at the treatment reserved for the opposition, which is manipulated, advised and paid for by the United States, because in the report we read that « Maduro's corrupt regimen will collapse but regrettably, the divided opposing forces, legitimate defenders of democracy and the well-being of their people, do note have power enough to put an end to the Venezuelan nightmare », because of their internal quarrels, and a « corruption similar to that of their rivals; as well as the scarcity of rooting, do not grant them the opportunity to make the most of this situation and to give the necessary step to overturn the state of penury and precariousness in which the pressure group, that exercices the leftist dictatorship has submerged the country ».They consider that we are facing « unprecedented criminal action in Latin America », although the government of Venezuela has never acted against its neighbours, but rather demonstrates intense solidarity, at both the regional and international level. The US plan claims that « democracy spreads out in America, continent in which radical populism was intended to take over ». Argentina, Ecuador and Brazil are given as examples of this. « This rebirth of democracy has the support of the most valuable determinations, and the conditions in the region run in its favour. It is the time for the Unites States to prove, with concrete actions, that they are implicated in that process, where overthrowing Venezuelan Dictatorship will surely mean a continental turning point ».They are also pushing US President Donald Trump to act, on the grounds that « It is the first opportunity of the Trump Administration to bring forward its vision in reference to security and democracy. Showing its active commiment is crucial, not only for the administration, but also for the continent and the world. The time has come to act ».This implies apart from the definitive eradication of Chavism and the expulsion of his representative working to « encourage popular dissatisfaction, by increasing scarcity and rise in price » in order to make the rejection of the current dictator irreversible.If we should seek to understand the art of counter-insurgent perversion, it would suffice to read the part of the document which recommends « to besiege [President Maduro], ridicule him and to pose him as symbol of awkwardness and incompetence. To expose him as a puppet of Cuba ».The document also suggests exacerbating the divisions between certain members of the group in power, by underlining the differences in the quality of life of the population compared with that of their leaders, and making sure that these differences are amplified.The idea consists of carrying out lightning operations, in the same way that Mauricio Macri in Argentina and Michel Temer in Brazil had taken certain measures in their own countries. These two valets obey the orders of Washington, and are both corrupt, but now, by imperial grace, they are presented as « examples of transparency » - within a matter of hours, they took measures to ensure the destruction of nation states with the precision of a missile strike.The document, signed by the head of SouthCom, demands that Maduro's government be made unbearable, in order to force him to hesitate, negotiate or flee. This plan, which is intended to get rid of the alleged dictatorship of Venezuela in short notice, calls for an « increase the internal instability to a critical level, by intensifying the undercapitalization of the country, the leaking out of foreign currency and the deterioration of its monetary base, bringing about the application of new inflationnary measures ».Another objective - « fully obstructing imports, and at the same time discouraging potential foreign investors in order to make more critical the situation for the population ».We may also find in this 11-page plan « appealing to domestic alllies as well as other people inserted from abroad in the national scenario in order to generate protests, riots and insecurity, plunders, thefts, assaults and highjacking of vessels as well as other means of transportation with the intention of deserting this country in crisis through all borderlands and other possible ways, jeopardizing in such a way the National Security of neighbouring frontier nations ». It would also be useful to create « victims » and accuse the leaders for this by magnifying the dimensions of the humanitarian crisis before the eyes of the whole world - for that, it will be necessary to deal in lies, and talk of generalised corruption amongst the leaders and link the government to narco-trafficking in order to dirty its image not only on the internal level, but in the eyes of international opinion - without forgetting to « promote fatigue inside the members of the PSUV [Unified Socialist Party], inciting the annoyance and nonconformity among themselves, for them to break noisily away from the line of the Governement, for them to refuse the measures and restrictions which also affect them […] making it as weak as the opposition is. Creating frictions between the PSUV and "Somos Venezuela" ».That's not all. It is also necessary to structure « a plan to get the profuse desertion of the most qualified professionnals from the country, in order to "to leave it with no professionnals at all", which will aggravate even more the internal situation and along these lines putting the blame on of Government ».

Military interference

[Image: 201114-2-b4947.jpg]Just like in a suspense novel, the document calls for « using the army officers as an alternative for a definitive solution » and « continuing hardening the conditions inside the Armes Forces to carry out a coup d'état before concluding 2018, if the crisis does not make the dictatorship to collapse and the dictator does not decide to move aside».Considering that all of the above may not succeed, and with outright contempt for the Venezuelan opposition, the plan suggests « continuing setting fire to the common frontier with Colombia. Multiplying the traffic of fuel and other goods. The movement of paramilitaries, armed raids and drug trafficking. Provoked armed incidents with the Venezuelan frontier security forces » and besides this, to « recruit paramilitaries mainly in the campsites of refugees in Cúcuta, La Guajira and the north of Santander, areas largely populated by Colombian citizens who emigrated to Venezuela and now return, run away from the regimen to intensify the destabilizing activities in the common frontier between both countries. Making use of the empty space left by the FARC, the belligerency of the ELN and the activities in the area of the Gulf cartel ».And here is the template for the final blow - « to prepare the involvment of allied forces in support the Venezuelan army officiers or to control the internal crisis in the event they delay too much in taking the initiative. Establishing a speedy time line that prevents the Dictator to continue winning control on the international scenario. If it is necessary, act before the elections stipulated for next April ».In fact, these elections will be held on 20 May, and the United States and their associates refuse in advance to recognise the result. The crux of the matter is « to get the support of the cooperation of the allied authorities of friendly countries (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Panama and Guyana); to organise the provisionning, relief of troops, medical and logistic support from Panama. Making good use of the facilities of electronic surveillance and signals intelligence, the hospitals and its deployed endowments in Darien [in the Panamanian jungle], the quipped airdromes for the Colombian Plan, as well as the landing fields of the old-time military bases of Howard and Albrook [Pananma], as well as the one belonging to "Rio Hato" in addition, the Humanitarian Regional Center of the United Nations, designed for situations of catastrophes and humanitarian emergency, which has an aerial landing field and its own warehouse ».We are faced with the setting up of an intervention which includes « the basification of combat airplanes and choppers, armored conveyances, intelligence positions and specail military and logistics units (police, and military district attorneys and prisons) ». […] It will be necessary to « develop the military operation under international flag, patronized by the Conference of American Armies, under the protection of the OAS and the supervision, in the legal and media context, of the General Secretary, Luis Almagro». lt will also be necessary to « declare the necessity that the continental commandement be strengthened to act, using the instrument of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, in order to avoid the democratic rupture », and above all it will be necessary to « bind Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Panama to the contribution of greater number of troops, to make use of their geographic proximity and experience in operations in forest regions. Strenghtening their international condition with the presence of combat units from the United States of America and the other named countries, under the command of a Joint General Staff led by the USA ».One is astounded by the impunity in which all this is being plotted, behind the backs of the People, in absolute illegality, revealing as it does the reasons for recent US military manoeuvres at the border between Brazil and Venezuela (Brazil, Peru, Colombia), and in the South Atlantic (United States, Chile, United Kingdom, Argentina) in the case of Argentina, these plans have been progressing since October-November 2017 without the slightest authorisation of the National Congress.« Use the facilities of the Panamanian territory for the rear guard and the capacities of Argentina for the securing of the ports and the maritime positions,
[Image: puce-cebf5.gif] Lean on Brazil and Guyana to make use of the migratory situation that we intend to encourage in the border with Guyana.
[Image: puce-cebf5.gif] Coordinate the support to Colombia, Brazil, Guyana, in Aruba, Curaçao, Trinidad and Tobago, and other States, in front of the flow of Venezuelan immigrants in the event of the crisis ».It is also planned to favour international participation in this effort, as part of the multilateral operation with the contribution of states and non-governmental and international organisations, and furnish whatever is necessary in terms of logistics and intelligence it will also be necessary to « anticipate, specialy, the most vulnerable points of Aruba, Puerto Carreño, Inirida, Maicao, Barranquilla and Sincelejo in Colombia, as well as Roraima, Manaos and Boavista in Brazil ». So here we have laid out before us the map of an announced war of intervention.

Strategic Information

As far as the strategic perspective is concerned, it will be necessary to « silence the symbolic presence of Chavez-representative of unit and popular support » while pursuing the harassing of the dictator « as the only responsible, in the first place, for the prevaling crisis due to his inability to find the way out that the Venezuelans are in need of » as well as his closest executives, who will be blamed for the crisis and the impossibility of recovery.In another paragraph, the text calls for the intensification of « the denouncement toward Maduro's regimem, […] high-lighting the incompetence of the mechanisms of integration created by the regimens of Cuba and Venezuela, specialy the ALBA [Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America] and Petrocaribe ».As far as the medias are concerned, the plan drawn up by the United States calls for an increase in the broadcasting, inside the country, by local media and foreign media, of invented messages based on witness reports and publications from the country itself, making use of all means of dissemination, including the social networks, of messages « claming, though the mas media, the need to put an end to this situation because of its unsustainable essence ».In one of the last paragraphs of the document, there is mention of claiming or showing the use of violent means by the dictatorship, in order to gain international support, by using « all the capacities of the psychological war of the US ARMY ».In other words, this means setting up the same scenarios based on lies, news montages, falsified photos and videos, everything that was used during the colonial wars of the 16th century.Another question, « The United States should entirely back up the OAS, strenghtening the image of the OAS and offer multilateral institutions of the inter-American system, as instruments for the solution to regional problems. Promoting the respect of the dispatch of the UNO military force for the imposition of peace, only Nicolas Maduro's corrupt dictatorship is defeated ».
Stella Calloni
Translation
Pete Kimberley

[Image: rien.gif]" class="" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: none; width: 15px; height: 15px; background-image: url(http://www.voltairenet.org/local/cache-s...26623255); background-position: 0px 0px;"> ][Image: rien.gif] ][Image: rien.gif] &notes=Stella%20Calloni%20reveals%20SouthCom%27s%20secret%20plan%20to%20overthrow%20the%20Bolivarian%20Republic%20of%20Venezuela.%20This%20document,%20which%20we%20have%20already%20published,%20contradicts%20President%20Trump%27s%20engagements%20to%20put%20an%20end%20to%20the%20r%C3%A9gime%20changes%20which%20have%20characterised%20US%20imperial%20policy.%20It%20demonstrates%20that%20the%20international%20image%20of%20chaos%20in%20Venezuela%20is%20entirely%20fabricated%20and%20is%20an%20exclusive%20invention%20of%20Anglo-Saxon%20propaganda.][Image: rien.gif] [Image: rien.gif] ][Image: rien.gif] [Image: rien.gif]


[1] "Plan to overthrow the Venezuelan Dictatorship "Masterstroke"", by Kurt W. Tidd, Voltaire Network, 23 February 2018.


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