Operation Dark Winter - some thoughts, and some participants

[Anthony Thorne]

Operation Dark Winter was the mock biological attack drill conducted just a short while prior to 9/11, on June 22nd and 23rd, 2001. A number of researchers have noticed various parallels between the drill and the later 9/11 attacks, and also the anthrax attacks that followed very shortly afterwards. Some of the available data makes these connections fairly obvious, and the biographies of those involved also seems to warrant some attention.

This is the script of the original Dark Winter exercise

http://www.upmchealthsecurity.org/our-wo...Script.pdf

Note there are some unpleasant images of smallpox victims inserted into the document, so avoid them if you're sensitive.

Page 3 of the script has the foresight to reference both Al-Qaida and Bin Laden.

Last month Russian authorities, with support from the FBI, arrested Yusuuf Abdul Aziiz, a known operative in Al-Qaida and a close personal friend and suspected senior lieutenant of Usama bin Laden. Yusuuf was caught in a sting operation that had been developing during the last year. He was attempting to acquire 50 kilograms of plutonium and was also attempting to arrange the purchase of several biological pathogens that had been weaponized by the Soviet Union.

And again on Page 17

Parties with capability to mount smallpox attacks include: Russia, Iraq, China, possibly N. Korea, Iran, though certainly other nations with industrial biotech base would have capability. Less likely are autonomous groups specifically Bin Laden.

On page 29, the document urges against considering any domestic element to the attack.

There is a very high probability this attack was conducted by either a state or a state-sponsored international terrorist organization. The probability that a domestic terrorist organization or individual, acting without state sponsorship, conducted this attack is virtually zero.

On Page 36, the script foresees an increase in anti-Arab sentiment.

Reports of beatings and harassment of persons of dark skin and of Arab Americans are increasing in numbers and violence. One hour ago, three teenaged youths of dark complexion were shot dead in downtown Chicago. The perpetrators and motive are unknown, but it is believed that the victims were killed because they appeared to be of mideastern descent. Two mosques have been defaced in past 24 hrs; one suffered serious fire damage.

On page 39, under the heading Smallpox shatters image of US as superpower, the report astutely notes

Americans can no longer take basic civil liberties such as freedom of assembly or travel for granted.

And on page 44, letters of warning are sent to the media.

The NY Times, Washington Post, and USA Today receive anonymous letters demanding the immediate removal (one week) of all US forces from Saudi Arabia and all war ships from the Persian Gulf. Failure to comply will result in renewed attacks on US, which will include anthrax, plague and small pox. Each letter also contained a genetic fingerprint of the smallpox strain matching the fingerprint of the strain causing the current epidemic.

During the exercise, various fake news reports were broadcast to the participants covering the crisis. Many of these have somehow been uploaded to Youtube. They make for somewhat surreal viewing.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkFPXgC-Ib0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMd4z19IJU0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hABMVGrr7VA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAkzNx3zFtQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irtlyPCZMxA


Noticing the list of those involved, I'm curious about the connections the various players might hold to the later 9/11 attacks, and to deep state activities in general. An official page on the exercise includes a list of 17 participants.

http://www.upmchealthsecurity.org/our-wo...rk-winter/

An earlier page on the event, however, includes two additional groups of people observers, and staff involved in (presumably) conducting the exercise.

https://web.archive.org/web/200110030643...pants.html

(The exercise was conducted in Washington, but the accompanying promotional graphic seems to depict a different city.)

As an exercise in occasional research, I plan to casually go through the histories of some of the people involved and see what connections pop up. (This will be done when time and outside commitments permit!)


Sam Nunn

During the exercise, the President of the United States was played by Senator Sam Nunn. In 1986, Nunn had (alongside Senator William Cohen) introduced the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act . From page 14 of the Rand Corporation document The Perfect Storm: The Goldwater-Nichols Act and Its Effect on Navy Acquisition

http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pub..._OP308.pdf

Senators Nunn and Goldwater led the effort to draft the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which was signed into law in 1986.

The Goldwater-Nichols act introduced by Nunn enabled the formation of U.S Special Operation Command (USSOCOM)

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-s...rgs/socom/

U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) was activated April 16, 1987, in response to congressional action in the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 and the Nunn-Cohen Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 1987. Congress mandated a new four-star command be activated to prepare Special Operations Forces (SOF) to carry out assigned missions and, if directed by the president or secretary of defense, to plan for and conduct special operations.

Under the headline The rise of the military's secret military', Nick Turse summarises USSOCOM as follows

Made up of units from all the service branches, SOCOM is tasked with carrying out Washington's most specialized and secret missions, including assassinations, counterterrorist raids, special reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, psychological operations, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175790/t...oes_global


USSOCOM would grow into a global network of special operations forces' conducting secretive black-op activities around the globe. From the TIME article Congress Says Special Ops Budget Too Secret'.

http://nation.time.com/2013/06/26/congre...oo-secret/

Both the House armed services and appropriations committees, as well as the Senate Armed Services Committee, are seeking more information from the military's secretive Special Operations Command, whose budget has grown markedly since 9/11. SOCOM engages in a wide variety of activities from direct actionssmall-scale offensive strikesto special reconnaissance activities to training of foreign military forces.

The U.S. government has given SOCOM lots of latitude to operate in the shadows, but it may finally be pushing the limits of what congressional overseers are willing to accept.

USSOCOM would eventually publish a monograph entitled Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare

www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA514554


The author of that report, Lt Colonel George Crawford, would be linked to a gamut of deep state Operation Condor style activities.

http://www.constantinereport.com/when-th...-to-roost/


Regardless, USSOCOM now seems to openly include Gladio-style activities within its remit.

https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...#post13798


So Nunn's support of the measures that introduced USSOCOM has borne some quite special fruit. While USSOCOM was developing in this way, Nunn would eventually make comments to TIME magazine about potential future terror attacks against the US. In his speculative scenario - offered several years before 9/11 - aircraft could be flown by remote control into buildings.

http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/wtc/in...40395.html

Three weeks ago, Georgia's Senator Sam Nunn sketched a lurid fantasy: how terrorists might wreck the central government of the U.S. On the night of a State of the Union address, when all the top officials are in the Capitol, Nunn said, a handful of fanatics could crash a radio-controlled drone aircraft into the building, "engulfing it with chemical weapons and causing tremendous death and destruction." This scenario, said Nunn, "is not far-fetched," and the technology is all readily available.

Don't quote me on this last one, but the comments by Nunn were originally printed in TIME in 1995. The original article does currently appear on the TIME site, but it has a different publication date listed - June 24th, 2001, one day after the completion of Operation Dark Winter. Was TIME advised around that period to update the page or bring it out of the archives for new readers? It's all a bit strange.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/ar...68,00.html

[Magda Hassan]

Curious. There are only 2 live smallpox virus still around and are located in the US and Russia. The Op Dark Winter articls seeks to connect Iraq, China, North Korea, Iran, and other nations with industrial biotech base (Cuba?) to the virus. How convenient.

[Drew Phipps]

There are many connections between this bunch and 9/11. Just off the top of my head:

Woolsey is a personal friend of Perle and Wolfowitz, midwives of the Pearl Harbor II scenario. Infowars said that Woolsey, who was some sort of consultant for NYFD, issued a "gag order" to prevent firemen from talking about bombs in the building.

Wisner Jr. (son of spook Wisner Sr.) served on the AIG Board of Directors and also the Kroll Associates, who had an office somewhere in Trade Center Bldg 7.

Hamre told reporters that NORAD can inject simulated material into the raw radar feed.

Larsen was called as a witness at the 9/11 Commission.


Interesting seam of information to mine.

[David Guyatt]

It strikes that Time changed the original publication date from 1995 to June 2001 for reasons more to do with concealing how long this technology had been available for. Publishing it with a date just a couple of months prior to 9/11 makes it more digestible imo. We keep seeing this sort of thing happening - a slight factual shift here, an emphasis there etc - all to muddy the waters, I think.