Tag: assassinations

HOW HENRY KISSINGER PAVED THE WAY FOR ORLANDO LETELIER’S ASSASSINATION

ON THE MORNING of September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, the former foreign minister of Chile living in exile in the United States, was driving to work in downtown Washington, D.C., when a bomb planted in his car exploded, killing him and one passenger while wounding another.

Letelier was assassinated in the heart of Washington by the brutal regime of Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, a far-right dictator who gained power in a 1973 coup backed by the Nixon administration and the CIA, overthrowing the socialist government of President Salvador Allende. Letelier served as foreign minister for Allende, and later was arrested and tortured by Pinochet. After a year in prison, Letelier was released thanks to international diplomatic pressure and eventually settled in Washington, where he was a prominent opponent of the Pinochet regime.

Even in exile, Letelier still had a target on his back. The Pinochet regime, along with the right-wing governments of Argentina and Uruguay, launched a vicious international assassination program — code-named Operation Condor — to kill dissidents living abroad, and Letelier was one of Operation Condor’s most prominent victims.

Nearly 50 years later, the full story of Letelier’s assassination, one of the most brazen acts of state-sponsored terrorism ever conducted on American soil, is still coming into focus.

Now, the 100th birthday of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, which has been marked in the press by both powerful investigations as well as puff pieces and hagiography, offers an opportunity to reexamine the Letelier assassination and the broader U.S. role in overthrowing Chile’s democratically elected government in order to impose a brutal dictatorship. It was one of the darkest chapters in Kissinger’s career and one of the most blatant abuses of power in the CIA’s long and ugly history.

Keep reading

John F Kennedy murder mystery could be solved thanks to new AI technology

AI could finally help solve the mystery of a “second shooter” in the assassination of US President John F Kennedy almost 60 years ago.

Experts believe Artificial Intelligence, combined with new advances in digital image processing, will either prove or disprove beyond all doubt whether another gunman took aim at JFK in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The fresh evidence is contained in a little-known home movie shot by local maintenance man Orville Nix, whose descendants have launched a legal bid to get it back from the US government.

His clip – unlike the famous one shot by Abraham Zapruder that has been seen by millions – was filmed from the centre of Dealey Plaza as Kennedy was hit in the head while he and wife Jackie waved at crowds from the back of his open-top limousine.

As a result, it provides the only known unobstructed view of the “grassy knoll” where conspiracy theorists have long claimed another sniper – or snipers – were concealed.

Nix’s film was last examined in 1978 by photo experts hired by the US’s House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Based in part on that analysis, the panel sensationally concluded JFK “was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy” and that “two gunmen” likely fired on him.

But the technology of the time left experts in doubt about whether the home movie actually proves this – and the original film subsequently “vanished from view”, with only imperfect copies remaining in the hands of government officials.

Keep reading

Head of RT Calls for Lindsey Graham’s Assassination After Edited Video

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham’s recent comments during his Friday meeting with the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky in the war-torn country caused outrage and fury in Moscow, with the head of RT Margarita Simonyan calling for his assassination.

In a video clip of the meeting, Graham’s comments were spliced in a way that made it seem that the Senator stated that the fact that Russians “are dying” in the invasion is “the best money we’ve ever spent.” In fact, Graham said that the U.S. aid to Ukraine—and not specifically the deaths of the Russians—was a valuable investment in global security for the United States.

“Senator [Lindsey] Graham has something to compare with. One of their [US] investments led to World War II and the Holocaust,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed in a statement on Telegram. State TV host Vladimir Solovyov followed Zakharova’s lead on his program, Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, as he angrily exclaimed: “Your dirty American money also fully supported the Nazi regime in Germany! You are a Nazi beast and you’re following in the footsteps of your predecessors. I’ll repeat it once again: you will croak, but the Russian people will live forever!”

Keep reading

Ukrainian Intelligence Says It’s Trying to Kill Putin

The Ukrainian intelligence service is making multiple attempts to kill Russian President Vladimir Putin. A high-ranking official admitted to actively plotting the Russian leader’s assassination after a recent drone attack on the Kremlin. 

“Putin is noticing that we are getting closer and closer to him,” Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, told Welt in an interview. He added, Putin is number one on the kill list “because he coordinates and decides what happens.”

The Ukrainian intelligence official claimed his agency had failed to kill Putin because he “stays holed up.” Skibitsky suggested another attempt could be made soon as the Russian leader “is now beginning to stick his head out.”  

Ukrainian officials have admitted to previously attempting to kill Putin. Last year, Kyrylo Budanov, the Head of the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, in an interview with Ukrainska Pravda claimed, “There was an attempt to assassinate Putin…[It was an] Absolutely unsuccessful attempt, but it really happened… It was about [March 2022].”

Three weeks ago, two unmanned aerial vehicles were downed over the Kremlin, where Putin keeps an office. Although, the Russian leader was not present at the complex when the attack occurred. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Moscow considered the drones to be an assassination attempt against Putin.

Kiev has denied any involvement in the attack. However, the New York Times reported on Wednesday that American officials say the attack was orchestrated by the Ukrainian government.

Keep reading

How the Murder of a CIA Officer Was Used to Silence the Agency’s Greatest Critic

ON THE NIGHT of December 23, 1975, Ron Estes, the CIA’s deputy station chief in Athens, was lounging on the couch in his girlfriend’s apartment when the man who worked as a driver for his boss, Richard Welch, burst through the front door.

“A shooting, and Mr. Welch is down,” the driver yelled.

Estes grabbed his coat and ran outside, ignoring his girlfriend’s pleas to stay.

At Welch’s house in the Greek capital, Estes saw the station chief lying on his back on the sidewalk, his wife, Kika, kneeling beside him. Blood covered Welch’s face, and Estes could see immediately that he was dead. “I didn’t need to feel for a pulse,” he said in an interview. A police car arrived, and Estes asked the officer to call an ambulance. When no ambulance arrived, they hauled the body into Welch’s car and Estes and Welch’s driver followed the police officer, siren blaring and lights flashing, through the streets of Athens to the nearest hospital. A medical team was waiting; they quickly placed Welch on a gurney and took him to an examining room. There, a doctor placed a stethoscope on Welch’s chest and confirmed to Estes that he was dead.

Welch was 46 years old. A career CIA officer, he had been the CIA’s Athens station chief for six months.

At the hospital, Welch’s driver finally caught his breath and told Estes what had happened. He had driven Welch and his wife home from a Christmas party at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, then stopped in front of the walled compound that enclosed Welch’s house to open the front gates. As Welch and his wife got out, three armed men in a black car pulled up behind them, burst out of the car, and confronted Welch.

“Put your hands up!” one of the men told Welch in Greek.

“What?” Welch asked in English.

One of the gunmen leveled his .45 caliber handgun and fired three times. An autopsy later showed that the first shot hit Welch in the chest, rupturing his aorta and killing him instantly. The three men got back in their car and sped away. That’s when Welch’s driver rushed to get Estes.

Keep reading

RFK Jr. goes public with who he thinks was involved in JFK murder, ‘cover-up’

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a bombshell claim Sunday in connection with the assassination 60 years ago of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy, who is now challenging President Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, blamed the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for the murder and “cover-up” of the tragic motorcade killing on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

During a New York City radio interview with John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM’s “Cats Roundtable,” RFK Jr. said: “There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder.

Keep reading

Former Mexican president worked for CIA

Former Mexican president Jose Lopez Portillo, who led the country from 1976 to 1982, was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset, according to a new batch of declassified documents published by the US National Archives.

Among the papers, relating to a CIA probe into the murder of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, was a memo from a meeting of CIA agents on November 29, 1976.

In the discussions, US intelligence official Bill Sturbitts informed his colleagues that “Mexico will soon have a new president, a man who has had control of Liaison for a number of years.”

Lopez Portillo was not mentioned by name in the memo, but the meeting took place just a few days before he officially assumed the presidency.

He had run for office earlier that year as the sole candidate from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled the country from 1929 to 2000. Lopez Portillo died in 2004 at the age of 83.

Keep reading

The Prankster and the Assassin

Kerry Thornley was born on April 17th, 1938 in Whittier, California, the very same conservative bastion of Orange County blandness that bestowed upon us the honorable Richard M. Nixon, who some consider the physical embodiment of the Curse of Greyface.1

In 1958 – as an apparent counterbalance to Nixon’s ascension into the office of Vice President – Thornley and his teenaged pal Greg Hill (while sipping coffee in a Whittier bowling alley) inadvertently invoked Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos and discord. In the aftermath of their caffeine-induced vision, Hill and Thornley founded the so-called spoof religion Discordianism, as well as its disorganizational branch, The Discordian Society.

Initially an in-joke between Hill and Thornley, by the late 1960s the Discordian Society began to attract a loose knit group of writers, artists and free spirits who often adopted comical Pope names. Thornley embraced the Discordian persona of Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst while Greg Hill became known as Malaclypse the Younger.

Other Discordian Popes included Playboy editors Robert Anton Wilson (Mordecai the Foul) and Robert Shea (Josh the Dill), who in tandem co-authored the counterculture classic, The Illuminatus Trilogy, with the first book in the series dedicated to none other than Hill and Thornley. Throughout Illuminatus are numerous references to Discordian memes such as The Law of Fives, The Sacred Chao, and the John Dillinger Died For You Society.

Many Discordian activities concerned pranks designed to not only poke fun at organized religion and uptight people, but also as a means of illumination through the use of surreal and irreverent humor. In recent years, the Discordian Society has grown into a worldwide underground phenomenon, although the only thing that its Popes and Momes can generally agree upon is that tried and true Discordian maxim: “We Discordians must stick apart!” For further information/confusion refer to Principia Discordia or How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her.

During Thornley’s junior year of high school in the spring of 1956, he enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves, attending boot camp that summer, then returned to high school in the fall of 1957 for his senior year. The following year he attended the University of Southern California as a journalism major, but quickly lost interest in pursuing the academic life.

A budding writer intent on traveling the world, Thornley figured the most immediate way to do so was by fulfilling his two-year active duty in the Marines. Kerry enlisted in the spring of 1959, and his first stop was El Toro Marine Base, located near Irvine, California. It was here that his life was forever altered when his path crossed that of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Keep reading

Russian Journalist Killed by Hand-Delivered Explosive in St. Petersburg Cafe

Russian journalist Vladlen Tatarsky was killed today in a St. Petersburg cafe after opening what he thought was a packaged gift, which was hand-delivered to him by a young woman and turned out to be an improvised explosive device. Tatarsky, who has reported from the front lines in contested regions of Ukraine, was at the cafe as part of a public gathering in support of the Russian war effort and was slated to address the crowd as a guest speaker.

Vladlen Tatarsky, a Russian journalist with more than half a million followers on his Telegram channel, was killed in an explosion at a St. Petersburg cafe, where he was set to speak to a crowd of Russian patriots about the ongoing war effort in Ukraine and his time spent on the front lines and elsewhere, covering the conflict.

According to eyewitnesses to the explosive attack, a young woman with blonde hair hand-delivered a package, disguised as a gift and containing a small statue, to Tatarsky. The package though was a bomb, and the explosion that followed its opening ended Tatarsky’s life, and injured sixteen other people.

“At 6:13 PM on April 2, 2023, the police received information about a blast in Universitetsjaya Embankment 25. As a result, one person was killed. It was war correspondent Vladlen Tatarsky. Sixteen people were wounded,” Russia’s Interior Ministry revealed in a statement announcing the bomb attack.

Security footage taken from the cafe shows a young woman, who is suspected to be the attack culprit, carrying a box. Russian authorities are circulating the image in an effort to hunt her down.

Keep reading

The Air Force’s Drones Can Now Recognize Faces. Uh-Oh.

The U.S. Air Force now has the capability to use facial recognition on drones that could target specific people. Special operations forces can use the drones to gather intelligence and to aid in other missions, according to a contract first spotted by New Scientist. It’s part of a growing movement to develop automated weaponry that raises legal and ethical questions.

The drone software maker, Seattle-based firm RealNetworks, claims the uncrewed craft will use artificial intelligence (AI) to fly itself and discriminate between friend and foe. The company has said that its software can also be used for rescue missions, perimeter protection, and domestic search operations.

The new Air Force drone system isn’t the only drone system to try to use facial recognition. An Israeli company is working on a drone that uses AI to help a drone find the best angles for facial recognition.

Keep reading