Tag: cia

What Did The CIA Know And When Did It Know It?

As Ukraine careens toward a political and military disaster, it is time to ask why did the CIA fail to predict this. “Wait a minute,” you might say, “How do you know the CIA did not?” Fair question. I no longer have access to classified information, but I can read the public statements of DOD and State Department officials as well as remarks by various members of Congress. At no time during the past two years — since the start of the Special Military Operation — have we heard a single discouraging word from anyone with access to CIA briefings on Ukraine’s military prospects suggesting the West embarked on a fool’s errand in trying to destroy Russia.

On the eve of the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the CIA should have provided answers to the following questions:

  1. What is the capability and condition of the Russian armed forces?
  2. What is Russia’s capability to withstand Western economic sanctions?
  3. What are the conditions that must exist that will force President Putin from office?

Here is what we know for certain. Despite repeated entreaties from Vladimir Putin to President Joe Biden and other Western leaders to provide assurances that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO, the West told Putin to screw off and continued building up Ukraine’s military. The U.S. and its NATO allies believed that Russia’s military was weak and ineffective. Western leaders also believed that Russia’s economy was vulnerable to Western economic sanctions and that an economic collapse in Russia would catapult Putin from power.

The Western plan was simple, audacious and delusional — i.e., using Ukraine as a military proxy, defeat Russia and humiliate Vladimir Putin; apply Western economic sanctions that would devastate the Russian economy and further erode support for Putin; break up the Russia Republic into 41 new countries. Sounds crazy, but take a look at what Angel Vohra wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine in April 2023:

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an independent U.S. government agency with members from the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, and departments of defense, state, and commerce, has declared that decolonizing Russia should be a “moral and strategic objective.” The Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, comprising exiled politicians and journalists from Russia, held a meeting at the European Parliament in Brussels earlier this year and is advertising three events in different American cities this month. It has even released a map of a dismembered Russia, split into 41 different countries, in a post-Putin world, assuming he loses in Ukraine and is ousted.

Western analysts are increasingly pushing the theory that Russian disintegration is coming and that the West must not only prepare to manage any possible spillover of any ensuing civil wars but also to benefit from the fracture by luring resource-rich successor nations into its ambit. They argue that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the West was blindsided and failed to fully capitalize on the momentous opportunity. It must now strategize to end the Russian threat once and for all, instead of providing an off-ramp to Putin.

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How the Government Used ‘Track F’ to Fund Censorship Tools

Officials from the National Science Foundation tried to conceal the spending of millions of taxpayer dollars on research and development for artificial intelligence tools used to censor political speech and influence the outcome of elections, according to a new congressional report.

The report looking into the National Science Foundation (NSF) is the latest addition to a growing body of evidence that critics claim shows federal officials—especially at the FBI and the CIA—are creating a “censorship-industrial complex” to monitor American public expression and suppress speech disfavored by the government.

“In the name of combatting alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election, NSF has been issuing multimillion-dollar grants to university and nonprofit research teams,” states the report by the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

“The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others.”

The report also described, based on previously unknown documents, elaborate efforts by NSF officials to cover up the true purposes of the research.

The efforts included tracking public criticism of the foundation’s work by conservative journalists and legal scholars.

The NSF also developed a media strategy “that considered blacklisting certain American media outlets because they were scrutinizing NSF’s funding of censorship and propaganda tools,” the report said.

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Secret cable: CIA orchestrated Haiti’s 2004 coup

A classified diplomatic cable obtained by The Grayzone reveals the role of a veteran CIA officer in violently overthrowing Haiti’s popular President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. 

A spectacular jailbreak in Gonaïves, Haiti in August 2002 saw a bulldozer smash through the local prison walls, allowing armed supporters of Amiot “Cubain” Métayer, a gang leader jailed weeks earlier for harassing Haitian political figures, to overrun the facility. Métayer escaped, as did 158 other prisoners. Among them were perpetrators of the April 1994 Raboteau massacre, which left dozens of Haitians dead and displaced. The victims were supporters of popular anti-imperial President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Documents released to The Grayzone under FOIA – no doubt unintentionally – reveal that the jailbreak was part of a complex US intelligence operation, aimed at undermining Aristide’s presidency. At the heart of this operation was Janice L. Elmore, a CIA operative working under cover as a Department of State “Political Officer” in the Port-au-Prince US Embassy at the time.

The breakout set in motion a violent regime change campaign, which ultimately ousted Aristide from office on February 29 2004. After being deposed and flown to South Africa, Aristide claimed to have been “kidnapped” by US forces and directly accused Washington of orchestrating the plot. His nation quickly transformed into a despotic failed state, as ruthless paramilitaries ran roughshod over the population. US Marines and later UN troops were deployed to “keep the peace,” which, in practice, meant violently cracking down on not only armed anti-coup militants but also outraged demonstrators and civilians.

In 2022, the former French ambassador to Haiti admitted that France and the US did, in fact, orchestrate the “coup,” which he acknowledged was “probably” due to Aristide’s repeated demands that Haitians be returned the $21 billion in reparations they’d forcibly paid their former slave masters in Paris since 1825. The former ambassador told the New York Times that with Aristide in exile, “it made our job easier” to undermine Haitians’ demands for a refund.

US officials have repeatedly denied any involvement in Aristide’s overthrow, claiming they only intervened afterwards to restore order. But the secret diplomatic cable obtained by The Grayzone tells a very different story.

Dispatched from the US embassy in Port-au-Prince in September 2002 by then-US Ambassador Brian Dean Curran, the file places Elmore, apparently a veteran CIA operative, in a meeting with disloyal local police officers and coup plotters in Gonaïves the night prior to the jailbreak.

The file reads as confirmation of high-level US government involvement in the 2004 coup in Haiti, and raises profound questions about American involvement in other recent regime change campaigns throughout the hemisphere.

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Obama’s CIA Asked Foreign Intel Agencies To Spy On Trump Campaign

The revelation that the U.S. intelligence community, under the Obama administration, sought the assistance of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Donald Trump’s associates before the 2016 election is a chilling reminder of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to protect its interests and challenge its adversaries. (The Five Eyes countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) This bombshell, reported by a team of independent journalists, exposes a dark chapter in American political history, where foreign intelligence services were reportedly mobilized against a presidential candidate.

The alleged operation against Trump and his associates, which predates the official start of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, is a stark example of political weaponization of intelligence. The involvement of foreign allies in surveilling American citizens under the pretext of national security raises serious questions about the integrity of our democratic processes and the autonomy of our nation’s intelligence operations.

The narrative that has been pushed for years, that the investigation into Trump’s campaign began with an Australian tip about a boastful Trump aide, now appears to be a cover for a more extensive and coordinated effort to undermine Trump. If reports are accurate, British intelligence began targeting Trump on behalf of American intelligence agencies as early as 2015, long before the official narrative claims.

The implications of this are profound. It suggests an unprecedented level of collusion between U.S. intelligence agencies and their foreign counterparts to influence the outcome of an American presidential election. The use of foreign intelligence to circumvent American laws and surveillance limitations represents a grave threat to our nation’s sovereignty and the principles of democracy.

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NY Times Plays CIA Messenger — Turn Off The Lights, The Party Is Over

I apologize on not writing about the NY Times article by  Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin, before now but my schedule did not give me the time I needed to do the subject justice. I was inundated with requests for a comment by several media outlets and did my best to accommodate those in radio and TV interviews.

The key thing you need to understand is that this article is a deliberate piece of misinformation that is intended to shape public and policymaking opinion in the United States. The following opening to the article, like all propaganda, is a mixture of fact and fantasy.

the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks.

But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.

It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different U.S. presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.

Yes, it is true that U.S. intelligence, along with NATO, supplied Ukraine with intelligence used to carry out missile strikes on Russian positions. Admitting this in the pages of the NY Times is reckless and dangerous. I am pretty sure the Russians already knew this but putting this on the record with U.S. intelligence sources is a casus belli for Russia. Can you imagine the reaction if Russian intelligence confirmed they provided intel to a group or country that attacked the U.S.? Do you think Washington would ignore that and not seek retribution? Of course not.

But the article starts with the big lie by claiming that the CIA relationship with Ukraine started in February 2022 and then piles on with these two whoppers:

Before the war, the Ukrainians proved themselves to the Americans by collecting intercepts that helped prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of a commercial jetliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The Maidan and the ensuing events in February and March 2014 involved what I believe was a joint U.S./U.K. intelligence operation to remove Ukraine’s President Yanukovich and install a pro-Western government that would be used to attack Russia. The fact of the matter is that the CIA has been dealing with Ukrainian opponents of Russia since at least 1947.

The propaganda purpose of the article is revealed by the decision of the reporters to repeat the specious claims that Russia shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17 and that Russia “meddled” in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. We have had a slew of revelations over the last two months, principally from Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, showing that it was the Clinton campaign with the help of the CIA and the FBI who meddled in the 2016 Presidential campaign in a failed effort to defeat Donald Trump. Entous and Schwirtz insert the bogus claim that Ukraine fingered the Russian officer responsible for “election interference.”

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CIA Built “12 Secret Spy Bases” In Ukraine & Waged Shadow War For Last Decade, Bombshell NYT Report Confirms

On Sunday The New York Times published an explosive and very belated full admission that US intelligence has not only been instrumental in Ukraine wartime decision-making, but has established and financed high tech command-and-control spy centers, and was doing so long prior to the Feb. 24 Russian invasion of two years ago.

Among the biggest revelations is that the program was established a decade ago and spans three different American presidents. The Times says the CIA program to modernize Ukraine’s intelligence services has “transformed” the former Soviet state and its capabilities into “Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.”

This has included the agency having secretly trained and equipped Ukrainian intelligence officers spanning back to just after the 2014 Maidan coup events, as well constructing a network of 12 secret bases along the Russian border—work which began eight years ago. These intelligence bases, from which Russian commanders’ communications can be swept up and Russian spy satellites monitored, are being used launch and track cross-border drone and missile attacks on Russian territory. 

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Recommended reading…

Get it HERE.

“A journalist’s twenty-year fascination with the Manson murders leads to “gobsmacking” (The Ringer) new revelations about the FBI’s involvement in this “kaleidoscopic” (The New York Times) reassessment of an infamous case in American history.

Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant. With no mercy and seemingly no motive, the Manson Family followed their leader’s every order — their crimes lit a flame of paranoia across the nation, spelling the end of the sixties. Manson became one of history’s most infamous criminals, his name forever attached to an era when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia — or dystopia — was just an acid trip away.

Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O’Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up behind the “official” story, including police carelessness, legal misconduct, and potential surveillance by intelligence agents. When a tense interview with Vincent Bugliosi — prosecutor of the Manson Family and author of Helter Skelter — turned a friendly source into a nemesis, O’Neill knew he was onto something. But every discovery brought more questions:

  • Who were Manson’s real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties?
  • Why didn’t law enforcement, including Manson’s own parole officer, act on their many chances to stop him?
  • And how did Manson — an illiterate ex-con — turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers?

O’Neill’s quest for the truth led him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from San Francisco’s summer of love to the shadowy sites of the CIA’s mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with shady cover-ups and suspicious coincidences. The product of two decades of reporting, hundreds of new interviews, and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, Chaos mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Steven Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. This is a book that overturns our understanding of a pivotal time in American history.”

More on the Secret Binder That Could Expose Officials in Russia Collusion Hoax

I reported earlier about the bombshell report that blew apart the “official” account of the start of the Russia collusion hoax and explained that it was started by the Obama CIA. 

The report – written by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag – details how the Obama administration CIA allegedly and improperly called on foreign allies from the “Five Eyes Nations” (the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) to surveil 26 Trump aides as “targets for collection and misinformation.” The journalists got this information from sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) investigation.

That’s big news. Shellenberger told Fox News that it was both illegal and election interference. 

Some of the information on this is in a binder, Shellenberger said. There has been a rumor about the binder and speculation that Mar-a-Lago was raided because of information that former President Donald Trump may have had on Crossfire Hurricane. 

Shellenberger is now talking about his and fellow journalist’s new report that gives more information about the secret binder. 

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Land Of Spooks And Shills And Sheeple

Trust is a rare commodity in today’s world. Maybe it always has been. I remember trusting some older males who were relatives or neighbors, as a child. Then later as an adult, I’d hear from my sister and others about how these fine upstanding men had propositioned them, or touched them inappropriately.

Moral trust is one thing. We all fail to some degree on this count, because we are all sinners. My head will probably always be turned by a good-looking female. It’s just instinctive. I remember a great comedy skit with Richard Pryor, where he was sitting in a crowd with his wife/girlfriend, who was glaring at him, upset over him checking out other women. Then his head turns again, and he tells her, “Can’t you see how strong that shit is? I know you’re gonna be mad, but I still can’t stop it!” While it bothers me when I attend a wedding where the divorced bride’s children from her first marriage are ringbearers or flower girls (mumbling to myself, “I can’t stop thinking she said ‘I do’ to someone else just five years ago’), I understand human weakness. Judge not lest ye be judged.

It’s political trust that’s on my mind. If you listen to me Saturdays at 12 noon on “America Unplugged” with Billy Ray Valentine and Tony Arterburn, you may have heard our discussion this past Saturday on Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin. It was obvious by the comments in the chat, and later on YouTube, that most people disagreed with me. I was arguing that, whatever Carlson’s real motivations, I usually agree with what he’s saying over 90 percent of the time. Yes, I’m aware that his father was the head of Voice of America, and that he once tried to get into the CIA. That he scoffed at 9//1 “truthers” and other “conspiracy theorists.” Maybe his bow tie was too tight. Is he just playing the role of mainstream “skeptic?”

I’m not accustomed to being the least skeptical person in the room about anything. I was a born skeptic. A doubter of all official narratives. But if the alt media is just going to attribute all good reporting, and sensible commentary to a hidden agenda, then what is the point of even addressing any issue? Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Rand Paul, RFK, Jr., all compromised. And oddly, they draw the attention (and ire) of many of us trying to provide an alternative to our state controlled media, far more often than the Joy Reids, Sunny Hostins, and Joe Scarboroughs do. Tucker Carlson’s father ran the Voice of America. A pretty, young female intern was found dead in Scarborough’s congressional office in 2001. Isn’t that a bit more incriminating?

Then there is the guy Carlson was interviewing- Vladimir Putin. I don’t have to trust him to agree with his purported comments (and this is assuming they’re being translated accurately) about wanting peace with America. If he really did ban all GMO products, and put out an arrest warrant for any Rothschilds strolling into Russia, isn’t that something we’d all agree with? Maybe he has an agenda, too, but why do we focus so much more on him than say, Angela Merkel or David Cameron? Carlson was blasted from all sides for how he conducted the interview. What was he supposed to ask him? He put Putin on the record. At the very least, we got to see the Russian leader’s impressive knowledge of history. Compare that to our putrid politicians.

In my book Hidden History, I delved into the background of the 1960s counterculture movement. Timothy Leary, the LSD guru who urged the impressionable hippies not to trust anyone over thirty (when he was older than thirty himself), was later outed as working for the CIA. So was Gloria Steinem, the face of “women’s lib” in the sixties and seventies. Her magazine MS was financed by the CIA. Murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton had a bodyguard who was an undercover government operative. So did Malcolm X. The guy cradling Martin Luther King’s head in his hands on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel was an undercover CIA asset. I gave lots of other examples of how undercover plants worked inside the Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan.

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How the CIA destabilises the world

There are three basic problems with the CIA: its objectives, methods, and unaccountability. Its operational objectives are whatever the CIA or the President of the United States defines to be in the U.S. interest at a given time, irrespective of international law or U.S. law. Its methods are secretive and duplicitous. Its unaccountability means that the CIA and president run foreign policy without any public scrutiny. Congress is a doormat, a sideshow.

As a recent CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, said of his time at the CIA: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

The CIA was established in 1947 as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS had performed two distinct roles in World War II, intelligence and subversion. The CIA took over both roles. On the one hand, the CIA was to provide intelligence to the US Government. On the other, the CIA was to subvert the “enemy,” that is, whomever the president or CIA defined as the enemy, using a wide range of measures: assassinations, coups, staged unrest, arming of insurgents, and other means.

It is the latter role that has proved devastating to global stability and the U.S. rule of law. It is a role that the CIA continues to pursue today. In effect, the CIA is a secret army of the U.S., capable of creating mayhem across the world with no accountability whatsoever.

When President Dwight Eisenhower decided that Africa’s rising political star, democratically elected Patrice Lumumba of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), was the “enemy,” the CIA conspired in his 1961 assassination, thus undermining the democratic hopes for Africa. He would hardly be the last African president brought down by the CIA.

In its 77-year history, the CIA has been held to serious public account just once, in 1975. In that year, Idaho Senator Frank Church led a Senate investigation that exposed the CIA’s shocking rampage of assassinations, coups, destabilisation, surveillance, and Mengele-style torture and medical “experiments.”

The expose by the Church Committee of the CIA’s shocking malfeasance has recently been chronicled in a superb book by the investigative reporter James Risen, The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy.

That single episode of oversight occurred because of a rare confluence of events.

In the year before the Church Committee, the Watergate scandal had toppled Richard Nixon and weakened the White House. As successor to Nixon, Gerald Ford was unelected, a former Congressman, and reluctant to oppose the oversight prerogatives of the Congress. The Watergate scandal, investigated by the Senate Ervin Committee, had also empowered the Senate and demonstrated the value of Senate oversight of Executive Branch abuses of power. Crucially, the CIA was newly led by Director William Colby, who wanted to clean up the CIA operations. Also, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, author of pervasive illegalities also exposed by the Church committee, had died in 1972.

In December 1974, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, then as now a great reporter with sources inside the CIA, published an account of illegal CIA intelligence operations against the U.S. antiwar movement. The Senate Majority Leader at the time, Mike Mansfield, a leader of character, then appointed Church to investigate the CIA. Church himself was a brave, honest, intelligent, independent-minded, and intrepid Senator, characteristics chronically in short supply in U.S. politics.

If only the CIA’s rogue operations had been consigned to history as a result of the crimes exposed by the Church Committee, or at the least had brought the CIA under the rule of law and public accountability. But that was not to be. The CIA has had the last laugh —or better said, has brought the world to tears—by maintaining its preeminent role in U.S. foreign policy, including overseas subversion.

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