
A few years ago…


In a recent CNN interview of US presidential candidate Cornel West, former CIA intern Anderson Cooper argued that the US invasion of Iraq was morally superior to the Russian attack on the city of Grozny.
Pushing back against West’s claim that NATO provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine and his call for ceasefire negotiations, Cooper argued that Putin was too evil and murderous to agree to stop slaughtering people.
“I mean, you saw what he did to Grozny in the nineties,” Cooper said. “I mean, he flattened that city. Civilians were trapped in that city. The world didn’t come to the rescue of Grozny. He did exactly what he wanted to do. I mean, unchecked, he will slaughter people.”
“Well, I mean, unchecked, he will slaughter folk, unchecked, what we did in Iraq was slaughtering people, unchecked,” West replied, when Cooper began frantically interrupting him.
“Nation states do that and they are wrong. And when they’re wrong, you have to point it out,” West continued while Cooper talked over him.
“Look, again, I respect you,” Cooper said. “You know I love you, but I do think it’s inappropriate to compare the Russian bombing of Grozny, and what we witnessed there with the war in Iraq. I mean, to say that innocents were killed. I mean, there’s no doubt about it. I mean, the horrible things happen-”
“Half a million Iraqis killed, my brother? Half a million,” interjected West.
“I certainly understand,” said Cooper. “I also saw a lot of Americans getting killed. And I saw, you know, the horrors of Saddam Hussein.I don’t think it’s accurate to compare the pummeling of a city by Russian artillery, with civilians inside, pummeling every single day with the intention of just destroying and flattening a city with actions the US took.”
A former CIA official has reportedly been accused of conning an aspiring operative into having sex with him under the guise of a training program to teach her how to use her body as a weapon.
Shaun Wiggins was named in the explosive new lawsuit, according to a report from the Daily Beast on Wednesday.
“A former CIA officer allegedly duped an aspiring covert operative into believing she was part of a quasi-official recruitment program for budding spies, then coerced her into repeatedly having sex with him so she could learn how to use her body ‘as a weapon,'” the Daily Beast reported. “The woman claims she was told it would replicate the purported ‘off limits’ work every CIA officer was inevitably called on to do, and that the techniques she picked up would become a valuable part of her ‘technical skillset.'”
The news report continues:
“But the ‘fabricated and extended ‘training exercise’’ did nothing to help the young cybersecurity specialist realize her dream of joining the agency, and instead groomed her for ongoing sexual abuse—ultimately landing her in a psychiatric facility, according to a bombshell lawsuit obtained by The Daily Beast.”‘
The report states that, while Wiggins is currently the co-founder and CEO of New York data analytics company Soteryx, his “corporate bio says he ‘served as a Clandestine Service Officer for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, identifying and engaging key foreign national stakeholders critical to U.S. interests.'”
The woman who is suing him has chosen to remain anonymous in the litigation.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has redesigned its website and revealed a new logo in an attempt to attract more diverse employees.
The CIA is America’s international intelligence gathering organisation, differing from the domestic-facing Federal Bureau of Investigation. Though it has a history of being male-dominated, the current CIA director is a woman and women head up all five of the agency’s branches.
CIA director Gina Haspel told Associated Press (AP) that she hopes the new website gives people a sense of the “dynamic environment that awaits them here”.
“We’ve come a long way since I applied by simply mailing a letter marked ‘CIA, Washington, D.C.’,” she added.
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr declared Monday that he believes the CIA was involved in funding the Wuhan lab where the COVID pandemic originated.
In an interview with Fox News’ Jesse Watters, Kennedy suggested that the Biden administration is not interested in punishing China for covering up the lab leak because it would expose National Institutes of Health funded bioweapons programs.
“I think the CIA was involved certainly in this research,” Kennedy proclaimed, adding “They were funding it through USAID. And NIH, I think, in the end gave about $26 million in funding to the Wuhan lab. But USAID, which was functioning as the CIA surrogate, gave over $64 million. The Pentagon also gave a lot of money.”
RFK Jr also slammed Anthony Fauci, the subject of an entire book that he was written, noting “I think he caused a lot of injury. I think that he particularly by withholding early treatment from Americans we racked up the highest death count in the world. We only have 4.2% of the globe’s population but we had 16% of the COVID deaths in this country and that was from bad policy.”
Britain’s foreign and domestic intelligence apparatus is facing scrutiny by a tribunal tasked with intelligence oversight. On May 26, London’s infamously opaque Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) unanimously issued a landmark ruling which means the complaints of two Saudis brutally tortured at CIA black sites and jailed for years in Guantanamo Bay can finally be heard, at least behind closed doors.
The British government insisted that the Tribunal, which explicitly examines wrongdoing by London’s security and intelligence agencies, did not have jurisdiction over the cases of Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Abd al-Rahim Nashiri. But the IPT disagreed.
Noting that “the underlying issues raised by this complaint are of the gravest possible kind,” the tribunal declared that “if the allegations are true, it is imperative that that should be established,” as “it would be in the public interest for these issues to be considered.”
The ruling means the Tribunal is likely to hear a complaint from Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who’s remained in US custody since American troops captured the man they claim is “a senior al-Qaida member” in 2003.
Al-Hawsawi bounced between CIA black sites for three years before being shipped to the US torture camp in illegally-occupied Guantanamo Bay in 2006. Along the way, he was subjected to brutal “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including rectal examinations conducted with “excessive force,” from which he was severely injured and reportedly suffers ongoing health problems to this day.
Lawyers for al-Hawsawi say they have proof that British intelligence agents illegally “aided, abetted, encouraged, facilitated, procured and/or conspired” with the US to torture and abuse their client.
Al-Hawsawi is one of just five remaining Guantanamo detainees to have been charged over alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
According to the declassified summary of the US Senate report into CIA torture, al-Hawsawi was one of several prisoners held and abused “despite doubts and questions surrounding their knowledge of terrorist threats and the location of senior al-Qaeda leadership.”
A 1955 memo has recently been further declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), chronicling a unique event: the sighting of a “saucer-like” craft by a former U.S. Senator while in Russia during the height of the Cold War. The declassified top-secret memo, written by Herbert Scoville Jr., then-Assistant Director, Scientific Intelligence for the CIA, provides a fascinating account of former Senator Richard B. Russell‘s encounter with unknown objects seen by multiple witnesses.
The document was released after The Black Vault filed a Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) case on January 6, 2020. The case took just over two years to review and declassify the two page memorandum, and despite the memo being released prior in redacted form in 1978, the memo has now been released, in full.
The memo is a record of an interview conducted with Senator Russell by Dr. Francis Clauser, a consultant with the Office of Scientific Intelligence, and Scoville himself, which took place on October 27, 1955. Russell’s observations are detailed and reveal a scenario that appears to remain unexplained after the Senator’s return to the United States.
“On an hour and one-half out of Baku,” the document states, “the subject [Russell] suddenly noticed a greenish-yellow ball rising rapidly.” Russell was quick to alert the rest of his party, exclaiming that he had just witnessed a “flying saucer.” Despite initial skepticism, the entire group soon became convinced after observing a second similar object ascending rapidly into the sky.
One of the biggest secrets of the Ukraine war is how much the CIA doesn’t know. The Agency is as uncertain about Volodymyr Zelensky‘s thinking and intentions as it is about Vladimir Putin‘s. And as the Russian leader faces his biggest challenge in the aftermath of a failed mutiny, the Agency is straining to understand what the two sides will do—because President Joe Biden has determined that the United States (and Kyiv) will not undertake any actions that might threaten Russia itself or the survival of the Russian state, lest Putin escalate the conflict and engulf all of Europe in a new World War. In exchange, it expects that the Kremlin won’t escalate the war beyond Ukraine or resort to the use of nuclear weapons.
America’s stance is under threat because the near-mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, raises the question as to whether Moscow has run out of options.
“Putin’s back is really against the wall” a senior defense intelligence official tells Newsweek, warning that while the CIA fully grasps how much Russia is stuck in Ukraine, it is very much in the dark with regard to what Putin might do about it. With talk of Russian nuclear weapons possibly being deployed to Belarus, and in light of Prigozhin’s public exposure of the terrible costs of fighting, something that Moscow has suppressed, the official says that it is a particularly delicate moment. “What is happening off the battlefield is now most important,” says the official, who was granted anonymity in order to speak candidly. “Both sides pledge to limit their actions, but it falls to the United States to enforce those pledges. This all hinges on the quality of our intelligence.”
The idea of “secret projects” such as MKUltra were once considered complete fiction and nothing but conspiracy theories. As were secret projects to influence the weather or the use of remote viewers by such intelligence agencies as the CIA. However, we now know that these efforts existed, at least on an initial research and experimental level.
If these top secret and once-denied projects were more factual than authorities would have originally had us believe, then what should we make of some of the other, albeit bizarre, allegations of top secret projects and programs that operate in the shadows of governments, funded by the “black budget?” Here are ten such programs. Some are more believable than others, no doubt, but all are intriguing to the max.
CIA Director William Burns said in a speech on Saturday that the war in Ukraine provides his spy agency a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to recruit Russians.
“Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership, beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression. That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA, at our core a human intelligence service,” Burns told the Ditchley Foundation in the UK, according to The Hill.
Burns mentioned how the CIA has been openly trying to recruit people inside Russia using social media. “We’re not letting it go to waste. We recently used social media — our first video post to Telegram, in fact — to let brave Russians know how to contact us safely on the dark web. We had 2.5 million views in the first week, and we’re very much open for business,” he said.
The CIA published a video on Telegram and YouTube in May asking Russians to contact the spy agency with links using Tor, a web browser that encrypts user activity. The idea is to use Tor to access a CIA site on the dark web that the agency uses to gather information from people around the world. The CIA has been posting similar instructions on social media throughout the war.
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