Tag: cia

71 years of RFE/RL: How the CIA-founded American state run media outlet survived the Soviet collapse to fight Cold War 2.0

The first of May marks the 51st anniversary of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (hereinafter “RFE/RL”, although this didn’t become the official name until 1976) – radio stations which broadcast into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, respectively. As detailed in an internal CIA document from 1951 titled “Radio Aims and Objectives,” RFE/RL was to be operated by refugees or exiles from the various Socialist Bloc countries to broadcast information intended to encourage “hatred against the regime(s)” and to increase the “will to resist the regime(s).” In other words, this project had an explicit function to remove governments unfavorable to Washington.

Undoubtedly, May 1 was chosen as the launch of this project as it coincided with International Workers’ Day, one of the most important holidays in the Socialist Bloc. 

From its inception until 1972, it was the CIA which funded RFE/RL, though it did so covertly without congressional knowledge or authorization. And it was CIA Director Allen Dulles – the mastermind behind the overthrow of democratic governments in countries such as Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) – who greenlit the secret financing of RFE/RL in the hope that it would contribute to the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

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CIA Behind Secret Plots to Kidnap, Torture and Assassinate Ukrainian Dissidents for President Zelensky, says Ukraine Defector

Vasily Prozorov, a former officer with the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) stated soon after his defection to Russia in 2018 that the SBU had been advised by the CIA since 2014.

“CIA employees [who have been present in Kyiv since 2014] are residing in clandestine apartments and suburban houses,” he said. “However, they frequently come to the SBU’s central office for holding, for example, specific meetings or plotting secret operations.”

Prozorov’s revelations take on extremely ominous implications in light of a new report by The Grayzone Project detailing the SBU’s participation in a campaign of assassination, kidnapping and torture overseen by Ukrainian President and Western media darling Volodymyr Zelensky.

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Who Whacked CIA Spy Chief William Colby?

On May 7, 1996, the Charles County Sheriff’s Office found the body of former CIA Director William E. Colby, 76, washed up on the shore of the Wicomico River near his canoe, about a quarter mile from his country home on Cobb Island, Maryland.

Colby’s death was ruled a drowning accident. Nine days earlier, he had allegedly gone canoeing at dusk, never to return.

A graduate of Princeton University who parachuted behind Nazi lines in France during World War II as a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) elite Jedburgh teams, Colby had spent most of his adult life as a cold warrior in his country’s clandestine service, “a soldier-priest,” as a colleague called him, on a covert crusade.[1]

According to his New York Times obituary, Colby “perfected the look of an invisible man: gray suits, graying hair, glasses with translucent frames the color of pale white skin.”

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How the CIA Helped Disney Conquer Florida

Starting in the mid-1960s when Disney set out to establish the Disney World Theme Park, they were determined to get land at below market prices and Disney operatives engaged in a far-ranging conspiracy to make sure sellers had no idea who was buying their Central Florida property. By resorting to such tactics Disney acquired more than 40 square miles of land for less than $200 an acre, but how to maintain control once Disney’s empire had been acquired? The solution turned out to be cartoon-simple, thanks to the CIA.

Disney’s key contact was the consummate cloak-and-dagger operator, William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Sometimes called the “Father of the C.I.A,” he was also the founding partner of Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine, a New York law firm whose attorneys included future C.I.A. director William Casey. Donovan’s attorneys provided fake identities for Disney agents; they also set up a secret communications center, and orchestrated a disinformation campaign. In order to maintain “control over the overall development,” Disney and his advisers realized, “the company would have to find a way to limit the voting power of the private residents” even though, they acknowledged, their efforts “violated the Equal Protection Clause” of the U.S. Constitution. Here again the CIA was there to help. Disney’s principal legal strategist for Florida was a senior clandestine operative named Paul Helliwell. Having helped launch the C.I.A. secret war in Indochina, Helliwell relocated to Miami in 1960 in order to coordinate dirty tricks against Castro. At a secret “seminar” Disney convened in May 1965 Helliwell came up with the approach that to this day allows the Disney organization to avoid taxation and environmental regulation as well as maintain immunity from the U.S. Constitution. It was the same strategy the C.I.A. pursued in the foreign countries. Set up a puppet government; then use that regime to do your bidding.

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CIA Files Confirm Guantanamo Bay Torture Program’s MKULTRA Roots

In March the CIA declassified a 2008 CIA Inspector General report on the agency’s treatment of 9/11 suspect Ammar al-Baluchi at overseas ‘black sites’ and Guantanamo Bay. The report was released as a result of legal submissions and its shocking contents offer an unprecedentedly candid snapshot of the brutal physical and psychological torment to which he and hundreds of others were subjected by the agency over many years, under its global torture program.

The nephew of purported 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Baluchi was arrested in Pakistan in April 2003. He was accused of serving as a “key lieutenant” within al-Qaeda and its chief “bagman,” having provided pivotal financial and logistical support to the 9/11 hijackers. U.S. officials declared his capture would offer crucial information on the plot, prevent future attacks by the terrorist group, and potentially even lead to the apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Despite years of incarceration, interrogation and torture, none of this proved to be true.

Quoting contemporary cables, the Inspector General’s report tracks Baluchi’s induction at the “Salt Pit,” a CIA black site in Afghanistan, in detail. New arrivals were physically examined, their beards and heads shaved, and then put through a “non-enhanced” psychological assessment to determine their “willingness to cooperate without enhanced techniques…displace their expectations and begin the conditioning of subjects.”

The cable’s nameless author stated that, depending on his “resistance level,” staff did not intend to employ enhanced techniques against Baluchi “unless directed by headquarters.”

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AMERICAN PHONE-TRACKING FIRM DEMO’D SURVEILLANCE POWERS BY SPYING ON CIA AND NSA

IN THE MONTHS leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, two obscure American startups met to discuss a potential surveillance partnership that would merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter. According to Brendon Clark of Anomaly Six — or “A6” — the combination of its cellphone location-tracking technology with the social media surveillance provided by Zignal Labs would permit the U.S. government to effortlessly spy on Russian forces as they amassed along the Ukrainian border, or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines. To prove that the technology worked, Clark pointed A6’s powers inward, spying on the National Security Agency and CIA, using their own cellphones against them.

Virginia-based Anomaly Six was founded in 2018 by two ex-military intelligence officers and maintains a public presence that is scant to the point of mysterious, its website disclosing nothing about what the firm actually does. But there’s a good chance that A6 knows an immense amount about you. The company is one of many that purchases vast reams of location data, tracking hundreds of millions of people around the world by exploiting a poorly understood fact: Countless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent, relying on disclosures buried in the legalese of the sprawling terms of service that the companies involved count on you never reading. Once your location is beamed to an advertiser, there is currently no law in the United States prohibiting the further sale and resale of that information to firms like Anomaly Six, which are free to sell it to their private sector and governmental clientele. For anyone interested in tracking the daily lives of others, the digital advertising industry is taking care of the grunt work day in and day out — all a third party need do is buy access.

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Zelensky’s Secret CIA-Nazi Ukrainian Government

Not publicized, but instead carefully hidden, is the systematic terrorizing, tracking down, and killing, of political opponents, which includes not only opposed politicians, but also investigative journalists who are digging too deeply — deeply enough to maybe jeopardize Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky’s staying in office. All of this was solidly documented by Dan Cohen of Mint Press News, in their stunning April 14th article, “Testimony Reveals Zelensky’s Secret Police Plot to ‘Liquidate’ Opposition Figure Anatoly Shariy: Accounts from the Ukrainian SBU’s torture prison reveal Zelensky’s plot to assassinate exiled opposition figure and leading journalist Anatoly Shariy.”  That article (which on April 17th was republished at Strategic Culture as “Testimony Reveals Zelensky’s Secret Police Plot to ‘Liquidate’ Opposition Figure Anatoly Shariy”) will be summarized here, with key excerpts.

Cohen’s article describes the case of “Shariy, a Ukrainian opposition figure and one of the country’s most popular journalists.” A friend of Shariy’s had sent him an email on 7 March 2022, and: “Four days later, Shariy received an email from [the same friend but from] a different [email] address, …  confirming Shariy’s suspicion that the first email had been written [actually] by an SBU [Security Bureau of Ukraine] agent.” Shariy’s friend, in this second email, “explained that he had been interrogated and tortured for his ties to Russia.” 

Then, Shariy received a phone call from that friend, telling him that the SBU “were preparing an assassination attempt” to kill Shariy.

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CIA Admits Feeding Americans False Info About Ukraine

Last week an extraordinary article appeared in, of all places, NBC News, reporting that the US intelligence community is knowingly feeding information it does not believe accurate to the US mainstream media for the American audience to consume.

In other words, the article reports that the US “deep state” admits to being actively engaged in lying to the American people in the hopes that it can manipulate public opinion

According to the NBC News article, “multiple US officials acknowledged that the US has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect…”

Readers will recall the shocking headlines that Russia was prepared to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, that China would be providing military equipment to Russia, that Russian President Putin was being fed misinformation by his advisors, and more.

All of these were churned out by the CIA to be repeated in the American media even though they were known to be false. It was all about, as one intelligence officer said in the article, “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”

That may have been the goal, but what the CIA actually did was get inside America’s head with false information meant to shape public perception of the conflict. They lied to propagandize us in favor of the Biden Administration’s narrative.

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