by Matthew Ehret September 25, 2021
As a journalist, it is necessary to do my best not only to stay up-to-date on as many of the cutting edge developments as possible, but to also keep a flexible mind so that the buzzing myriad of facts emerging every day can be imbued with value such that my analysis can be useful to readers.
Over the past weeks, my mind processed such a dizzying array of information pertaining to the evolving situation surrounding Afghanistan that I ultimately had to shut myself off of reading any breaking news for a few days. It was during this short break that I took great pleasure reviewing the pre-release of a new novelized memoir entitled Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond, published by Trine Day Press and written by the husband and wife team of Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould.
Just when I was beginning to think that nothing new could be offered to the topic, I was happily surprised that this book provided an invaluable dimension to Afghanistan’s story within the context of world history from the first-hand account of the only two American journalists permitted to enter the war-torn nation in 1981 and again in 1983. The two documentaries produced by the duo during that period went far to shatter the carefully-constructed narrative of a “Russian Vietnam” that had been built up for years by a western deep state.
Paul Fitzgerald’s story begins with a chance encounter with Presidential-nominee Edward (Ted) Kennedy’s chief of staff Al Lowenstein in the lead-up to the 1980 elections. In their brief exchange, Lowenstein described his and Kennedy’s intention to shed light on the CIA’s involvement in the murder of the two Kennedy brothers. When Lowenstein ended up shot dead in his office by a former colleague two weeks later, Paul and his wife began to realize that they were pressing on something much larger than themselves.
Taking the reader through their journey of discovery, the couple artfully relay how they grappled with the startling discovery that there wasn’t one USA, but rather two opposing factions of U.S. intelligence at war with each other.
The journey began with the discovery that Lowenstein had been the founder and president of the National Students Association launched in 1951 which operated as a CIA front group designed to recruit both talented young Americans and foreign students alike who would later be propped up in various governments during the Cold War. It was obvious that Al was sick of playing a part in this machine and had found his last years emersed in organizing for Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr and when they fell, made the surviving Kennedy brother’s presidential election his governing passion. (1)
The broader clash of two intelligence agencies touched upon the question of whether or not the USA would operate on the basis of a foreign policy doctrine that presupposed an honest intention on the part of the Soviet Union to adhere to detente and the 1972 SALT treaty or whether U.S. security doctrine would operate on the assumption that the Soviets were liars intent on imposing their own global world government onto humanity.
Paul and Liz document the rise of a new think tank named Team B formed in 1976 which revived the earlier Committee on Present Danger led by financier Paul Nitze who in 1950, used this organization to spearhead the passage of NSC-68 that first justified the notion that the USA should maximize its build up of nuclear warheads on the supposition that the USA was in a moral equivalent of war with Russia. Throughout the 1960s, saner forces pushed back against Nitze’s Committee resulting in the nuclear test ban treaty, Open Skies Treaty, Space Treaty, and other trust building measures. The 1972 SALT was an extension of those mechanisms and limited the growth of U.S. nuclear warheads while operating on a presumption that Russia would do the same while respecting each others’ spheres of influences.
In the minds of Nitze, Brzezinski and the growing hive of neoconservative right wingers like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pipes, Richard Perle and Bush Sr growing in power and prestige amidst the presidencies of Ford, Carter and Reagan, this push towards trust and cooperation had to stop.
Hence this cast of characters was grouped together to promote a counter-argument to the “official” National Intelligence Estimate (referred to as “Team A”) which was assigned the role of proving the Soviets to be honest in their promises to respect their fields of influence and limit their nuclear warheads.
Where the NIE at the time was still maintaining the view that the threat posed by Russia would decrease if it’s sense of security and stability were increased, Team B asserted the opposite view promoting the fictious idea of an evil empire committed to becoming a global Soviet hegemon.
As one can imagine, the debates set up between the two teams were highly tilted in Team B’s favor as the champions selected to represent the Team A assessment was staffed by incompetent second rate minds completely out of their depths and totally incapable of refuting the vast data crunching sophistry of powerhouses like Nitze and his neocon team. Though history has demonstrated Team B’s thesis to be an artificial construction, the propaganda was successful and by 1978, the Trilateral-run coup of U.S. intelligence was nearly complete. At this time, a newly re-organized system of international clandestine operations were launched to conduct asymmetric warfare against not only Russia, but any other force in either the east or west that didn’t fit with Brzezinski’s ‘technetronic age’ then coming into being.
The Trotskyist Roots of the Neoconservative Takeover
In evaluating this strange cabal of right wingers, Paul and Liz astutely observe: “developed by an inbred class of former Trotskyist intellectuals, the Team B approach represented a radical transformation of America’s national security bureaucracy into a new kind of elitist cult.”
Tracing out the roots of these new neocons that dovetailed with the emergence of a new “end times” Christian-Zionist movement, the authors hit upon the Trotskyist common denominator which Cynthia Chung has also elaborated upon in her new series here and here.
It was no coincidence that this network of devotees of Trotsky’s particular brand of socialism with permanent revolution characteristics became a driving nexus of devotees among the imperial intelligentsia of the west like James Burnham, Alfred Wohlsetter, Richard Perle and Irving Kristol. These ideologues simply didn’t find the switch to neo-conservativism very difficult after Trotsky’s plans to take control of Russia failed by 1940. Trotsky’s fifth column in Russia had no trouble working with fascist Japanese, German, British or Wall Street powers in their fanatical aims to end Stalin’s “Socialism in one country” doctrine and impose global revolution which has been documented elsewhere and will be the topic of a future study.
The Murder of a U.S. Ambassador
This background helped set the duo up for the next series of discoveries they were to make preparing the groundwork for a journey with a camera team into Afghanistan in 1981. This preparation work involved Paul and Liz interfacing with a network of highly placed agents in dominant positions within the State Department and media industrial complex whose incredible overlap with the murder and coverup of president Kennedy, and management of the earlier Vietnam war is shocking.
Upon their arrival in Afghanistan in 1981, the duo also pieces together the mysterious anomalies of the assassination of American Ambassador to Kabul, Adolph Dubs on February 14, 1979. It didn’t take long before the couple discovered that Ambassador Dubs had been working covertly on an agenda that ran in total opposition to the Trilateral Commission plans for the region and if successful, threatened to disrupt all of Brzezinski’s designs.
It was Dubs after all, who had headed the Study Mission on International Controls of Narcotics Trafficking and Production for the Senate Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control only six months prior to his station in Kabul and understood better than anyone else where and how the global drug production complex functioned.
During dozens of meetings and interviews conducted with Afghanistan officials, Paul learned that Ambassador Dubs had at least 14 secret meetings with President Hafizullah Amin who was clearly not the sort of individual which western media portrayed. Not only was Amin not Marxist, he wasn’t in any way pro-Soviet or even a serious Muslim. Evidence piled up increasingly that Amin was little more than an opportunistic CIA tool interfacing closely with his nominal enemy Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (another CIA asset) in an effort to bring global heroin production into Afghanistan. As Paul and Liz discover, both men were in truth united as members of the same Ghilzai tribe which had long sought to assert dominance over Kabul.
This goal went part in parcel with Amin’s objective of undermining the nationalistic forces associated with King Daoud within the PRPD during the April 1978 Saur revolution that deposed the King.
However, when Dubs began negotiating a plan that kept the Soviets from falling into an Afghan trap while still enriching Amin, something had to be done to save Zbigniew’s script.
As Paul and Liz discover in the course of time, this CIA connection ultimately proved Amin’s own undoing and also resolved the paradoxical fact that despite being a nominally pro-Soviet Afghan president, Soviet forces wasted no time killing him on December 27, 1979 when Russia’s military entry officially began.
While official records still blame the death of Ambassador Dubs to a combination of Soviet and Afghan military forces to this very day, the authors demonstrate that bountiful evidence points to the hand of western intelligence that shaped the shootout that killed all three kidnappers and the Ambassador in room 117 of the Kabul Hotel. Chief among this evidence are the presence of CIA and DEA agents on the scene of the crime, evidence of Dubs’ having been alive after the famous shootout and his body having been 1) moved after his murder to make it seem as though bullets from the window might possibly have killed him, 2) shot several times by a .22 calibre pistol at close range… most likely by a sociopathic Kabul police chief Mohammed Lal who also turned up dead months later.
Russia Falls for the Trap
The murder of Dubs provided Zbigniew the propaganda needed to fuel the fires of anti-Russian hysteria among credulous Americans on the one hand, while also justifying the creation of a new clandestine asymmetric warfare policy that forever changed the fate of world history.
The only sacrifice needed on Brzezinski’s’ part was the murder of a pesky diplomat who wanted to avoid a world war, and the sacrifice of a highly placed CIA asset [President Amin] who would play the role of an Afghan Lee Harvey Oswald, taking the primary blame for the chaos that would erupt under Russia’s soft underbelly.
Additionally, the event that triggered so-called “Russia’s Vietnam”, provided the living proof which Team B’s fictitious thesis needed by demonstrating that Russia truly had a desire to dominate the world.
This, in turn fueled the money pit known as Operation Cyclone which poured billions of dollars into sponsoring terrorist movements that would soon morph into Al-Qaeda and the emergence of the world’s largest heroin production zone right in the heart of Mackinder’s World Island. It additionally justified Zbigniew’s push for “flexible response” limited nuclear war doctrine of 1980 which went on to shape the Full Spectrum Dominance program now encircling Russia and China.
When asked in a 1998 interview if he regretted having played a driving role in the creation of Al Qaeda, Zbigniew Brzezinski responded:
“Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”
A year before this interview, Brzezinski wrote a poisonous book called “The Grand Chessboard” that became the guiding light for the neocon Project for a New American Century led by the same neo cons that emerged into power under his sponsorship in the 1970s like Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Helms and Dick Cheney where he stated:
“In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geo-strategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”
While the small space allocated for this review cannot do justice to the scope of this story which lead the reader up to the highest echelons of Europe’s old nobility and even a few under-appreciated secret societies, the lessons that are communicated have as much, if not more applicability now, forty years later as the USA departs from its own Afghan debauchery and mutant strains of Western/Saudi-sponsored radical Islam continue to plague the world in the form of ISIS-K, H. The only difference between 2021 and 1981 is that today, a Multipolar Alliance led by the Russia, China and joined by a growing array of great nations and many others have created a new paradigm founded upon a coherent alternative security, cultural and financial architecture capable of challenging the dystopic unipolar hegemon that Zbigniew Brzezinski believed should govern the New World Order.