In our presently beleaguered era, caught as we are at the final stages of an empire, the region of Afghanistan has become the center of world attention once more. This is a region which is shaped by greater forces of history than most realize. On the one hand, it is a historic bridge between civilizations east and west as a node on the ancient silk road (a role it might hopefully regain today). On the other hand it has earned its title as “The Graveyard of Empires” for any imperial force wishing to dominate this center-piece of the World Island.
In The Valediction Three Nights of Desmond (Book 1), Paul and Liz have painted an earth-shaking picture of the strategic dynamics shaping not only Afghanistan, but also the dynamics shaping the takeover of the US foreign policy establishment over the dead body of JFK and the launching of the Vietnam war.
Having been in the unique position as the sole American journalists permitted into Afghanistan in 1981 and again in 1983, Paul and Liz ran directly into powerful forces shaping the levers of power and mass perception from the highest echelons of media, finance and intelligence agencies then centered around the CIA and Trilateral Commission of Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller.
In mapping out their personal experiences, Paul and Liz have reconstructed not only their own process of discovery in an autobiographical format that reads like a detective story, but have also shed light onto the complex forces operating above nation states which maneuvered to assassinate an American Ambassador in Kabul, pull the Soviet Union in an un-winnable quagmire, amplify the international drug trade and grow the monster of Islamic terrorism which plagued humanity for the next 40 years… all while maintaining a veneer of “liberal democracy” for public consumption.
How Paul and Liz were able to render these creatures of the shadows stretching to the highest echelons of the European old nobility and associated secret societies intelligible for readers of any level of awareness is admirable.This book is a must for anyone wishing to understand not only what has so misshapen US foreign policy, artificially lit the Middle East on fire or what possible solutions to this unwinnable Dark Age agenda that is still shaping much of our lives.
Matthew Ehret, Editor-in-Chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Author of The Clash of the Two Americas, Director of The Rising Tide Foundation, and Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow
(Ehret synthesizes discoveries from The Valediction as part of a larger research project on Rogue News. Watch the program, titled The Great Game With Mathew Ehret, here.)