Part 5: Brzezinski‘s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

OpEdNews 6/26/2018  Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Robert_Moss

Robert Moss became a shamanic dream teacher starting in 1987 after leaving a career as an intelligence operative, specialized in creating anti-communist propaganda, with the CIA, MI6, Institute for the Study of Conflict and membership in the Pinay Cercle.  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

“IRAN WAS OF increasing concern to the 6I. The Imperial Throne was under siege from an alliance against nature between Shi’ite fundamentalists and Marxists. Apart from unsubtle repression by the Iranian secret service, the SAVAK, and by the armed forces, little was being done to break the unholy alliance. SAVAK was unversed in the arts of psychological action.”

Brian Crozier, Free Agent 1941-1991

Brian Crozier knew a lot about alliances against nature. After “spending several days closeted” with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, helping the dictator draft (in Spanish) fifteen clauses for a new Constitution, he turned his attention in early 1978 to Iran and decided the Shah needed his advice. Warning the Shah that: “The CIA had virtually collapsed and its operational capacity had been reduced to zero,” Crozier counseled that the British alone could not save him and offered him the services of his “shadowy organization,” known as the 6I. A few months later the Shah agreed and Crozier returned with a team of advisors including the Shah’s old friend Antoine Pinay of the Pinay Cercle.

Combined with Vietnam, Iran was cause for a fevered panic inside Brian Crozier’s right-wing fascist circles of power. The Cold War strategy of suppressing Communism with military force had failed spectacularly in Vietnam and was now crumbling in Iran and Crozier, his prote’ge’ Robert Moss and Zbigniew Brzezinski were pushing the idea (with no proof) that Moscow’s meddling was behind it. In his book on the Iran fiasco, All Fall Down, former National Security Council staff member Dr. Gary Sick acknowledges Moss’s undeserved influence on Washington’s policy-making by citing Moss’s December 2, 1978 article in the New Republic, “Who’s meddling in Iran?”

“Brzezinski” reproduced the Moss article, circulated it to the president and other top policy makers, and cited it in policy meetings for weeks. Although Moss cited no real evidence and had no apparent qualifications as a specialist on Iran, his article attained the status of a major document in U.S. policy-making circles at a key moment.”

Moss, was of course wrong. As Gary Sick further cites, “the central organizing force of the revolution” was the religious network operating out of the mosques under the strategic control of Khomeini,” and not the Soviets. But the idea that it was the Soviets and not their own policy failures that were wrong, was just what Washington’s bureaucracy wanted to hear.

The Shah’s Persian “empire” was at its core a backward, impoverished third world country with enormous social problems and a crushing military budget. According to a 1974 Newsweek cover story America’s vital Iranian ally had spent $4 billion of his $20 billion dollar oil revenues on arms purchases from the United States in the first six months of 1973 alone, acquiring 289 fighter jets, 500 attack helicopters, 700 tanks, and six destroyers. $10 billion in foreign aid had gone to foreign governments to “expand his sphere of influence” while SAVAK had grown into one of the largest (and most feared) intelligence services in the world with somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 full-time personnel and an estimated 3 million (12 percent of the population), informers.

Obsessed with the Soviet’s “grand design” to conquer the Middle East, the Shah had even constructed an invasion force for neighboring Afghanistan just in case Prince Mohammed Daoud fell to Soviet subversion, but his plan proved useless given the absence of popular support for Daoud following the bloody April, 1978 Marxist coup.

The CIA’s best laid plans for their “policeman in the Gulf” had proved an expensive farce which the U.S. had no strategy for rescuing and out of desperation, the Shah came begging to Brian Crozier for help. “In November of 1978, the Shah sent the top civilian in the SAVAK hierarchy to London to see me,” Crozier writes in his autobiography Free Agent. “I arranged for him to be closeted with Robert Moss for a whole week” The outcome was a Conflict Study dated November 1978, ‘The Campaign to Destabilize Iran’ by Robert Moss. Shortly after the study had appeared, the Iranian charge d’affaires informed me that the Shah had authorized a first annual payment of -1 million to The 6I for a psychological action operation on the lines we had suggested to him.”

Crozier found a welcome audience with the Shah as he had with numerous other fascist dictators like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Spain’s Francisco Franco and would quite soon with U.S. President Ronald Reagan . The Shah had been installed by the U.S. and Britain at the height of its post-World War II power. But confidence in America’s omnipotence had ended with Vietnam and Europe’s old imperialists were quickly filtering back into their old colonies with their old habits to pick up where they’d left off. The British had been running covert and overt operations in the region since the 18thcentury. Generations of sons, grandsons and great grandsons of operatives who’d served the British Raj remained on the scene as journalists, businessmen and informal agents. One word from Crozier or Britain’s MI6 intelligence service was all they needed to reactivate.

Joining Brian Crozier and his prote’ge’ Robert Moss in engaging the Shah that autumn was a senior Chinese intelligence officer and veteran supporter of Mao by the name of Qiao Shi. John K. Cooley writes, “In September of 1978, on the way home to Beijing from one of his Balkan missions, Qiao Shi stopped over in Tehran to see the Shah of Iran, who was ill with cancer” Qiao Shi proposed to the Shah a new alliance to thwart Soviet expansion, especially in neighboring Afghanistan” Agreement was reached to undertake a covert war in Afghanistan, apparently independent of CIA plans for the same country.”

According to Cooley, shortly after the Maoist Qiao Shi’s agreement with the Shah’s SAVAK Chief, General Nasser Moghadam, “Chinese agents began to move into position in Pakistan. Liaising with Pakistan’s ISI was the Iranian ambassador in Islamabad, former head of SAVAK.” Instigated by Brzezinski and backed by the CIA and MI6, the so called China-Iran-Pakistan axis began to flourish with Qiao Shi and other “senior Chinese military intelligence officials,” adding to Brzezinski’s ongoing destabilization.

The American Ambassador Adolph Dubs needn’t have worried about Hafizullah Amin’s well known affiliation to the CIA. He had far bigger problems. Not only were Afghan rebels openly training in Pakistan but by the late fall of 1978 Chinese intelligence risked a Sino/Soviet war by training Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Islamists over the Chinese border in Xinjiang province. In addition there was the CIA’s Saudi-funded stockpile of misfits and malcontents roaming the countryside, manning the Safari Club’s 1,500-strong army of assassins and enforcers. And last but not least were the Chinese supported Maoist groups like Setam-i Melli, Sholah Jaweed and SAMA operating from bases on the Pakistan and Iranian borders and programmed by Beijing to bring down their Pashtun oppressor, Hafizullah Amin.

Thanks to Saudi Intelligence chief Sheikh Kamal Adham and BCCI banker, Sheikh Agha Hasan Abedi, there were ample funds to finance a holy jihad against Russia in Afghanistan but the motives for undermining Russia on its southern border didn’t stop there. Bringing war to Afghanistan provided the opportunity to assist the migration of the heroin trade from Southeast Asia to the Pakistani/Afghan border and to make billions of dollars for the BCCI doing it. Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Provinceshad been targeted early on by international drug syndicates eager to find a new home as the Vietnam War wound down. Cited in a French Study by Catherine Lamour and Michel R. Lamberti originally published in 1972 titled Les Grandes Manoeuvres de l’Opium ,“Afghanistan and northern Pakistan represent a source of opium as yet virtually untapped by European traffickers” Situated at the junction of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the two territories are not as far from Marseilles or Munich as are Burma and Laos. The political conditions in their opium producing areas make these places an ideal refuge where racketeers from Europe could go about their business untroubled by international law enforcement agencies.”

As of the early spring of 1978 the narcotics problem in the Golden Crescent, appeared to then Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near East and South Asia Affairs Adolph Dubs to be under control by the governments of the United States, Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. But by January of 1979 the newly unstable region was fast becoming the launch pad for the greatest heroin empire in history and the primary financing source for a terrorist campaign that would transform the world.

The Frankenstein political monster emerging to thwart Dubs’ plan for Afghanistan could only have come from Brzezinski’s ethnic experiment called the Nationalities Working Group . The potential for stirring up Muslim unrest against Soviet/Russian rule had been kicking around for decades but gained little traction within the CIA. But the rise of the neoconservatives following the Vietnam War had brought with it an ethnic strategy that put Saudi Wahhabists , Iranian Shiites, Tajik Maoists, assorted Marxist-Leninists and Afghan extremists together with European and Middle Eastern racketeers – fed by a Trotskyist hatred for all things Russian.

Contrary to Brzezinski’s assertion that Hafizullah Amin was Moscow’s obedient servant, Dubs was learning that his target was not much of a Communist, convincing him to restore and expand a U.S. military training program for Afghan army officers. Russian documents reveal the Kremlin didn’t consider him to be a Communist at all but “a commonplace petty bourgeois and an extreme Pushtu nationalist” with “boundless political ambitions and a craving for power” in addition to most likely being a CIA agent. According to Selig Harrison, Amin had even bragged to him that the Soviets needed him more than he needed them. The trick was to maintain a balance of American influence while not triggering Soviet countermeasures that would bring them in. But for the ambassador who’d been sent to rope Amin closer to the U.S., Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor seemed to be doing everything in his power to put the rope around Dubs’ neck. Still, Dubs continued his mission; Selig Harrison writes, “Dubs, meanwhile was arguing vigorously for keeping American options open, pleading that destabilization of the regime would provoke direct Soviet intervention” Ironically, while Brzezinski was promoting armed opposition to Amin, Dubs was continuing to nurture his dialogue with the Afghan leader.”

A Time magazine article that January suggested Brzezinski’s campaign to frame the Kabul regime as hopelessly pro-Soviet was on the verge of being exposed as a lie. “The new government in Afghanistan of President Noor Mohammed Taraki is commonly thought to be in Moscow’s pocket, especially since it recently signed a friendship treaty with the Soviets. There are signs however, that this too may be an exaggeration. During Taraki’s visit to Moscow last month President Brezhnev reportedly chided him for behaving too obsequiously before the Russians, which he felt made the Afghan leader look bad. As soon as they got back to Kabul, Afghan officials began to drop hints that they would welcome more Western aid. Apparently, the Russians are not altogether satisfied with their new client regime in Kabul.”

But Brzezinski’s objectives were not to be undone by appearances, protests from the ambassador or reasoned political arguments. That same month, Brzezinski’s NSC director of South Asian affairs, Thomas P. Thornton, arrived in Kabul to shut Dubs down. Meeting with Amin, he provided a “negative assessment” of the regime, recommending that any additional aid be cut off.

In the interim between Dubs’ arrival in Kabul in July of 1978 and the fall of the Shah on January 16, 1979 American foreign policy in Iran, China and Afghanistan had shifted into the hands of a neoconservative/right-wing cabal with hardly anyone being the wiser. Backed by Brzezinski’s National Security Council but run by a consortium of right-wing intelligence officers including

France’s intelligence chief, Count Alexandre de Marenchesand his cohorts at the Pinay Cercle, Safari Club and 6I, the decades-long geopolitical plan to move the United States into alignment with the old European right-wing of Antoine Pinay and Brian Crozier was nearing completion.

Regardless of Brzezinski’s public denials about supporting the Afghan rebels, the CIA’s “secret” program to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam was becoming so well known it was making headlines in the American papers and a mockery of the Carter administration. Selig Harrison writes: “By early February 1979, this collaboration became an open secret when the Washington Post published an eyewitness report that at least two thousand Afghans were being trained at former Pakistani bases guarded by Pakistani patrols.” Yet President Carter and his Secretary of State never seemed to realize that increased destabilization on the Soviet Union’s southern border would eventually produce Soviet counter moves to offset it.

By mid-February the unholy alliance between Shi’ite fundamentalists and Marxists that Brian Crozier had warned the Shah about only months earlier had been turned against Kabul by remnants of the Shah’s Savak and Chinese intelligence. The Shah had fallen and the Afghan countryside was in open revolt. The Marxist regime of Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin was calling on Moscow for military assistance and the only man left to hold back a Soviet military takeover in Kabul was the American Ambassador, Adolph Dubs. But on the morning of February 14, 1979 he too would fall into the hands of the covert plan to give Russia its own Vietnam and in a tragic twist of irony, become the vehicle for the very operation he had gone to Kabul to stop.

Copyright – 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski’s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’e’tat –

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

OpEdNews 6/24/2018 Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Mount_Kenya_Safari_Club_TMnr_20014548

Entrance of the Safari Club; a ‘supranational’ intelligence agency formed in 1976 by France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Morocco to create a ‘second CIA’ to operate covertly when Congress limited the activities of the CIA.  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike

“The Safari Club set a precedent and some guidelines for the subsequent CIA operation in Afghanistan. As its name implied, the Safari Club’s main task was to carry out missions – always anti-Communist ones, for America, on the ‘good guys’ side of the Cold War…” John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars, 1999

The Safari club represented the true essence of what CIA Director Allen Dulles had intended when setting up the Central Intelligence Agency following World War II; an autonomous covert action organization with global reach, beyond the jurisdiction of American democracy and responsible to no one. A spinoff of the right-wing Pinay Cercle as a secret off-the books “Private Sector Intelligence agency,” and in league with the CIA and Brian Crozier’s 6th International, the Safari Club was only formerly acknowledged in 2002 by the one-time head of Saudi Arabian Intelligence Prince Turki Al-Faisal to have come into existence in 1976.  But as revealed by John K. Cooley in his groundbreaking 1999 study, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, the Safari Club members had been active informally for years secretly protecting CIA assets and covert operations from the prying eyes of Congressional investigators following Watergate and the revelations of the Church Committee hearings on 30 years of CIA coups, cover-ups and assassinations.

Cooley writes, “The Carter team adopted a method of avoiding the stigma of direct CIA involvement in covert operations which could go wrong and backfire on the United States. It was a method which Henry Kissinger… had refined and applied with skill: get others to do what you want done… the ‘others’ in Kissinger’s era of the early 1970s, a time of rehearsal for the approaching adventure in Afghanistan, were a set of unlikely colleagues…”

Kissinger’s set of unlikely Safari Club colleagues included, France’s Count Alexandre de Marenches chief of French external intelligence, The Shah of Iran, King Hassan II of Morocco, President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and Kamal Adham, head of intelligence for Saudi Arabian King Faisal. More to the point, the Safari Club was more than just an off-the-books spy operation doing covert operations for the CIA whose methods the Carter team adopted. The Safari Club was the real CIA, covertly funded by Saudi Arabia and run out of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by the CIA’s former director Richard Helms, U.S. Ambassador to Iran from 1973-1977.

As presented by one-time CNN Special Assignment investigator Joe Trento in his 2005 exposé Prelude To Terror, “Both Prince Turki and Sheikh Kamal Adham [head of Saudi intelligence] would play enormous roles in servicing a spy network to replace the official CIA while it was under Congressional scrutiny between the time of Watergate and the end of the Carter administration… Several top U.S. military and intelligence officials directed the operations from positions they held overseas, notably former CIA Director Richard Helms, at this time Ambassador to Iran.”

According to Trento, at this time, Sheikh Kamal Adham took control of intelligence financing for the United States by setting up a network of banks with the official blessing of the CIA’s George Bush; turning “a small Pakistani merchant bank, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine, buying banks around the world in order to create the biggest clandestine money network in history.”

Working alongside the bank’s founder Sheikh Agha Hasan Abedi, Adham not only gained “a comprehensive knowledge of U.S. intelligence operations,” but expanded the very concept by using BCCI to merge the Safari Club’s objectives with “every major terrorist, rebel, and underground organization in the world.” A 2001 Time magazine report found that the bank functioned as “a vast, stateless, multinational corporation that deploys its own intelligence agency, complete with paramilitary wing and enforcement units, known collectively as the “black network:’” a black network that would threaten, bribe or assassinate anyone it needed to turn Afghanistan into the place to trap the Soviet Union in their own Vietnam.

Trento writes, “Adham did not rely simply on money to carry out the plan. Adham and Abedi understood they would need muscle.  They tapped into the CIA’s stockpile of misfits and malcontents to help man a 1,500-strong group of assassins and enforcers.”

1973: The Red Prince Daoud overthrows the King

To most of Washington, the bloodless 1973palace coup of the Afghan King Zahir Shah by his cousin and former Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud along with a faction of the Afghan left was a non-event. But to the Safari Club’s Shah of Iran, Daoud’s coup signaled a leftward drift and provided the opportunity to demonstrate his influence as America’s policeman in the Gulf. Considered to be too friendly to Moscow (which had earned him the nickname the Red Prince), Daoud was known primarily for his repeated claims to Afghan (ethnic Pashtun) provinces seized by the British during the 19th century in (what is today) Pakistan. Due mainly to America’s lack of interest in the country, the U.S. State Department viewed Daoud mostly as an Afghan nationalist and a nuisance. Afghanistan rated at the bottom of U.S. foreign policy priorities and had since the end of the British Raj in 1947, been cast into the Soviet’s sphere of influence. But as president, Daoud planned to break the mold and needed the West’s economic assistance to do it. He had come to the newly oil-rich Shah of Iran for help but found himself at the mercy of the notorious Safari Club and the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK.  South Asia expert Selig Harrison writes, “On the one hand, Teheran used its aid leverage to press Daoud for the removal of suspected Communists. At the same time, Savak channeled U.S. weapons, communications equipment, and other paramilitary aid to anti-Daoud groups.”

The Shah’s campaign against Daoud quickly drove him to unceremoniously dump the Afghan left, but not before a coalition of CIA-backed agents from Pakistan and Iran had come together to organize his enemies on the left and the right against him. Harrison continues, “Pakistani harassment of Daoud reached its climax in a series of Islamabad-orchestrated raids on police posts in the Pansjer valley. Savak, the CIA and Pakistani agents were also involved in the abortive, fundamentalist-backed coup attempts against Daoud in September and December 1973 and June 1974.”

One Pakistani-trained group involved in the Pansjer raids were the Setam-i Melli (Against National Oppression), a Tajik-based Shiite/Maoist splinter group broken-away from the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).  As pro-Chinese and anti-Pashtun, the Setam and a variety of other Shiite /Maoist groups would find themselves attractive to Chinese intelligence and at odds with both Prince Daoud and the Pashtun dominated PDPA and were driven underground. But as Chinese involvement in Afghanistan grew, they would return in a mysterious role that would spontaneously deliver the pivotal element Zbigniew Brzezinski would need to enact his grand plan.

Mohammed Daoud fought off the CIA’s initial intrusions from Savak, the CIA’s Pakistani agents and their fundamentalist (soon to be) holy warriors. But with Western influence in Southeast Asia closing out in Vietnam in 1975, a new Great Game for Central Asia was about to begin. And without the State Department knowing much about it, President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was busy moving the chess pieces into position.

April 1978: Daoud goes down in an unusually bloody coup

Brzezinski’s plot to weaponize China against Russia by sacrificing Afghanistan was straight out of James Burnham’s Machiavellians. The spontaneous April, 1978 Marxist coup against the King’s cousin, Mohammed Daoud played like clockwork directly into his “predictions” of Soviet infiltration and subversion but on close inspection appeared to fit too conveniently. Nobody at the State Department had expected Daoud to be overthrown by Communist agents because it wasn’t in their interests to do so, nor did it in any way satisfy a broad range of Soviet interests. The Indian expert M.S. Agwani of Jawaharlal Nehru University offered this cogent analysis at the time:

“On the eve of the fateful events of April 1978 Afghanistan seemed to be the most unlikely candidate for a Communist take-over. And there were at least two good reasons for that. First, the Communist movement in Afghanistan did not possess the necessary means—in terms either of a well-oiled party machine or of a popular base—to launch a successful revolution on its own. Secondly, there was no apparent ground for Afghanistan’s Communist neighbor to encourage revolutionary action in that country. On the contrary, a Communist take-over in Afghanistan could offer no advantage to the Soviet Union, in terms either of security or of influence relationship, which it did not already possess.”

Of course, Zbigniew Brzezinski ignored what to everyone else was obvious. Selig Harrison writes of the coup, “Vance recalls that the April coup was depicted by Brzezinski as the opening gambit in a Soviet master plan for achieving hegemony in Southwest Asia. It would be followed in due course, Brzezinski argued, by the incorporation of Afghanistan into the Soviet orbit (which the U.S. had already accepted) and ultimately by political and military moves to subjugate the Gulf oil-producing states.”

As Secretary of State, Vance found no basis for Brzezinski’s argument and rejected it out of hand.  Despite Brzezinski’s subterfuge, the State Department was still committed to preserving détente and moving on with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, SALT. U.S. Ambassador Theodore Eliot expressed positive feelings toward the new Afghan regime and believed the U.S. could find a way to work with them. But in spite of the State Department’s position, Brzezinski’s plan had already been set in motion and by the spring of 1978 was taking on a life of its own.

Brzezinski Plays the China Card

The decision by Zbigniew Brzezinski to “play” China against Russia at the expense of détente and SALT II would set off a chain of events that would eventually bring the Vance/Brzezinski struggle into stark relief and American foreign policy into deep crisis. Brzezinski had traveled to China only weeks after the April takeover and used the coup as an opportunity for promoting a revolutionary U.S.-China military alliance against the Soviet Union based on his false claim that they were behind it. Exaggerating the coup as frightening evidence of the Soviet’s grand design, Brzezinski mimicked Brian Crozier’s trumped-up predictions, offering to cooperate on Afghanistan and share high-level secrets about Soviet capabilities with the astonished Chinese. In one stroke, Brzezinski had used the coup to singlehandedly turn American foreign policy toward his anti-Soviet position – leaving Cyrus Vance twisting in the wind and making the death of détente a fait accompli.

The State Department’s Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff writes, “Whether President Carter fully realized it, in overriding Secretary of State Vance’s objections and sending Brzezinski to Beijing he set in train the development of a rapprochement with China on an anti-Soviet basis. The President did not intend the China card as a counter to Soviet and Cuban activities in Africa, but his action had much broader and deeper consequences . . . it is very unlikely he realized he was giving priority to Chinese relations at a time and in a way that would contribute to American-Soviet estrangement.”

Whether or not President Carter understood he was contributing to American-Soviet estrangement by befriending China on an anti-Soviet basis, we now know that within a year, Carter formerly sanctioned Brzezinski’s bold plan to use Afghanistan to lure the Soviet Union into its own Vietnam and later lied to the public about it when the Soviets fell into the trap. But as Joseph Trento writes, Carter’s deceptive ignorance of Brzezinski’s efforts didn’t end there. “Carter may in fact have signed his directive in July 1979, but the Safari Club’s Islamic fighter had been taunting Moscow into invading for nearly a year before that. The effort included cross-border raids into Soviet territory.”

Afghanistan’s April coup organizer, Hafizullah Amin was well known to the KGB having been brought to the U.S. twice under a CIA funded education program designed to turn future third world leaders into agents for American interests. The KGB did this sort of thing in the third world as well but none had played out quite so fortuitously for the U.S. side as Hafizullah Amin. After failing to receive his doctorate Amin had left New York in mid-1965, gone back to Afghanistan and taken a job at Kabul University’s Institute of Education “virtually run by American aid advisors” according to former Associated Press Moscow bureau chief Henry S. Bradsher, author of 1983’s Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. From there he joined the Khalq faction of the leftist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, PDPA and became its central organizer. While using his teaching position to recruit young students Amin worked his way up to a leadership position, distanced himself from the Soviets but stayed in regular contact with the Americans. According to an Afghan source close to Amin whom we interviewed, he also maintained close ties to the Islamist right, and especially to his fellow Pashtun tribesman, the notorious Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Enter Ambassador Adolph “Spike” Dubs

Replacing Ambassador Theodore Eliot three months after the Marxist coup, Adolph “Spike” Dubs arrived in Kabul in July 1978with an urgent mission: Bring Hafizullah Amin over to the American side and keep the Russians out. As stated to us in an interview we conducted with Selig Harrison in 1993. “Dubs… came out there with a very sophisticated conception of what he was going to do politically; which was to try to make Amin into a Tito – or the closest thing to a Tito/Ceausescu – detach him. He’d still be pretty close to the Russians but he’d have more freedom of action and it would be enough to make it safe from our point of view.”

President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski on the other hand, had already engineered a grander mission: Pressure Hafizullah Amin and the Afghan Marxists to increasingly draw on Russian support through destabilization from Iran, Pakistan and China and then keep them tied down long enough to give the Soviets their own Vietnam. Ambassador Dubs was working from the standard State Department playbook in courting Amin and met with him 14 times, according to Selig Harrison. But Brzezinski’s ongoing destabilization through the Safari Club, his budding military relationship with the Chinese and Amin’s provocative behavior toward the Russians was making life for the American ambassador increasingly dangerous.

So alarmed was Adolph Dubs by Amin’s behavior he demanded to know from his CIA station chief if he was employed by the CIA. He was told no and the CIA has always denied that Amin was their covert agent, but the facts speak louder than the denials. Denying responsibility is standard practice for an agency engaged in covert operations and Brzezinski had been running a covert operation since taking over as national security advisor to President Carter in January of 1977. According to the now legendary April 1, 1967 Ramparts Magazine Article “Three Tales of the CIA” the CIA recruited lots of Afghan students during Amin’s era who returned home to become key, high level officials in the Afghan government including the cabinet and state treasury.  According to a Harrison interview with resident American Afghan expert Louis Dupree, Amin made no secret of his CIA connection telling him: “He took American money for his school and then, behind their backs, recruited the brightest teachers for the Communist Party. But you can imagine how it all looked to the Russians.”

Hafizullah Amin may not have been an “agent” but two specific classifications may apply to his covert role. The term “nonofficial cover” (NOC) pertains to individuals working at the deepest levels of CIA covert operations but without any official backing. The other is Controlled American Source (CAS) which the State Department describes in one of its own documents “is a code name for the CIA”. Author Richard D. Mahoney claims in his book about American Taliban member John Walker Lindh Getting Away with Murder that CAS was the classification assigned to Hafizullah Amin.

But whether a CAS or an NOC, the perception that Amin was CIA was all that was needed to spook the Kremlin’s Soviet gerontocracy into taking the bait that Brzezinski had laid out for them. And as his plot moved forward into January of 1979, Ambassador Dubs found himself at the center of a Saudi-funded Safari Club operation that would not only give the right-wing the revenge for Vietnam they so longed for, but transform Afghanistan into the center for Islamic terrorism and the heroin capital of the world.

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!                                                  

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812 Part

3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski‘s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’état –

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

OpEdNews 6/24/2018 Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

256px-Satan_before_the_Lord

Satan before the Lord United States public domain tag

“This decidedly mixed record [of successful and failed African coups] did not prevent the return of some of the mercenaries to the world scene, this time to Afghanistan. By the early 1970s London had become a center of the arms trade as well as of the recruiting of already trained ‘soldiers of fortune’ to serve both as trainers and in operational roles… There was a covert group of such personnel, available for hire, and known in London as ‘the Circuit’ or sometimes simply as “the lads.”  John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars, 1999

Even at this late date few Americans understand how the U.S. government came to be owned by the London-backed neoconservative/right-wing alliance that grew out of the post-Vietnam era and how its obsessive compulsion to forge “the one ring to rule them all” has driven the U.S. and its NATO cohorts into an apocalyptic hysteria. Neither do they understand that it was the presidency of James Earl Carter and not Ronald Reagan that opened the door to the rise of Islamic extremism, the sellout of the middle class and the disenfranchisement of America’s constitutional values.

Whether he admired Jimmy Carter or not, Brian Crozier and Zbigniew Brzezinskiwere of one mind when it came to disbelieving in “mutual coexistence” or power-sharing with the Soviet Union and Brzezinski’s membership in the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict, WISC proved it. The deep bureaucratic influence of Crozier’s new institute could be measured in its choice of board members all of whom had been actively preparing the ground for an ideological rollover for decades. Thanks to WISC member Richard Pipes and the Team B, Brzezinski could now bring Britain’s radical right-wing formula for social change right into the Oval Office and the new President from Georgia was ready and willing to sign on.

Working closely after the election with Carter and one of Henry Kissinger’s former National Security staffers, David Aaron, on the Island retreat of St. Simon, Brzezinski devised a simple structure that channeled all executive decisions into two committees, the Policy Review Committee (PRC) and the Special Coordination Committee (SCC). The PRC’s function was to deal with foreign policy, defense policy and international economic issues and would be chaired by a variety of cabinet secretaries. The SCC’s responsibilities were covert intelligence and other sensitive operations, arms control and crisis management and would be chaired exclusively by Brzezinski. Carter then took it one step further by elevating the national security advisor to cabinet level and the palace coup was complete before Gerald Ford left the White House. In a fundamental break with the past, Brzezinski’s SCC would now be at the center of American foreign policy and not the State Department.

As recalled with relish by the Neoconservative author and professor of international relations David J. Rothkopf in Charles Gati’s 2013 book ZBIG, “It was a bureaucratic first strike of the first order. The system essentially gave responsibility for the most important and sensitive issues to Brzezinski, and the vague definition of what constituted crisis management essentially ensured that if anything came up that was important it could be claimed by the White House.”

The new structure effectively froze the incoming Secretary of State, Cyrus Vanceout of the decision-making process before Carter had even entered the Oval Office. More importantly, it also delivered to Brzezinski control over covert action and a free hand to use it wherever he saw fit. Former CIA Director Robert Gates recalled how President Carter pushed for covert action over diplomacy from the very beginning of his administration in his 1997 book From the Shadows. “Indeed, as Carter turned to covert action within weeks after his inauguration and increasingly frequently thereafter, the most constant criticism of CIA that I heard from both Brzezinski and Aaron was its lack of enthusiasm for covert action and its lack of imagination and boldness in implementing the President’s ‘findings’ (legal shorthand for covert actions).”

One bold, imaginative operation initiated by Brzezinski in 1977 was theNationalities Working Group (NWG),dedicated to weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming ethnic tensions among the Islamic populations of the South Asia region. Already in Kabul to help implement the plan was Graham Fullerwhose expertise as CIA operative was on politicizing Islamic radicals on behalf of American interests. As the CIA’s Kabul station chief from 1975 to 1978 Fuller was perfectly placed to provide the intelligence and the contacts necessary to coordinate Brzezinski’s covert pressure from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China with the CIA’s next big adventure; Afghanistan.

Brzezinski’s rewiring didn’t stop at covert action but continued on into nuclear policy toward the Soviet Union beginning immediately after assuming control. On February 3, 1977 Carter attended the first session of Brzezinski’s SCC on the long delayed Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) at which a competing initiative to the State Department’s was put into action. Limiting the growth of nuclear weapons and delivery systems available to the Pentagon under de’tente had been an ongoing process with the Soviets under two previous presidents with agreed to protocols and expectations. Now Carter suddenly shifted the SALT structure from limitation to deep cuts forcing an unprepared Vance to fly off to meet the unprepared Soviets with a proposal that was guaranteed to fail.

Brzezinski’s aggressive approach was no surprise to some on his staff who believed the offer was intended as a trick to “show up the Soviets for what they were.” But the evidence of Brzezinski’s rigging the deck against Vance was even clearer. David J. Rothkopf writes, “Brzezinski shepherded the process closely and even went so far as having William Hyland, working for the NSC, oversee the delivery of the negotiating instructions to ensure that they did not get into the hands of the State Department until the instant of their departure.”

With Vance’s hands tied by the President, a Russophobic Brzezinski expanding nuclear targeting options from 25,000 to 40,000 and covert action teams sabotaging behind Soviet lines from early 1977 onward, it doesn’t take much to imagine what the Soviets were thinking. Brzezinski and Carter were letting the Soviets know they were ripping up SALT and De’tente as well as the very assumptions both were based on. Rothkopf quotes Carter Defense Secretary Harold Brown. “Brzezinski had, I think, a more apocalyptic view of the world and especially a different attitude toward the Soviets” he believed that concessions to the Russians merely encouraged them to press further, and he was willing to use almost any device or any other relationship with other countries to contain them.”

Brown goes on to say Brzezinski believed that the United States “should use China as a weapon against the Soviets”. But it was in Afghanistan, in the run up to the Afghan crisis where the results of Brzezinski’s weaponizing can best be seen not to mention the faint traces of off-the-books secret agencies helping him do it. Selig Harrison , former Washington Post foreign correspondent and Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace commented on Brzezinski’s role in fomenting the crisis in Afghanistan in his book, co-authored with Diego Cordovez Out of Afghanistan: “Brzezinski had steadily eroded Vance’s power, persuading the President to transfer jurisdiction over the CIA from the Inter-Agency Policy Review Committee, headed by the Secretary of State, to the National Security Council’s Special Coordinating Committee [SCC] which Brzezinski chaired as the National Security Advisor. This control over covert operations enabled Brzezinski to take the first steps toward a more aggressively anti-Soviet Afghan policy without the State Department’s knowing much about it.”

Brzezinski’s plot to weaponize China against Russia by sacrificing Afghanistan was straight out of James Burnham’s Machiavellians and the spontaneous April, 1978 Marxist coup against the King’s cousin, Mohammed Daoud played like clockwork directly into his “predictions” of Soviet infiltration and subversion. Harrison writes, “Vance recalls that the April coup was depicted by Brzezinski as the opening gambit in a Soviet master plan for achieving hegemony in Southwest Asia. It would be followed in due course, Brzezinski argued, by the incorporation of Afghanistan into the Soviet orbit and ultimately by political and military moves to subjugate the Gulf oil-producing states.”

Vance rejected Brzezinski’s argument out of hand. As supported at the time by the State Department’s own intelligence and later revealed by post-Soviet research, the coup appeared to be a spur of the moment outburst by disorganized, repressed political factions unsure of exactly what they were doing. Vance found no evidence of Soviet complicity in the coup and even Brian Crozier would later have to admit in his autobiography that none would ever materialize. In fact, the evidence suggests that the 1978 Marxist coup in Afghanistan was the end result of CIA, Pakistani and Iranian efforts to undermine Daoud’s regime, and was only supported by the Soviets after it had become a fait accompli. Brzezinski’s prediction was ideological wish-fulfillment, more in line with discredited right-wing ISC reports or something conjured by the mind of Team B than with any sober professional analysis of Soviet intentions. And, had it been the first shot in a Soviet master plan to seize Southwest Asia and the Middle East, the April coup plotters Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin would never have been Moscow’s choice to lead it. According to David Newsom, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs who visited Kabul after the coup and met with the coup leaders, “My assessment was that we were dealing with a regime that hadn’t found itself. There were divisions in it and it was still on probation in Soviet eyes.”

Terror in Soviet eyes was more like it. The coup plotters were divided into two main factions that fought bitterly and the coup organizer, Hafizullah Amin had been brought to the United States by a CIA front organization on two separate occasions to be educated. According to the KGB chief Alexander Morozov, the KGB later discovered Amin’s instructions to the plotters severely forbade them from informing the Russians of the plan lest they try to stop it. Amin had even admitted to the KGB that he’d taken money from the CIA. He had studied for a doctorate at Columbia University and headed up the Afghan Student Association at a time when (as exposed by Ramparts Magazine) it too was being used as a CIA recruitment tool for future Third World leaders. Hafizullah Amin was now one of those leaders and Vance was sending a new, tough and savvy American Ambassador to Kabul named Adolph “Spike” Dubs to deal with him.

A Russian-speaking Soviet specialist who’d served in Moscow and as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near East and South Asia Affairs, Dubs came with a complex plan to bring Amin closer to the U.S. but not close enough to set off alarms in Moscow. The Carnegie Endowment’s Selig Harrison had flown into Kabul to meet with him after he’d taken over in the summer of 1978 and found him optimistic. We interviewed Harrison in his Washington office in 1993 about Dubs’ plan. “Dubs” came out there with a very sophisticated conception of what he was going to do politically; which was to try to make Amin into a Tito — or the closest thing to a Tito/Ceausescu — detach him. He’d still be pretty close to the Russians but he’d have more freedom of action and it would be enough to make it safe from our point of view. And Brzezinski of course thought that was all nonsense” which as you say was all part of a self-anointed prophecy. It was all very useful to the people like Brzezinski. Afghanistan was a great vindication of their point of view and so they were trying to polarize the situation.”

Copyright – 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski’s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’e’tat —

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

OpEdNews 6/24/18  blogguest Veterans Today

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Horace_Vernet_-_La_Barrière_de_Clichy256

The 1814 Battle of Paris was between Russia, Austria and Prussia against France. The French surrendered March 31, forcing Napoleon to abdicate and go into exile. [Public domain]

“Psychological Action has nothing to do with the intellect, and everything to do with gut emotions. Having made a list, the next step is to find the right things to say to carefully select groups of voters.” Brian Crozier, Free Agent 1941-1991

The 1975 creation of the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict, WISC was not the first time British intelligence had directly interfered in a contentious struggle for political power in the United States.  London had a direct hand in bringing the U.S. into both World Wars I and II. The British had schooled American OSS agents in the “dark arts” of trickery and deception during World War II, including future Reagan CIA director William Casey who’d served as OSS station chief in London. The post war CIA would be modeled on the political and secret services of the British Empire’s notorious East India Company; a company that would so impress banker and former Kennedy/Johnson Under Secretary of State and Bilderberg co-founder George Ball, he recommended it as a model for a world corporate government to replace the obsolete “nation state”. The CIA had worked hand in hand with Britain’s Information Research Department, IRD to establish the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and helped to fund Brian Crozier’s Institute for the Study of Conflict, ISC. But the WISC represented a new era in British involvement by marking a direct infusion of ultra-right-wing European and British politics into the highest level of Washington thinking without anyone realizing what it was or what it intended to do to American democracy.

The purpose for ISC’s founding in 1970, as stated by Crozier in his autobiography Free Agent was “in exposing the fallacies of ‘détente’ and warning the west of the dangers inherent in a policy of illusion”; the illusion being that the West could ever have any peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union. The “Institute” got off to a quick start in the U.S. by forging an alliance with the National Strategy Information Center, NSIC a right-wing neoconservative think tank founded by Frank Barnett, William Casey and Joseph Coors in 1962 and with links to the defense industry’s original anti-labor think tank, the American Security Council. ISC’s first major triumph came a short time later as a result of a collaboration with the ultra-right-wing Pinay Cercle when Crozier, his protégé Robert Moss and two ISC board members, Sovietologist Robert Conquest and Congress for Cultural Freedom editor Leo Labedz, produced an ISC Special Report attacking the basis for “peaceful co-existence” (and therefore the legitimacy of détente with the Soviet Union) called European Security and the Soviet Problem.

The study, financed by the right-wing Pinay group made no bones about its “Soviet problem” actually being the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists had been hoping to solve since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812. “The present rulers of the Soviet Union are heirs to the Tsar’s dominions,” it reads on page 1; concluding that “Their foreign policy is thus a hybrid of Great Russian imperialism and Marxist-Leninist ideology.” In a development that would have made George Orwell grin, Crozier’s team had turned the truth on its head by transforming Soviet calls for peace into a weapon to weaken western resolve thereby “making peace” a new a kind of waging war and anyone who aspired to it as part of a Soviet conspiracy.

Determined to undermine détente, the aging right-wing former French Prime Minister, Antoine Pinay was so delighted with Crozier’s double-speak he presented the study in person to both President Nixon and Henry Kissinger and by 1975 the group was staged to make their move on Washington. The timing was perfect.

On March 3, 1975, less than two months before the fall of Saigon, the US Committee of the ISC (USISC) was launched which would act as the parent body of the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict. With the humiliation of Vietnam now a millstone around the neck of the Washington bureaucracy, Crozier and Pinay’s extremism no longer looked so extreme. The ISC had been created specifically with CIA backing to give discredited right-wing, anti-Communist and anti-union clichés in Britain the cover of legitimacy. Or as Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan write in their book The Terrorism Industry,  “ISC would provide anti-communist propaganda under the guise of ‘independent research’ and analysis… based on ‘evidence’ that came from the files of well-known and discredited right-wing organizations whose material only took on respectability when laundered through ISC.”

The ISC’s stamp of approval had provoked the British intelligence services to act on their own disinformation and black propaganda to the extent they had plotted to overthrow an elected British government in a military coup and replace it with one to their liking. Now the group that had manufactured that black propaganda for the British military to use, the ISC was establishing an American satellite organization to do the same in the U.S.

Despite the growing public scandal over the CIA’s use of Crozier’s Forum World Features as a London-based fake news service, Washington’s elites were rolling out the red carpet to welcome them and were leaving some British journalists bewildered. Steve Weissman summed up his astonishment in an August 1976 article for London’s Embassy Magazine. “Crozier, of course, isn’t the only one to be acutely embarrassed by the CIA scandals. But his story touches on what might become one of the more intriguing questions of the entire affair. For even as the [U.S.] Congress was investigating some of Crozier’s covert propaganda activities in Latin America, he and his colleagues were helping to set up a new Institute for the Study of Conflict right in the heart of Washington, D.C. And among the Americans involved with him in this highly suspect intervention into the American political scene are two of the most likely candidates [George Ball and Zbigniew Brzezinski] to serve as the next Secretary of State.”

Under the Chairmanship of Ball, WISC appeared a veritable who’s who of high-level ex-CIA, neoconservative and right-wing influencers bent on striking back at the Soviet Union for their humiliation in Vietnam. Senator John McCain’s father, the Admiral John S. McCain Junior, recent Commander in Chief of US Pacific Forces (CINCPAC) and a board member of the Military/Industrial think tank American Security Council had worked closely with ISC to get the WISC off the ground. Rhodes Scholar and NSIC President Frank Barnett was another committee member with long held ties to hardline neoconservative organizations such as the Smith Richardson Foundation and American Security Council.  Kermit Roosevelt, high level CIA officer who’d staged the 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew the duly elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and senior CIA officer Robert W. Komer architect of the U.S. government’s notorious Phoenix Program in Vietnam.  From Georgetown University came WISC’s first President James Theberge, who’s two books on Soviet influence in the Caribbean – helped provide the pretexts for overthrowing Chile’s legitimately elected leftist president Salvador Allende. And then there was Richard Pipes, the virulently anti-Soviet history professor from Harvard University, who would soon be hand-picked for his political bias to lead a radical right-wing, neoconservative attack on the CIA known as Team B. Using the ISC’s methodology of fabricated threats and disinformation to win over intelligence elites at the CIA, Team B was at first seen by some inside the agency for what it was: “[A]n ideological, political foray, not an intellectual exercise. We knew the people who were pleading for it;” said one intelligence professional. Acquiesced to by then CIA director George Bush, in retrospect Team B’s politicized challenge to the CIA’s authority is viewed by many as the central mistake that permanently crippled the agency’s effectiveness. In the words of Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985, Pipes and the Team B were the real reason for the intelligence failures represented by 9/11 because they were “hard-liners who created the concept out of an unwillingness to accept the unbiased and balanced judgments of intelligence professionals.”

But in the end the Team B gained friends and influence inside the broader intelligence and defense community and with the appointment of fellow WISC member Zbigniew Brzezinski as President Carter’s national security advisor, British intelligence agent Brian Crozier’s plan to infiltrate and subvert the détente process with the Soviet Union was complete.

That is not to say Brian Crozier was at all happy with the election of Jimmy Carter. He writes in his autobiography Free Agent, “Although fundamentally pro-American, I was explicitly and actively anti-Carter. Not only had I attacked Jimmy Carter’s policies in my National Review and Now! columns and elsewhere, but I had also provided anti-Carter material to other journalists, American as well as British.”

Crozier believed the Carter election would only worsen “the self-emasculation of American intelligence”. His belief “[T]hat the entire security apparatus of the United States was in a state of near collapse,” provoked yet another move to interfere in American politics, but this time beyond disinformation and black propaganda and into directed action. “The question was whether something could be done in the private sector – not only in Britain, but in the United States and other countries of the Western Alliance.” He writes in his autobiography.  “A few of us had been exchanging views, and decided that action was indeed possible. I took the initiative by convening a very small and very secret meeting in London.”

Crozier’s secret meeting in “the luxurious executive suite of a leading City of London bank on the morning of Sunday 13 February 1977” would produce a secret off-the books “Private Sector Intelligence agency, beholden to no government, but at the disposal of allied or friendly governments for certain tasks which, for one reason or another, they were no longer able to tackle…” including “[S]ecret counter-subversion operations in any country in which such actions were deemed feasible.”

The name of Crozier’s operation was the 6I, obscure shorthand for the 6th International, a name that harkened back to Crozier’s mentor, James Burnham, secretary to the Communist 4th International’s Leon Trotsky from 1934 – 1940.  But Crozier needn’t have worried about the Carter administration’s anti-Russian resolve. Carter and Brzezinski had rewired the command structure at the White House before they’d even entered the Oval Office and within a short time of their arrival had maneuvered the government away from détente and a bi-lateral foreign policy toward the Soviet Union and China toward the right-wing goals of the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict.

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski‘s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’état –

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

OpEdNews 6/22/2018  Veterans Today blogspot NexusNewsFeed.com

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep!

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

The_Empire_Needs_Men_WWI 256 pixel

While the British were urging men of the empire to fight in WWI, they were secretly forcing President Wilson to enter the war against the will of the American people.  [Public Domain]

“The ultimate sophistication of subversion is to take over the government, not by unlawful but by lawful means.

Brian Crozier, Free Agent 1941-1991

According to the dean of American intelligence scholars Loch K. Johnson as reported in the New York Times, the real story about alleged “Russian meddling” in America’s presidential election is that the United States meddles in other nation’s elections and in a big way. But the extent of Britain’s secret services meddling in American politics – at least since – the beginning of the 20th century would shock even the most devout cheerleaders of ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele and his “dirty dossier”.

In a case oddly reminiscent of America’s current hysteria over the Russians, British intelligence even meddled with its own government back in the mid-1970s when panicked right-wing elements of the military plotted a coup d’ etat of Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson based on information generated by their own disinformation campaign about the Soviet Union. As told by Colin Wallace, a psychological warfare specialist for the British army working to smear Wilson and other British politicians as Soviet puppets: “One of the main byproducts of the disinformation campaign in 1973-74 was the dramatic growth of paramilitary organizations. Bearing in mind that these people were motivated for the real reasons one can only surmise that the bulk of the information that they were reacting to was the disinformation which we and other parts of the government apparatus was producing at that stage. One of the other side effects of the psychological operations is that once we actually created false information about an individual or an organization, members of the intelligence community also believed it.”

Do you get that America? In 1974 Britain’s intelligence services plotted the overthrow of their own elected government in London which they had convinced themselves with their own lies had been infiltrated and subverted by KGB agents from Moscow whom they, themselves had invented. Continuing to accuse anyone who opposes the “Russians did it narrative” as working for the Russians is what used to be called paranoid right-wing McCarthyism, and the anti-Putin bureaucracy is pouring gasoline on themselves by continuing to push it. The Democratic Party has long used falsified evidence to move the United States to war against London’s enemies and the British government has a reputation for producing dirty dossiers to help them. The “leak” of the 1917 Zimmerman telegram(conveniently intercepted by British intelligence) was “arranged” so as to make it politically impossible for Democratic President Woodrow Wilson to fulfill his promise to keep the United States out of World War I. In the spring of 1940, more than a year and half before America’s entry into World War II, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) created a massive covert operation in New York City known as the British Security Coordination(BSC) to conduct an illegal campaign of political subversion, propaganda and sabotage inside the United States (to frame Germany). Initiated by Winston Churchill with the private approval of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and the cooperation of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who insisted “that no other US government department, including the Department of State should be informed of it”, BSC’s purpose was to manipulate a neutral United States once again into war with Germany. Then once Germany was dispensed with, Winston Churchill followed up with his Iron Curtain speech in the spring of 1946 and the foundation for the Cold War with the Soviet Union was laid.

The documented history of the BSC compiled by BSC officers after the war and published in 1998 as The Secret History of British Intelligence , details how deeply British intelligence penetrated American politics before during and after World War II while providing the inspiration and cultural continuity for America’s Cold War national security state that followed. Military historian Nigel West expresses his disbelief in the introduction. “Overall, the history falls into two distinct parts, pre- and post-Pearl Harbor, and reveals the lengths taken to influence US public opinion and isolationist politicians. In particular the willingness of American radio commentators, then a very influential medium, to peddle what amounted to foreign propaganda, will shock.”

Even more shocking is how today’s influential commentators march in lockstep with their 1940s counterparts in words and deeds as they once again peddle propaganda cooked up in London to undermine an American president and prepare the United States for fighting yet another and most likely final World War against the old British Empire’s most formidable enemy; Russia.

Unconstitutional in the extreme, these kinds of covert operations were privatized in the 1970s to avoid accountability and today work in tandem with corporate/business intelligence services such as London based Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., Hakluyt & Co. and Fusion GPS, but the overall objective remains the same: Manipulating public opinion through subversion, propaganda and sabotage in order to covertly make the case for war a fait accompli. The Trump dossier is a crude piece of unsubstantiated character assassination that circulated for months among journalists who knew better than to use it and that even the FBI has yet to verify. Yet in their wonton desire to delegitimize Trump and his constituency, his enemies in the Democratic Party and Federal bureaucracy, bet the farm on it. Former MI6 agent, author Christopher Steele and his business partner and co-director Christopher Burrows are highly regarded Kremlin experts who’d previously worked at Britain’s Foreign Office.

It’s not unreasonable to ask what two highly regarded Kremlin experts are doing peddling unsubstantiated salacious rumor and innuendo. But as the BSC’s history demonstrates – establishing a “Rumor Factory” – is exactly what MI6 intelligence experts are trained to do, replete with important rules to follow:

1. A good rumour should never be traceable to its source.

2. A rumour should be of the kind which is likely to gain in the telling.

3. Particular rumours should be designed to appeal to particular groups.

4. A particular rumour should have a specific purpose. The objectives of rumor spreading may be many, but a single rumour cannot be expected to serve more than one of them.

5. Rumours are most effective if they can be originated in several different places simultaneously and in such a way that they shuttle back and forth, with each new report apparently confirming previous ones.

Creating a successful rumour assumes of course that you will never get caught in the act and if ever traced back to the source you will never have to testify to it in court. The BSC excelled at devising new ways to harass Nazis. An operation known as Station M was created to fabricate letters and documents and came up with a game called Vik so even civilians could play at it. “A Nazi, they said ‘can be telephoned at all hours of the night and when awakened can be apologetically assured that it is the wrong number; the air can disappear mysteriously out of his motor tires; shops can be telephoned on his behalf and asked to deliver large quantities of useless and cumbersome goods… his lady friend can receive anonymous letters stating that he is suffering from mysterious diseases” a rat might die in his water tank” his favorite dog might get lost.'”

Prior to and all through World War II the BSC prided itself at spreading low brow fabricated rumours about the Nazi leadership in the name of the “forces of Democracy,” and continued on to new lows against the Soviets during the Cultural Cold War through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), and Britain’s CIA-supported Information Research Department the IRD. According to Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of Britain’s Secret Propaganda War , “the vast IRD enterprise had one sole aim: To spread its ceaseless propaganda output (i.e. a mixture of outright lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists who worked for major agencies and magazines, including Reuters and the BBC, as well as every other available channel. It worked abroad to discredit communist parties in Western Europe which might gain a share of power by entirely democratic means, and at home to discredit the British Left”.

London operated as propaganda central in the 1980s for the Soviet War in Afghanistan and a recruitment hub for radical Islamic groups like the Taliban afterward. But the 1970 creation of the IRD’s privatized spinoff, the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) marked an evolution in the degree to which the techniques of infiltration and propaganda could be used to create a façade of legitimacy for right-wing causes. It also provided a platform for a right-wing element of Western intelligence services to plot against their own governments and covertly make the rise of an authoritarian neoconservative agenda a fait accompli.

As presented by Edward Herman and Gerry O’ Sullivan in their 1989 study, The Terrorism Industry,“The London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) provides an especially well-documented case study of the use of a purportedly ‘independent’ institute as a front for propaganda operations of hidden intelligence agency and corporate sponsors. In 1968, and again in the mid-1970s, ISC’s principal, Brian Crozier, was revealed in the British press to have been an agent of British and U.S. intelligence, to have served secretly as a propaganda conduit for the South African police, and to have colluded with British firms and trade associations in a campaign to smear British trade Unions with the tar of subversion. This did not in any way discredit Crozier as a Western expert.”

If Brian Crozier’s exposure as a spy did anything it only enhanced his reputation as a Cold Warrior dedicated to defeating what he called Moscow’s “war called peace.”

As a devoted acolyte of the very first neoconservative, James Burnham, Crozier brought to his secret world of rightwing businessmen, intelligence, police and military officials a strategic plan to use the media to move the West’s liberal democracies to the ideological right by fabricating threats of Communist subversion. In doing so, he got the CIA, Richard Mellon Scaife, The Ford Foundation , Shell Oil, British Petroleum, the Heritage Foundation and an exclusive secretive right-wing business group known as the Pinay Cercle , to pay for it. Crozier shared Burnham’s view that the West and the Soviet Union were in a war for civilization and had to be fought with politics, subversion, terrorism and psychological warfare. Citing Burnham’s oblique defense of Joe McCarthy in his 1954 book The Web of Subversion , his greatest concern was “not with open, professed, Communists,” he wrote in 1976, but “with the underground–the illegal apparatus, and the hidden, secret Communist agents and collaborators.”

Like Burnham, Crozier believed that trade unions, peace groups and the non-communist left had no legitimate concerns of their own but were witting and unwitting fronts for a vast Soviet plot. But his biggest concern was for what he believed to be the KGB’s infiltration and subversion of Western governments which mandated a preemptive counterinsurgency or even military coups d’ etat to thwart. In Britain this took the shape of a covert campaign against the Labor government of Harold Wilson, the discrediting of Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe with “black information” and the replacement of Conservative leader Edward Heath with someone willing to act on the fabricated threats and outright lies the ISC and other right-wing organizations were feeding them. As retold by The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland summarizing the BBC2 docudrama, “The Plot Against Harold Wilson”. “It sounds fantastic, almost comic. But watch [Alexander] Greenwood talk of setting up his own private army in 1974-75. Listen to the former intelligence officer Brian Crozier admit his lobbying of the army, how they ‘seriously considered the possibility of a military takeover’. Watch the archive footage of troop manoeuvres at Heathrow, billed as a routine exercise but about which Wilson was never informed – and which he interpreted as a show of strength, a warning, even a rehearsal for a coup.”

As revealed by West German intelligence officer Hans Langemann in a 1982 Der Spiegel Magazine article titled “Victory for Strauss,” throughout the 1970s Crozier facilitated “a transnational security organization,” that helped to successfully replace numerous labor, liberal or centrist governments with ultra-conservative ones. Working alongside right-wing elements of business, the military and police in France, Britain, Switzerland and the United States, a variety of tactics had extended to “Covert Financial Transactions for Political Purposes”” “Organizing public demonstrations”” “Carrying out international campaigns with the aim of discrediting hostile personalities”” “Recruiting writing contributions by certain, well-known journalists in Britain, the U.S. and other countries,” “Ensuring a lobby in influential circles”” and the establishment of offices “with full-time coordinators and operational plans for London, Washington, Paris, Munich and Madrid.” Left unreported in the United States and thereby unknown to most Americans, Crozier and his ISC were the hidden hand of British intelligence, guiding the post-Vietnam rise of the neoconservatives and the gradual transfer of power through its Washington branch, the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict, WISC – into the hands of a right-wing military industrial cabal bent on using the United States as a host for Britain’s long lost imperial conquest of the Eurasian continent.

Copyright – 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series

Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian “Rumor Factory”

Part 2: America’s “Soviet problem” is the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists have been facing since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812

Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy came to be directed by a diabolical, London-backed, privately funded, neoconservative/right-wing alliance

Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA

Part 5: Brzezinski’s Safari Club “Friends” Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes

Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs – Cui bono? ‘To whom is it a benefit?’

Part 7: The Coup d’e’tat —

Part 2: The post WWII strategy of the neocons has been shaped by Russo phobia against the Soviet Union and now Russia

The Turning on Russia Series

OpEdews Veterans Today

Truthdig Consortiumnews

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

In the months and years following the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, the issue of Israel and its security would become so enmeshed in American policy as to become one and the same.  The lesson of October 1973 that détente had succeeded in securing American and Soviet interests, was anathema to the entire neoconservative agenda and revealed its true hand.  At the time a majority of American Jews were not necessarily against better U.S.-Soviet relations. But with the forceful hammering of influential right-wing neoconservative pundits like Ben Wattenberg and Irving Kristol and the explosive manifestation of the Evangelical Christian Zionist movement, many of Israel’s liberal American supporters were persuaded to turn against détente for the first time. According to the distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff’s Détente and Confrontation; “Analytically and objectively the American-Soviet cooperation in defusing both the Israeli-Arab conflict, and their own involvement in a crisis confrontation, may be judged a successful application of crisis management under détente.”  But as Garthoff acknowledges, this success threatened “Israel’s jealously guarded freedom of action to determine unilaterally its own security requirements,” and set off alarm bells in Tel Aviv and Washington.

With Richard Nixon on the ropes with Watergate and Vietnam dragging to a conclusion, American foreign policy was open to external pressure and within a year would fall permanently into the hands of a coalition of pro-Israel neoconservative and right-wing defense industry lobbying groups. These groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the American Security Council and Committee on the Present Danger would set about to make American interests and their own personal crusade to control the greater Middle East, interchangeable.

The issue of U.S. support for Israel, its neoconservative backers and its dedicated anti-Russian  bias has a long and complicated history dating back long before Theodor Herzl’s19th century Zionist Project. Zionism was not instilled in American thinking by Jews but by 16th and 17th century British Puritans whose sacred mission was to reestablish an ancient Kingdom of Israel and fulfill what they believed to be biblical prophecy based on the King James Version of the bible.

Britain’s Anglo/Israel movement found common cause with the British Empire’s 19th and early 20th century political goals of controlling the Middle East through Jewish resettlement of Palestine which culminated in the Balfour declaration of 1917. This long term plan of the British Empire continues on today through American policy and what has been dubbed the Zionist Project or the Yinon plan. Add the 700 million strong worldwide Evangelical movement and its 70 million Christian Zionists in the United States and American foreign policy towards the Middle East becomes an apocalyptic confluence of covert agendas, ethnic grudges and religious feuds locked in permanent crisis.

It has been argued that the neoconservative’s slavish adherence to Israel makes neoconservatism an exclusively Jewish creation. Numerous neoconservative writers like the New York Times’ David Brooks tar critics of Israel as anti-Semites by accusing them of substituting the term “neoconservative” for “Jew.” Others argue that “neoconservatism is indeed a Jewish intellectual and political movement” with “close ties to the most extreme nationalistic, aggressive, racialist and religiously fanatic elements within Israel.”

Although clearly acting as a political front for Israel’s interests and an engine for permanent war, neoconservatism would never have succeeded as a political movement without the support and cooperation of powerful non-Jewish elites. New America Foundation co-founder Michael Lind writes in The Nation in 2004, “Along with other traditions that have emerged from the anti-Stalinist left, neoconservatism has appealed to many Jewish intellectuals and activists but it is not, for that reason, a Jewish movement. Like other schools on the left, neoconservatism recruited from diverse “farm teams” including liberal Catholics… populists, socialists and New Deal liberals in the South and Southwest… With the exception of Middle East strategy… there is nothing particularly “Jewish” about neoconservative views on foreign policy. While the example of Israel has inspired American neocons… the global strategy of today’s neocons is shaped chiefly by the heritage of cold war anti-Communism.”

Add to that the  abiding influence of Britain’s Imperial policy-makers following World War II – the British creation of Pakistan in 1947 and Israel in 1948 – and the hidden hand of a global imperial strategy is revealed. Pakistan exists to keep the Russians out of Central Asia and Israel exists to keep the Russians out of the Middle East.

Whether American democracy could have survived the stresses put upon it by the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the ongoing frauds posed by neoconservatism now poses an answerable question. It couldn’t. Fletcher School international law professor Michael Glennon maintains the creation of the national security state in 1947 as a second, double government effectively renders the question mute. He writes “The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal. Absent a more informed and engaged electorate, little possibility exists for restoring accountability in the formulation and execution of national security policy.”

The motion to kill détente and hobble Henry Kissinger’s balance of power or “realist” foreign policy quickly followed the 1973 war in the form of the anti-Soviet amendment to the Trade Act known as Jackson-Vanik. Sponsored by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Representative Charles A. Vanik of Ohio but engineered by Albert Wohlstetter acolyte Richard Perle, trade concessions and virtually anything regarding Moscow would be forever linked to the Zionist Project through Jewish emigration to Israel from the Soviet Union.

Supported by organized labor, traditional conservatives, liberals and neoconservatives, Jackson-Vanik hobbled efforts by the Nixon/Ford administration to slow the arms race and move towards a permanent easing of tensions with the Soviet Union. It removed control of American foreign policy from the President and Secretary of State while delivering it permanently into the hands of the old anti-Stalinist/Trotskyist neoconservatives.

Jackson-Vanik overcame liberal support for détente because of an intellectual dishonesty within the non-communist left that had been roiling America’s intelligentsia since the 1930s. That dishonesty had transformed left wing Trotskyists into the CIA’s very own anti-Soviet cultural Cold Warriors and aligned them with the goals of the West’s right-wing. By the1950s their cause was not about left or right, or even liberal anti-Communism versus Stalinism. It was about exchanging a value system of laws and checks and balances for a system alien to America. As Frances Stoner Saunder’s describes in her book The Cultural Cold War, it was simply about grabbing power and keeping it. “‘It’s so corrupt, it doesn’t even know it,’ said [legendary Random House editor] Jason Epstein, in an uncompromising mood. ‘When these people talk about a “counter-intelligentsia”, what they do is to set up a false and corrupt value system to support whatever ideology they’re committed to at the time. The only thing they’re really committed to is power, and the introduction of Tzarist-Stalinist strategies in American politics. They’re so corrupt they probably don’t even know it. They’re little, lying apparatchiks. People who don’t believe in anything, who are only against something, shouldn’t go on crusades or start revolutions.”

But neoconservatives did go on crusades and start revolutions and continued to corrupt the American political process until it was unrecognizable.  In 1973 neoconservatives did not want the United States having better relations with Moscow and created Jackson-Vanik to obstruct it. But their ultimate goal as explained by Janine Wedel in her 2009 study the Shadow Elite, was a Trotskyist dream; the complete transfer of power from an elected government representing the American people to what she referred to as a “new nomenklatura,” or “guardians of the national interest,” free from the restraints imposed by the laws of the nation. Wedel writes, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York and onetime neoconservative, suggested that this kind of suspension of the rules and processes was what motivated him to part ways with the movement in the 1980s: ‘They wished for a military posture approaching mobilization; they would create or invent whatever crises were required to bring this about.’”

The synthesis of James Burnham’s Cold War ethos (established formally by Paul Nitze in his 1950 NSC-68) together with Trotskyism (espoused by the core neoconservatives) combined with this aggressive new support for Israel empowered America’s neoconservatives with a cult-like political influence over American decision-making that would only grow stronger with time.

As envisaged by James Burnham, the Cold War was a struggle for the world and would be fought with the kind of political subversion he’d learned to master as a leading member of Trotsky’s Fourth International. But joined to Israel by Burnham’s fellow Trotskyists and the underlying influence of British Israelism – it would enter an apocalyptic mythos and resist any and all efforts to bring it to an end. John B. Judis, former editor of the New Republic relates in a 1995 Foreign Affairs book review of the Rise of Neoconservatism by John Ehrman: “In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists or nationalists… The neoconservatives who went through Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to ‘export democracy’ in [Joshua] Muravchik’s words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism.”

Through the eyes of the State Department’s Raymond Garthoff, the moves against détente in 1973 are viewed from the narrow perspective of a professional American diplomat. But according to Judis in his article titled “Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution” the legacy of NSC-68 and Trotskyism contributed to a form of apocalyptic thinking that would slowly exclude the professional policy-making process from the realm of empirical observation and replace it with a politicized mechanism for creating endless conflict. “The constant reiteration and exaggeration of the Soviet threat was meant to dramatize and win converts, but it also reflected the doomsday revolutionary mentality that characterized the old left.”

In the end, Judis argues that the neoconservative success at using self-fulfilling prophecies to kill détente actually made the Cold War far more dangerous by encouraging the Soviet Union to undertake a military buildup and expand its influence which the neoconservatives then used as proof that their theories were correct. In effect, “Neoconservatism was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It helped precipitate the crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations that it then claimed to uncover and respond to.”

Writing in the summer of 1995 with the Cold War finally ended and the storm passed, Judis considered neoconservatism as the subject of ridicule, describing key neoconservatives as merely political anachronisms and not the thriving political dynamo described by John Ehrman in his book. But in the end Ehrman turned out to be right, the neoconservative crusade had not come to a close with the end of the Cold War but had only entered a new and more dangerous phase.

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

Part 1: It’s been done to Russia before but this time will be the last

The Turning on Russia Series

globalresearch.ca

OpEdNews Veterans Today

Truthdig Consortiumnews

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

“Stanley Fischer, the 73–year-old vice chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, is familiar with the decline of the world’s rich.  He spent his childhood and youth in the British protectorate of Rhodesia… before going to London in the early 1960s for his university studies. There, he experienced first-hand the unravelling of the British Empire… Now an American citizen, Fischer is currently witnessing another major power taking its leave of the world stage… the United States is losing its status as a global hegemonic power, he said recently… The U.S. political system could take the world in a very dangerous direction…”

A Shrinking Giant, Spiegel Online, 9/11/2017

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the creation of the so called Wolfowitz Doctrine in 1992 during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, the United States claimed the mantle of the world’s first and only Unipower as well as its intention to crush any nation or system that would oppose it in the future. The New World Order foreseen just a few short years ago becomes more disorderly by the day, made worse by varying degrees of incompetence and greed emanating from Berlin, London, Paris and Washington. As a further sign of the ongoing seismic shocks rocking America’s claim to leadership, by the time Stanley Fischer’s interview appeared in the online version of the conservative German magazine Der Spiegel, he had already announced his resignation as vice chair of the Federal Reserve; eight months ahead of schedule. If anyone knows about the decline and fall of empires it is the “globalist” and former Bank of Israel president, Stanley Fischer. Not only did he experience the unravelling of the British Empire as a young student in London, he actually assisted in the wholesale dismantling of the Soviet Empire during the 1990s.

As an admitted product of the British Empire and point man for its long term imperial aims, that makes Stanley Fischer not just empire’s Angel of Death, but its rag and bone man.

Alongside a handful of Harvard economists led by Jonathan Hay, Larry Summers, Andrei Shleifer, Anatoly Chubais and Jeffry Sachs, (the Harvard Project) Fischer helped to throw 100 million Russians into poverty overnight – privatizing, or as some would say piratizing – the Russian economy. Yet, Americans never got the real story because a slanted anti-Russia narrative covered the true nature of the robbery from beginning to end. As described by public policy scholar and anthropologist Janine R. Wedel in her 2009 book Shadow Elite, “Presented in the West as a fight between enlightenment Reformers trying to move the economy forward through privatization, and retrograde Luddites who opposed them, this story misrepresented the facts. The idea or goal of privatization was not controversial, even among communists… the Russian Supreme Soviet, a communist body, passed two laws laying the groundwork for privatization. Opposition to privatization was rooted not in the idea itself but in the particular privatization program that was implemented, the opaque way in which it was put into place, and the use of executive authority to bypass the parliament.”

Intentionally set up to fail for Russia and the Russian people under the cover of a false narrative, she continues “The outcome rendered privatization ‘a de facto fraud,’ as one economist put it, and the parliamentary committee that had judged the Chubais scheme to ‘offer fertile ground for criminal activity’ was proven right.”

If Stanley Fischer, a man who helped bring about a de facto criminal-privatization-fraud to post-empire Russia says the U.S. is on a dangerous course, the time has arrived for post-empire Americans to ask what role Stanley Fischer played in putting the U.S. on that dangerous course. Unknown to Americans is the blunt force trauma Stanley Fischer and the “prestigious” Harvard Project delivered to Russia under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. According to The American Conservative’s James Carden “As the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted back in 2011… ‘the IMF’s intervention in Russia during Fischer’s tenure led to one of the worst losses in output in history, in the absence of war or natural disaster.’ Indeed, one Russian observer compared the economic and social consequences of the IMF’s intervention to what one would see in the aftermath of a medium-level nuclear attack.”

Neither do most Americans know that it was President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1970s grand plan for the conquest of the Eurasian heartland that boomeranged back to terrorize Europe and America in the 21st century. Zbigniew Brzezinski spent much of his life undermining the Communist Soviet Union and then spent the rest of it worrying about its resurgence as a Czarist empire under Vladimir Putin. It might be unfair to say that hating Russia was his only obsession. But a common inside joke during his tenure as the President’s top intelligence officer was that he couldn’t find Nicaragua on a map. If anyone provided the blueprint for the United States to rule in a unipolar world following the Soviet Union’s collapse it was Zbigniew Brzezinski and if anyone could be said to represent the debt driven financial system that fueled America’s post-Vietnam Imperialism, it’s Stanley Fischer.  His departure should have sent a chill down every neoconservative’s spine. Their dream of a New World Order has once again ground to a halt at the gates of Moscow.

Whenever the epitaph for the abbreviated American century is written it will be sure to feature the iconic role the neoconservatives played in hastening its demise. After emerging from their Marxist/Leninist cocoon after World War II their movement helped to establish the Cold War. And from the chaos created by Vietnam they set to work restructuring American politics, finance and foreign policy to their own purposes. Dominated at the beginning by Zionists and Trotskyists but directed by the Anglo/American establishment and their intelligence elites, the neoconservatives’ goal was to deconstruct the nation-state through cultural cooptation and financial subversion and in that they have been overwhelmingly successful. From the end of World War II through the 1980s the focus of this pursuit was on the Soviet Union, but since the Soviet collapse in 1991, their focus has been on dismantling any and all opposition to their global dominion.

Shady finance, imperial misadventures and neoconservatism go hand in hand. The CIA’s founders saw themselves as partners in this enterprise and the defense industry welcomed them with open arms. McGill University economist R.T. Naylor, author of 1987’s Hot Money and the Politics of Debt, described how “Pentagon Capitalism” had made the Vietnam War possible by selling the Pentagon’s debt to the rest of the world. “In effect, the US Marines had replaced Meyer Lansky’s couriers, and the European central banks arranged the ‘loan-back’” Naylor writes. “When the mechanism was explained to the late [neoconservative] Herman Kahn – lifeguard of the era’s chief ‘think tank’ and a man who popularized the notion it was possible to emerge smiling from a global conflagration – he reacted with visible delight. Kahn exclaimed excitedly, ‘We’ve pulled off the biggest ripoff in history! We’ve run rings around the British Empire.’” In addition to their core of ex-Trotskyist intellectuals early neoconservatives could count among their ranks such establishment figures as James Burnham, father of the Cold War Paul Nitze, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Zbigniew Brzezinski himself.

From the beginning of their entry into the American political mainstream in the 1970s it was known that their emergence could spell the end of democracy in America and yet Washington’s more moderate gatekeepers allowed them in without much of a fight. Peter Steinfels’ 1979 classic The Neoconservatives: The men who are changing America’s politics begins with these fateful words. “THE PREMISES OF THIS BOOK are simple. First,  that a distinct and powerful political outlook has recently emerged in the United States. Second, that this outlook, preoccupied with certain aspects of American life and blind or complacent towards others, justifies a politics which, should it prevail, threatens to attenuate and diminish the promise of American democracy.”

But long before Steinfels’ 1979 account, the neoconservative’s agenda of inserting their own interests ahead of America’s was well underway attenuating American democracy, undermining détente and angering America’s NATO partners that supported it. According to the distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff, détente had been under attack by right-wing and military-industrial forces (led by Senator “Scoop” Jackson) from its inception. But America’s ownership of that policy underwent a shift following America’s intervention on behalf of Israel during the 1973 October war. Garthoff writes in his detailed volume on American-Soviet relations Détente and Confrontation, “To the allies the threat [to Israel] did not come from the Soviet Union, but from unwise actions by the United States, taken unilaterally and without consultation. The airlift [of arms] had been bad enough. The U.S. military alert of its forces in Europe was too much.”

In addition to the crippling Arab oil embargo that followed, the crisis of confidence in U.S. decision-making nearly produced a mutiny within NATO. Garthoff continues, “The United States had used the alert to convert an Arab-Israeli conflict, into which the United States had plunged, into a matter of East-West confrontation. Then it had used that tension as an excuse to demand that Europe subordinate its own policies to a manipulative American diplomatic gamble over which they had no control and to which they had not even been privy, all in the name of alliance unity.”

In the end the U.S. found common cause with its Cold War Soviet enemy by imposing a cease-fire accepted by both Egypt and Israel thereby confirming the usefulness of détente. But as related by Garthoff this success triggered an even greater effort by Israel’s “politically significant supporters” in the U.S. to begin opposing any cooperation with the Soviet Union, at all. Garthoff  writes, “The United States had pressed Israel into doing precisely what the Soviet Union (as well as the United States) had wanted: to halt its advance short of complete encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army east of Suez… Thus they [Israel’s politically significant supporters] saw the convergence of American-Soviet interests and effective cooperation in imposing a cease-fire as a harbinger of greater future cooperation by the two superpowers in working toward a resolution of the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian problem.”

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

A great review of The Voice

The Voice
by Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould

Review by Burl and Merry Hall

5.0 out of 5 stars Towards the Truth!

October 20, 2015

Powerful book, powerful story. At points, I erupted into spiritual ecstasy. If the reader is truly attentive to this book, she may become more attuned to becoming enlightened. She will be enlightened by the history taught in the book regarding the Grail Quest. My personal response to this book is that it is one of many that include the likes of mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychiatrist Carl Jung that can lead us into wholeness. Ok, I’ll also nudge my book, “Sophia’s Web: A Passionate Call to Heal our Wounded Nature.” My point regarding “The Voice” is: Can we let go of our conditioned minds and become virgin, i.e., de-conditioned (the actual meaning of the virgin birth, it wasn’t meant to be literal. Can we let go of our conditioned minds in finding the Grail, the Deep Knowledge of “All-That-Is”? This book is one that will point you towards that knowledge. Not a small profit from such a small inexpensive book. What’s money anyway? For more information on The Voice visit www.grailwerk.com

Our Neocon History Articles 2011-2017

We are finishing up the finale to our Neocon history series. Here are the URLs to the already published articles:

The Neocon Takeover of America Series Published August, 2017

Part 1: Darkness at Noon

Part 2: The West is Disintegrating

Part 3: Engineering Public Perception to the Right for the Right

Part 4: Ceaseless Propaganda, Outright Lies and Distorted Facts

–The Universal Empire Series, Published April, 2017

Part 1: American Imperialism Leads the World Into Dante’s Vision of Hell

Part 2: How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books

Part 3: How the CIA Created a Fake Western Reality for ‘Unconventional Warfare’
Part 4: The Final Stage of the Machiavellian Elites’ Takeover of America

America, an Empire in Twilight Series Published November, 2016

Part 1: When America Became the Dark Force

Part 2: How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Have Been Rendered Irrelevant

Part 3: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American Empire

Part 4: The End of Illusion

FINALE: The Trump Card is played! Never Underestimate THE FOOL

Psychological Warfare and the American Mind Series Published September, 2016

Part 1: A Campaign Where the Lie Became the Truth and the Truth Became the Enemy of the State

Part 2: Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda, the People, the Process & the Product

Part 3: A Clockwork Afghanistan

Part 4: Willie Wonka & the National Security State

Individual Articles

America’s Late Stage Imperial Dementia 11/3/2016

New York Times Strikes Out Again on Afghanistan Published 11/6/2017

What have they done to our fair sister? An Epitaph Published 10/6/2017  

Brzezinski Vision to Lure Soviets into ‘Afghan Trap’ Is Orlando’s Nightmare Published 6/16/2016

America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest Essay 10/14/2015

America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest Published 6/2/2015                                                         

America’s Financial Armageddon and Afghanistan Published 9/14/2011.

New York Times Strikes Out Again on Afghanistan

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
The New York Times building. (Dan DeLuca / Wikimedia)

In the final days of the Soviet Union, an old witticism about truth (pravda) went something like this: In the United States, they tell you everything, but you know nothing. In the USSR, they tell you nothing, but you know everything.

Who would ever be nostalgic for the old Soviet Union, where truth was what the official government mouthpiece told you it was and everything else was a lie meant to undermine the state? Whoever that might be, he or she would feel at home in the now totally neocon-ized U.S., where the old mainstream media marches in lockstep with a dysfunctional federal bureaucracy to aggressively limit freedom of speech and label anything that contradicts its ideological view of reality as enemy propaganda.

From 1918 until its demise in 1991, Pravda was the official newspaper of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. But most Americans would be surprised to learn that The New York Times has been operating for decades as the U.S. government’s Pravda without anyone being the wiser.

Now the truth-war rages between such old mainstream media outlets as The New York Times and any news operation or website that challenges its version of the truth.

We were drawn into this battle by a recent New York Times obituary for our dearest Afghan friend, Sima Wali, who fled the violent Marxist coup in 1978 that kicked off the U.S.-backed rise of Islamic extremism and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.Considering that the Times maintains that the alternative media is filled with false news and Russian propaganda, we were shocked to find many claims in Sima’s obituary that contained American Cold War propaganda about Afghanistan that has long since been debunked. One particularly outrageous example was the claim that in 1978, “gender apartheid” was “imposed by the Communists and then by the Taliban.”

Apparently, The New York Times believes it can turn day to night by blaming communists for introducing gender apartheid, a term adapted (from the South African apartheid regime) in 1996 to draw the public’s attention to the cruelty and human rights abuses imposed by the Taliban on the women of Afghanistan. The communists did not impose it after their takeover in 1978. In fact, the opposite was true. As Sima stated in the introduction to our book, “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” “The draconian Taliban rule stripped women of their basic human rights. Their edicts against women in Afghanistan led to an introduction of a new form of violence termed ‘gender apartheid.’ ” In reality, a major cause for the growth of the resistance to the communists in the more tradition-bound countryside was the forced education of women and girls and the forced removal of the veil. Nor is it understood in the West that many Afghan rulers in the past attempted these reforms with some level of success.

Related Articles Sima Wali obituary | theguardian.com What Have They Done to Our Fair Sister? by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould| truthdig.com

As David B. Edwards writes in his book, “Before Taliban,” there is a direct line between these and other reforms to the reforms mandated by King Amanullah after 1919. He writes, “The transformations that he [Amanullah] sought to bring about before his overthrow in 1929 were in many respects forerunners of those of the Marxists and were particularly revealing of the problems they later encountered.”

An accurate picture of what was done by the communists during their rule in the early 1980s can be read in Jonathan Steele’s 2003 Guardian article, titled “Red Kabul revisited,” in which he compares the U.S. occupation of Kabul in 2003 with Soviet-occupied Kabul of the 1980s:

“In 1981, Kabul’s two campuses thronged with women students, as well as men. Most went around without even a headscarf. Hundreds went off to Soviet universities to study engineering, agronomy and medicine. The banqueting hall of the Kabul hotel pulsated most nights to the excitement of wedding parties. The markets thrived. Caravans of painted lorries rolled up from Pakistan, bringing Japanese TV sets, video recorders, cameras and music centres. The Russians did nothing to stop this vibrant private enterprise.”

Prior to 9/11, Laili Helms, a spokeswoman for and defender of the Taliban and niece to former CIA Director Richard Helms, went so far as to suggest that educating women was a communist plot, claiming that any Afghan woman who could read had to be a communist, because only the communists had educated women. After the American invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, Wali was outraged by this Taliban mentality, which she saw creeping into the American-installed Afghan leadership with the blessing of the American government. In an address to the Global Citizens Circle in Boston in 2003, she stated her objections: “[A]s an Afghan and an American, I will testify to you that the argument against women’s rights is neither Afghan nor Islamic!”

Thirty-four years ago in May, I stood before the irate Afghan press officer for the communist government in Kabul as he threw a copy of The New York Times onto his desk. “Have you read this?” he demanded, pointing to an article by Leslie Gelb, titled “U.S. Said to Increase Arms Aid For Afghan Rebels.” What Gelb, the former Jimmy Carter administration’s assistant secretary of state, had disclosed had angered the Foreign Ministry’s press secretary, Roshan Rowan, and he was holding me, an American, responsible. “Why are you doing this to us?” he shouted. “What is it we have done to you, to deserve this invasion?”

I didn’t need to rely on The New York Times to tell me what was going on in Afghanistan. As the first American journalist to risk the wrath of the Ronald Reagan administration, with its newly installed neoconservative foreign policy, by bringing a news crew to Kabul in 1981, I was one of only a handful of Americans who knew the score. The United States was backing Muslim guerrillas who were burning down schools specifically for girls and killing local officials, whether they were communist or not. The Gelb article made clear that in collaboration with the Saudis, Egyptians, Chinese, Iranians and Pakistanis, the “bleeders” inside the Reagan administration were upping the ante in order to “draw more and more Soviet troops into Afghanistan,” while at the same time claiming to pursue “a negotiated settlement to the war.” It was not obvious from the Gelb article how the United States could be escalating a conflict while negotiating a settlement at the same time in Afghanistan in 1983. Also missing from the article was any indication that the administration’s policy was a fundamental contradiction.

In the spring of 1983, we had invited Roger Fisher, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, to return with us to Kabul to unwrap the riddle of why the United Nations negotiations were getting nowhere. Contracted to ABC’s “Nightline,” Fisher met with the Kremlin’s chief Afghan specialist, who had flown down from Moscow and told him point blank, “We want to get out. Give us six months to save face, and we’ll leave the Afghans to solve their own problems.” Upon his return, Fisher expected his discovery would be greeted with relief. Instead he found that “negotiated settlement” was only a fig leaf for escalating the war. The mainstream media were just beginning to ramp up a propaganda campaign, which would become known as Charlie Wilson’s War, to drive support for keeping the Soviets pinned down in their own Vietnam while bleeding Sima Wali’s Afghanistan to death.

The American people expect the full story from their “free press,” and the Constitution demands that the press serve the people and not the bureaucracy. The New York Times needs to get its mission straight, lest it sacrifice its credibility to the very thing it claims to stand against. Left-wing Afghan communists cannot be magically transformed into right-wing Pakistani Taliban. The United States is not the Soviet Union, and The New York Times should stop behaving as if it is Pravda.

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