The Dark Answers to Imperialism, JFK and Afghanistan are hidden in the Mystical–Two Authors’ Journey of Discovery
OpEdNews January 13, 2022
Jack’s Blog January 15, 2022
By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould
The first thing an academic tells you when you mention the mystical side of Afghanistan is that you shouldn’t talk about that. The study of foreign policy cannot be seen as motivated by anything other than rational and objective reasons and measured by the metrics of quantitative analysis. How then to explain ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the first director of the OSS and the father of today’s CIA calling his agents Knights Templars?
How then to explain the American military’s fascination with medieval knighthoods? How then to explain the use of New Testament biblical passages engraved on the gunsights of American and British troops in Afghanistan? How then to explain American exceptionalism whereby the United States gets to do anything it pleases because America is right no matter what it does or how it does it?
People have heard about the holy warriors of the Muslim world, but what most Americans are unaware of is the mystical component of the warriors who fight for America and how that component has been setting the agenda for American politics from behind the scenes with no public scrutiny.
In Maine they use the expression “You can’t get there from here,” to explain this sort of disconnect. It’s being used to make the point that you can’t get exoteric Afghanistan unless you understand the esoteric and you can’t understand the esoteric without accepting your own personal motivationsIn researching for our books, we discovered a trove of esoteric history surrounding the West’s attraction to Afghanistan starting with the British. It revolves around Mystical Imperialism, a term first used to describe 19th-century British imperial efforts to colonize the non-Christian world by applying Judeo Christian ethics and philosophies.
Simply put, mystical imperialism rationalizes the expansion of a nation’s authority by conquest over other nations by infusing a sense of the divine into the raw politics of empire building. Today’s practitioners of American mystical imperialism are a hardened core of ideological defense intellectuals and military officers who combine their own esoteric and religious beliefs with Washington policy making.
These individuals can trace their philosophical DNA back to 19th-century European secret esoteric societies who were known to be heavily involved in espionage on both British and Russian sides. Reflected in the fictional quasi-Masonic exploits of Rudyard Kipling’s two soldiers in The Man Who Would be King, the “hidden” or occult game for control of Afghanistan and Central Asia was a factor in the foreign policy of the 19th century for the British and the Russians, and continues to this day through the United States
Afghanistan’s most notorious ‘Holy Warrior’ Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
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As the ancient home of Zoroaster and the Avesta, the foundation document for the Judeo/Christian war of light against dark, of good versus evil, 19th-century Afghanistan and its surroundings provided a mystical underpinning to what today is dryly regarded as geopolitics.
Described as the “World-Island” by early 20th-century British geo-strategist Halford Mackinder, Russia’s geographic position at the center of the Eurasian land mass rivaled
Britain’s as an island fortress. Mackinder foresaw Russia expanding with ferocity beyond its borders. From the outset – a Russian dominance of Central Asia spawned nightmares for the British of an apocalyptic horde sweeping from the Russian steppe across Europe, which had to be stopped at any cost.
Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, supported an expedition in 1934 with the intention of establishing a spiritual settlement in the Himalayas. Wallace expressed his enthusiasm for the plan known as the Shambhala Project, stating that, “the political situation in this part of the world is always rendered especially intriguing by the effect on it, of ancient prophecies, traditions and the like.” Wallace anticipated that those prophecies were at last coming due.
Hidden to human eyes, Shambhala was said, by Tibetan Buddhists, to lie somewhere near Tibet and would finally be revealed at the end of time. Others believed it was hidden in the valleys of the Pamir mountain range in Northeastern Afghanistan. This was the Shambhala that concealed the lost wisdom, the secrets of immortality and the beginnings of the human race. Adolph Hitler sent an expedition to Tibet and Afghanistan in 1939 in the hopes of uncovering proof of Aryan links to modern German society in the soil of Central Asia.
From Halford Mackinder at the beginning of the 20th century to the American Cold Warrior James Burnham, the godfather of neo-conservatism, to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the
Grand Master of Geostrategic American foreign policy, Eurasia represented the central basis for American global primacy, in a world defined by Manichean opposites. In a 1945 Partisan Review article titled “Lenin’s Heir” Burnham, while still at the OSS, infused his apocalyptic political views with mystical allusions to the Eurasian heartland as “the magnetic core” of Soviet power, comparing it to the mystical “reality of the One-of-Neo-Platonism,” whose inexorable and unstoppable “progression… descends through the stages of Mind, Soul, and Matter… towards its ultimate destination beyond the Eurasian boundaries and through…Appeasement and Infiltration England and the United States.”
As an “anti-Communist ideology” Burnham’s apocalyptic warnings about the inevitability of Soviet expansion from Eurasia’s magnetic core ring like a medieval theologian’s incantation throughout Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech, which set the terms of the Cold War.
Twenty-six years later, Senator William Fulbright would realize that only because of the disastrous outcome of Vietnam was there any willingness to reexamine the basic assumptions of the Cold War. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known as SALT, would spring from this rational re-assessment, as would the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and eventually SALT II.
President Jimmy Carter and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev sign the Strategic Arms Limitation
Talks (SALT II) treaty, June 18, 1979, in Vienna.
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But because of National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s unyielding hostility toward any compromise with the Soviet Union over Afghanistan, President Carter would ask the Senate to delay consideration of the treaty on the Senate floor. That treaty would never be passed and the United States would begin a long slow march into what Burnham described as the magnetic core of the World Island.
Our initiation into the realm of Mystical Imperialism began six months before the December 27, 1979, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan while we were producing Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance, a documentary for televangelist Pat Robertson‘s Christian Broadcast Network (CBN).
The station had been airing the American Security Council‘s The Salt Syndrome, a propaganda film railing against the passage of SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) that would limit defense spending. As host of CBN’s public affairs show, our documentary was to be the rebuttal to The Salt Syndrome as required by the Fairness Doctrine. We were aware that Robertson’s proselytizing on his flagship 700 Club program was already engaged in a religious crusade to change America.
While working on the documentary our eyes were opened to a merging of powerful pro war political, business, and religious interests that were using their combined influence to push America into a Holy War against the Soviet Union.
As we continued to work on the production, experts from the opposite side of the political spectrum, such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith, informed us about the damage that a massive diversion of tax dollars would represent to the civilian economy. Galbraith insisted that accelerated defense spending following the end of the Vietnam War–as the military-industrial complex was demanding–would destroy the civilian economy.
He was convinced that the Cold War had already made America more like the Soviet Union, ideologically rigid, increasingly orthodox and ruled by a military-industrial-academic establishment suspended from reality.
By the time our program aired, the argument was no longer whether our government should call a halt to the nuclear arms race and reinvest in the civilian economy. According to President Carter the December 27, 1979, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.
That statement instantly rolled back the narrative to 1947, the Truman Doctrine and the psychological warfare campaign necessary to bring it back to life. We realized that the powerful pro-war political, business, and religious interests calling for Holy War in The SALT Syndrome had just won the brass ring.
The point man for that campaign was Zbigniew Brzezinski. As an acolyte of geo-strategist Halford Mackinder, Brzezinski believed the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan and its pursuit of global dominance was foreordained and not subject to rational empirical observations.
Beginning in 1978, Brzezinski had been dialoguing with the Chinese and the Pakistanis over Soviet influence in Afghanistan and how to respond to it. In the summer of 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, Brzezinski had President Carter sign a finding enabling propaganda support to the insurgency that would help draw the Soviets into what Brzezinski referred to as “the Afghan trap.”
When the Kabul government expelled the Western media one month after the Soviet invasion, we jumped at the chance to get behind the propaganda and break the news blackout. Once we had secured the visas in the spring of 1981, a friend in local TV news connected us to CBS Foreign News Editor Peter Larkin. Larkin was an intense man–Saigon bureau chief during the Vietnam War–and wanted the story immediately.
What we saw in Kabul was indeed in stark contrast to the picture playing on evening news. After struggling with our footage for a month CBS finally aired a segment about the Soviet troops that we didn’t see. Our involvement with CBS News was the beginning of an education in the MSM’s fact-free restructuring of the Afghan narrative that continues to hold sway today.
Following the distribution of Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, a PBS documentary we produced in 1982, we got a call from Major Karen McKay of the Committee for a Free Afghanistan. She complained that we didn’t mention anything about the Soviets’ use of chemical weapons in the documentary.
We explained those charges hadn’t been proved. But the Major countered that since the New York Times and the Washington Post had accepted her evidence why wouldn’t we.
Because, we explained, the claims we’d reviewed came from second- or third-hand sources or were based on hearsay evidence. Then we politely suggested what seemed like common sense, that the Major could make a better case if she had some hard evidence. Major McKay’s answer was revelatory as she snapped, “When it comes to the Russians we don’t need proof. We know they’re guilty.”
Once again, it was made very clear to us that when it came to the MSM narrative, facts REALLY didn’t matter.
When the third opportunity to challenge the MSM’s narrative arrived, we still had hope and again jumped at the chance. In the spring of 1983 we returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation Project Director Roger Fisher for ABC’s Nightline.
Our aim was to establish the credibility of the American claims that the Soviets had no intention of withdrawing from Afghanistan. We had a number of credible sources stating that the Kremlin wanted desperately to abandon the war, but the Reagan administration was dragging its feet.
From the moment they entered the White House the new administration had demanded that the Soviets withdraw their forces, while at the same time keeping them pinned down through covert action so they couldn’t leave. Though lacking in factual backup, this hypocritical campaign was embraced by the entire American political spectrum and our effort with Roger Fisher to further the negotiation process remained willfully unexamined by America’s mainstream media.
By 1987 we were so frustrated with getting nowhere at changing the official narrative with the facts on the ground we had to question all our assumptions about journalism. If facts did not matter, what did?
That’s when we looked at our story from a personal perspective and wondered what had called us to the Afghan story in the first place. We started writing screenplays out of our accumulated materials and research and by the end of the 1980s had completed four. But we had yet to find the right path to tell our story.
Then in September of 1991, our ten-year-old daughter Alissa told us about a dream she had with Paul’s deceased father whom she had never met. He was accompanied by a man wearing a Scottish plaid suit with bell-bottom trousers and a matching hat. The man told Alissa he was 800 years old. We already knew the Fitzgerald family had come to Ireland as mercenaries for King Henry II 800 years before and decided to consider Alissa’s dream as a mystical encouragement to dig deeper into the past for answers.
Three months later we saw Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, and found the inspiration we had been looking for. Stone’s decision to include the involvement of an esoteric secret society with deeper motives resonated with us.
In our research into the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1170, an enterprise largely run by the Fitzgerald family, we had discovered historical reasons why members of some secret societies might have been motivated to eliminate JFK in the modern era as retribution for past “crimes.” We then developed The Voice research paper with the hope that Stone would become interested in this esoteric perspective too, but he wanted our Afghanistan story instead.
Maurice FitzGerald as shown in the Expugnatio Hibernica, written in 1189 by his nephew, Gerald of Wales
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Once we began to work on the script, the mythic implications of the Afghan story began to emerge when many of the documents preceding the crisis were declassified. As we trailed the clues, we found pseudo-religious references in Washington’s official policy to the Manichean war of the light against the dark-whose origins began in the region now known as Afghanistan.
We then discovered a synchronistic connection that we could not have imagined. One of the books we had purchased was written by an ex-CIA agent about British efforts in the 19th century. In the book were many photos of prominent Brits and Afghans and of the battles they fought. But also included were photos of two
Americans. One of these men was dressed wearing a Scottish plaid suit with bell-bottomed trousers and a matching turban. The photo was of Alexander Gardner, a mercenary who’d found his way to Afghanistan in the 1820s. He’d discovered the religion of Zoroaster settled in the mountains and married an Afghan Princess. He not only lived the real life of Rudyard Kipling’s Man Who Would Be King; it has been said Gardner provided Kipling with essential information for his novel.
Alissa confirmed that day when she came home from school that the soldier in the photo wearing a clan uniform of his own design, was the man from her dream. Alissa had somehow tapped a synchronicity about our Afghan adventure that gave it a deeper meaning.
Colonel Alexander Gardner
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As we continued to develop The Voice as a novel, over time Stone became intrigued and asked us to connect its esoteric background with the fact-based Afghanistan script. Now titled Three Nights of Desmond, we found ourselves merging the past, present, and future into a very different kind of story.
In writing the script, the antagonist (modeled after CBS Foreign News Editor Peter Larkin) emerged as a tragic archetype: an angry, wounded veteran who was determined to twist the Afghanistan story to get back at the Soviets for what he believed they had done to him in Vietnam. In The Voice, published in 2001, the character had matured as a victim of his own propaganda. Through that narrative the character of Alissa, as Paul’s daughter, resolved the conflict between the “Larkin” character and Paul.
Even though Alissa had no involvement in our work, over the decades many of our Afghan contacts, that she had never met, continued to cross into her life as if by magic. The most powerful synchronicity occurred when she came to meet the real Peter Larkin through her friendship with his daughter Brett. We had known nothing about this friendship until December 23, 2011, when Peter and Brett arrived at our home for a holiday party at 7:00 pm as guests of Alissa.
Having the man who launched us into our Afghan saga join with us for our holiday party was beyond surreal. It was as if a dream had materialized before our eyes. The novelized encounter between Paul and Peter through Alissa (which had been foreshadowed in The Voice) had been delivered to us through our front door. The reality of the script we struggled to write for Stone had finally written itself. It was a revelatory moment produced by our daughters that completed a journey begun 30 years before between two competing storytellers.
CONCLUSION
Back in 1979 when we first encountered the MSM’s propaganda Afghan narrative we could not have imagined that narrative would still be presented as fact in 2021. The science is very clear; a narrative built with no facts is still more powerful at changing minds than facts alone. This MSNBC report is a stark reminder of that fact. From the ancient oral to the modern written tradition humans have always been drawn to stories. The power of narratives to transform people’s views is well documented. Like a recipe being offered as food, presenting even solid facts without framing it in a narrative is not enough to motivate most people to action. Our big breakthrough came when we realized that the power to win hearts and minds was not by trying to change the MSM’s empty narrative; it was in creating a new narrative with our own facts. When you create a good story out of solid facts that is truly food for thought!
We’ve often wondered what would have changed in the American dialogue on the JFK assassination if Oliver Stone had created a film based on the concept we gave him in 1992; going back to the origin of the Fitzgerald family and their dicey relationship with London. What Stone did do for us was put us back on the Afghan course we had walked away from; and in that process crossed us over into the mystical telling of our own story. We came to see that the weaving back and forth of the screenplay and the novel had become a way of understanding the multi-dimensional nature of narrative creation. Although our three years of work with Stone did produce the Three Nights of Desmond script concept, it was never fulfilled. Thirty years in the making, we finally brought the script concept created for Stone to fruition as the heart and soul of, The Valediction Three Nights of Desmond and The Valediction Resurrection that will be available next spring. Copyright © 2022 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
Roundtable #5 – “The Quest For The Grail is Resolved: The Oldest Spy Operation In History”
READ OUR ARTICLE: The Dark Answers to Imperialism, Afghanistan and JFK are hidden in the Mystical–Two Author’s Journey of Discovery IT DELIVERS SOME OF WHAT WE’LL BE DISCUSSING IN RT#5
TrineDay’s The Valediction Roundtable Series
Dear friends,
Join with us for a FREE Zoom Event: “ The Quest For The Grail is Resolved The Oldest Spy Operation In History: ” January 19th from 3:00-4:30 pm/ET. You won’t want to miss it! For more about The Valediction Three Nights of Desmond visit valediction.net.
All best, Paul and Liz
Registration Required at Valediction.net/eventlist
Panelists:
- RA “Kris” Millegan, TrineDay publisher “The folks in the shadows who lie, cheat and steal to manipulate us must be exposed so we can create a better world for our children.”
- Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond and The Voice
- Bruce de Torres author of God, School, 9/11 and JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free and moderator
Valediction Roundtable Series: “Exposing the Failure of Empire and Reclaiming the Narrative Creation Process
Roundtable #4 – “Into the Mystic: The Murder of JFK and How It Relates to The Valediction” –
FREE Zoom Event Dec. 8, 2021 from 3:00-4:30 pm/ET Registration Required at Valediction.net/eventlist
For more information visit valediction.net
Panelists:
- RA “Kris” Millegan, TrineDay publisher “The folks in the shadows who lie, cheat and steal to manipulate us must be exposed so we can create a better world for our children.”
- Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond and The Voice
- S.K. Bain, author of The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 As Mass Ritual; Black Jack: The Dawning of the New Great Age of Satan; Most Dangerous: A True Story; and The End Is Only the Beginning: 2022 and the Coming of God
- Jay Dyer, public speaker, lecturer, comedian and author of Esoteric Hollywood: Sex, Cults and Symbols in Film. His graduate work focused on the interplay of film, geopolitics, espionage and psychological warfare.
- Sean Stone, filmmaker (Greystone Park, Enter the Fist, A Century of War, co-host Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, RT news show Watching the Hawks) and author of New World Order: A Strategy of Imperialism
- Sarah Whalen journalist and author of Royal Vengeance, The Assassination of Princess Diana and the Ancient Royal Cult of Human Sacrifice
- Katherine Wilson screenwriter, film-maker and author of Echoes From the Set 1967-2017 — 50 Years of Filming On-Location (Volumes 1 and 2)
- Bruce de Torres author of God, School, 9/11 and JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free and modera
A New Memoir Reveals How Brzezinski’s Chessboard Led to U.S. Checkmate in Afghanistan
Nearly as suspenseful as the Taliban’s meteoric return to power after the final withdrawal of American armed forces from Afghanistan is the uncertainty over what will come next amid the fallout. Many have predicted that Russia and China will step in to fill the power vacuum and convince the facelift Taliban to negotiate a power-sharing agreement in exchange for political and economic support, while others fear [that] a descent into civil war is inevitable. Although Moscow and Beijing potentially stand to gain from the humiliating U.S. retreat by pushing for an inclusive government in Kabul, the rebranded Pashtun-based group must first be removed as a designated terrorist organization. Neither wants to see Afghanistan worsen as a hotbed of jihad, as Islamist separatism already previously plagued Russia in the Caucasus and China is still in the midst of an ongoing ethnic conflict in Xinjiang with Uyghur Muslim secessionists and the Al Qaeda-linked Turkestan Islamic Party. At this point, everyone recognizes the more serious extremist threat lies not with the Taliban but with the emergence of ISIS Khorasan or ISIS-K, the Islamic State affiliate blamed for several recent terror attacks including the August 26th bombings at Hamid Karzai International Airport in the Afghan capital which killed 13 American service members and more than a 100 Afghans during the U.S. drawdown.
Three days later, American commanders ordered a retaliatory drone strike targeting a vehicle which they claimed was en route to detonate a suicide bomb at the same Kabul airport. For several days, the Pentagon falsely maintained that the aerial assault successfully took out two ISIS-K militants and a servile corporate media parroted these assertions unquestioningly, including concocting a totally fictitious report that the blast consisted of “secondary explosions” from devices already inside the car intended for use in an act of terror. Two weeks later, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) was forced to apologize and admit the strike was indeed a “tragic mistake” which errantly killed ten innocent civilians — all of whom were members of a single family including seven children — while no Daesh members were among the dead. This distortion circulated in collusion between the endless war machine and the media is perhaps only eclipsed by the alleged Russian-Taliban bounty program story in its deceitfulness.
If any Americans were aware of ISIS-K prior to the botched Kabul airstrike, they likely recall when former U.S. President Donald Trump authorized the unprecedented use of a Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, informally referred to as the “Mother Of All Bombs”, on Islamic State militants in Nangarhar Province back in 2017. Reportedly, Biden’s predecessor had to be shown photos from the 1970s of Afghan girls wearing miniskirts by his National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, to renege on his campaign pledge of ending the longest war in U.S. history. As it happens, the ISIS Khorasan fighters extinguished by the MOAB were sheltered at an underground tunnel complex near the Pakistani border that was built by the C.I.A. back in the 1980s during the Afghan-Soviet war. Alas, the irony of this detail was completely lost on mainstream media whose proclivity to treat Pentagon newspeak as gospel has been characteristic of not only the last twenty years of U.S. occupation but four decades of American involvement in Afghanistan since Operation Cyclone, the covert Central Intelligence Agency plan to arm and fund the mujahideen, was launched in 1979.
Frank Wisner, the C.I.A. official who established Operation Mockingbird, the agency’s extensive clandestine program to infiltrate the news media for propaganda purposes during the Cold War, referred to the press as its “Mighty Wurlitzer”, or a musical instrument played to manipulate public opinion. Langley’s recruitment of assets within the fourth estate was one of many illicit activities by the national security apparatus divulged in the limited hangout of the Church Committee during the 1970s, along with C.I.A. complicity in coups, assassinations, illegal surveillance, and drug-induced brainwashing of unwitting citizens. At bottom, it wasn’t just the minds of human guinea pigs that ‘The Company’ sought to control but the news coverage consumed by Americans as well. In his testimony before a congressional select committee, Director of Central Intelligence William Colby openly acknowledged the use of spooks in journalism, as seen in the award-winning documentary Inside the C.I.A.: On Company Business(1980). Unfortunately, the breadth of the secret project and its vetting of journalists wasn’t fully revealed until an article by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, whereas the series of official investigations only ended up salvaging the deep state by presenting such wrongdoings as rogue “abuses” rather than an intrinsic part of espionage in carrying out U.S. foreign policy.
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Operation Mockingbird, CIA Media Control Program – YouTube CIA Funding and Manipulation of the U.S. News MediaOperation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign … |
Clip from Inside the CIA: On Company Business (1980)
The corrupt institution of Western media also punishes anyone within its ranks who dares to swim against the current. The husband and wife duo of Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of a new memoir which illuminates the real story of Afghanistan, were two such journalists who learned just how the sausage is made in the nation’s capital with the connivance of the yellow press. Both veterans of the peace movement, Paul and Liz were initially among those who naively believed that America’s humiliation in Vietnam and the well-publicized hearings which discredited the intelligence community might lead to a sea change in Washington with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. In hindsight, there was actually good reason for optimism regarding the prospect for world peace in light of the arms reduction treaties and talks between the U.S. and Moscow during the Nixon and Ford administrations, a silver lining to Henry Kissinger’s ‘realist’ doctrine of statecraft. However, any glimmer of hope in easing strained relations between the West and the Soviet Union was short-lived, as the few voices of reason inside the Beltway presuming good faith on the part of Moscow toward détente and nuclear proliferation were soon challenged by a new bellicose faction of D.C. think-tank ghouls who argued that diplomacy jeopardized America’s strategic position and that the USSR sought global dominion.
Since intelligence assessments inconveniently contradicted the claims of Soviet aspirations for strategic superiority, C.I.A. Director George H.W. Bush consulted the purported expertise of a competitive group of intellectual warmongers known as ‘Team B’ which featured many of the same names later synonymous with the neoconservative movement, including Richard Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Bush, Sr. had replaced the aforementioned Bill Colby following the notorious “Halloween Massacre” firings in the Gerald Ford White House, a political shakeup which also included Kissinger’s ouster as National Security Advisor and the promotion of a young Donald Rumsfeld to Secretary of Defense with his pupil, one Richard B. Cheney, named Chief of Staff. This proto-neocon soft coup allowed Team B and its manipulated estimates of the Soviet nuclear arsenal to undermine the ongoing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between Washington and the Kremlin until Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev finally signed a second comprehensive non-proliferation treaty in June 1979.
The behind-the-scenes split within the foreign policy establishment over which dogma would set external policymaking continued wrestling for power before the unipolarity of Team B prevailed thanks to the machinations of Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. If intel appraisals of Moscow’s intentions and military capabilities didn’t match the Team B thesis, the Polish-American strategist devised a scheme to lure the USSR into a trap in Afghanistan to give the appearance of Soviet expansionism in order to convince Carter to withdraw from SALT II the following year and sabotage rapprochement. By the time it surfaced that the C.I.A. was supplying weapons to Islamist insurgents in the Central Asian country, the official narrative dispensed by Washington was that it was aiding the Afghan people fight back against an “invasion” by the Red Army. Ironically, this was the justification for a proxy conflict which resulted in the deaths of at least 2 million civilians and eventually collapsed the socialist government in Kabul, setting off a bloody civil war and the emergence of the Taliban.
Even so, it was the media which helped manage the perception that the C.I.A.’s covert war began only after the Soviets had intervened. Meanwhile, the few honest reporters who tried to unveil the truth about what was happening were silenced and relegated to the periphery. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould were the first two American journalists permitted entry into the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1981 by the Moscow-friendly government since Western correspondents had been barred from the country. What they witnessed firsthand on the ground could not have contrasted more sharply from the accepted tale of freedom fighters resisting a communist “occupation” disseminated by propaganda rags. Instead, what they discovered was an army of feudal tribesmen and fanatical jihadists who blew up schools and doused women with acid as they waged a holy war against an autonomous, albeit flawed, progressive government in Kabul enacting land reforms and providing education for girls. In addition, they learned the Soviet military presence was being deliberately exaggerated by major outlets who either outright censored or selectively edited their exclusive accounts, beginning with CBS Evening News and later ABC’s Nightline.
Not long after the Taliban established an Islamic emirate for the first time in the late 1990s, Brzezinski himself would shamelessly boast that Operation Cyclone had actually started in mid-1979 nearly six months prior to the deployment of Soviet troops later that year. Fresh off the publication of his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, the Russophobic Warsaw-native told the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateurin 1998:
“Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. Is this period, you were the NationalSecurityAdvisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujaheddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet militaryintervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it?
B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q :When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement inAfghanistan ,nobody believedthem .However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for theregime,a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B :What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
If this stunning admission straight from the horse’s mouth is too candid to believe, Fitzgerald and Gould obtain confirmation of Brzezinski’s Machiavellian confession from one of their own skeptics. Never mind that Moscow’s help had been requested by the legitimate Afghan government to defend itself against the U.S. dirty war, a harbinger of the Syrian conflict more than three decades later when Damascus appealed to Russia in 2015 for military aid to combat Western-backed “rebel” groups. Paul and Liz also uncover C.I.A. fingerprints all over the suspicious February 1979 assassination of Adolph Dubs, the American Ambassador to Afghanistan, whose negotiation attempts may have inadvertently thrown a wrench into Brzezinski’s ploy to draw the USSR into a quagmire. Spurring Carter to give his foreign policy tutor the green light to finance the Islamist proxies, the timely kidnapping and murder of the U.S. diplomat at a Kabul hotel would be pinned on the KGB and the rest was history. The journo couple even go as far as to imply the branch of Western intelligence likely responsible for his murder was an agent from the Safari Club, an unofficial network between the security services of a select group of European and Middle Eastern countries that carried out covert operations during the Cold War across several continents with ties to the worldwide drug trade and Brzezinski.
Although he was considered to be of the ‘realist’ school of international relations like Kissinger, Brzezinski’s plot to engineer a Russian equivalent of Vietnam in Afghanistan increased the clout of neoconservatism in Washington, a persuasion that would later reach its peak of influence in the George W. Bush administration. In retrospect, the need for a massive military buildup to achieve Pax Americana promoted by the war hawks in Team B was a precursor to the influential “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” manifesto by the Project for the New American Century cabal preceding 9/11 and the ensuing U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Fitzgerald and Gould also historically trace the ideological roots of neoconservatism to its intellectual foundations in the American Trotskyist movement during the 1930s. If a deviated branch of Marxism seems like an unlikely origin source for the right-wing interventionist foreign policy of the Bush administration, its basis is not as unexpected as it may appear. In fact, one of the main reasons behind the division between the Fourth International and the Comintern was over the national question, since Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution” called for expansion to impose global revolution unlike Stalin’s “socialism in one country” position which respected the sovereignty and self-determination of nation-states while still giving support to national liberation movements.
The authors conclude by highlighting how the military overhaul successfully championed by the neoconservatives marked the beginning of the end for U.S. infrastructure maintenance as well. With public attention currently focused on the pending Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to repair decaying industry at home just as the disastrous Afghan pullout has put President Joe Biden’s favorability at an all-time low, Fitzgerald and Gould truly connect all the dots between the decline of America as a superpower with Brzezinski and Team B. Even recent statements by Jimmy Carter himself were tantamount when he spoke with Trump about China’s economic success which he attributed to Beijing’s lack of wasteful spending on military adventures, an incredible irony given the groundwork for the defense budget escalation begun under Ronald Reagan was laid by Carter’s own foreign policy. Looking back, the spousal team notes that the ex-Georgia governor did not need much coaxing after all to betray his promises as a candidate, considering his rise to the presidency was facilitated by his membership alongside Brzezinski in the Trilateral Commission, an elite Rockefeller-funded think tank. What is certain is that Paul and Liz have written an indispensable book that gives a level of insight into the Afghan story only attainable from their four decades of scholarly work on the subject. The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond is now available from Trine Day Press and the timing of its release could not offer better context to recent world events.
1979 Assassination of U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs Set Groundwork for America’s Longest War
By Jeremy Kuzmarov, Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine October 29, 2021
U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs, center, with family. [Source: Washingtonian.com]
New evidence links Zbigniew Brzezinski, the CIA and European fascists who formed the Safari Club to the crime.
Dubs had sought to prevent Soviet and U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, which made him a target of neoconservatives.
Elizabeth Gould: “Carter was supposed to advance détente and SALT [strategic arms control agreement], not start a new cold war. Pundits joke he’s so innocent and pure he can’t find his way to the bathroom but he brings a known Russophobe (Brzezinski) into the White House? Then he gives him the power to make every top level decision and nobody notices? That’s Machiavellian.”“But even Machiavelli needs a sacrifice to make the plan work—and that’s where Afghanistan comes in,” Paul Fitzgerald interjects.Elizabeth responds: “They needed a sacrifice. But they needed someone to set the trap for it—and that’s where Adolph Dubs fits in.”[1] |
As America’s oldest living president, Jimmy Carter is widely revered for his down-to-earth and folksy manner and for having taken many principled stands on political issues.However, during his presidency in the late 1970s, it was Carter who enmeshed the United States in its longest war in Afghanistan by arming Islamic fundamentalists. The United States aimed to unseat Afghanistan’s socialist government that came to power in a 1978 revolution and induce a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in order to give the Soviets their Vietnam. The mastermind of Carter’s Middle East policy was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a descendent of the Polish nobility with strong Russophobic views.Brzezinski had helped elevate Carter to the presidency as a member of the Trilateral Commission, a Rockefeller-funded group whose goal was to restore U.S. hegemony after the Vietnam War and undermine the 1960s movement.
Brzezinski with Carter, left, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance outside the Oval Office in September 1979. [Source: washingtonmonthly.com]
Brzezinski was allied with the Pentagon’s Team B led by neoconservatives who advocated for a massive program of remilitarization to counter the Soviet Union. Brzezinski was also associated with the Safari Club, a shadow CIA backed by members of Europe’s old nobility and the Saudi Royal family that ran clandestine operations against left-wing groups financed by the drug trade. Afghanistan was crucial to the designs of the global Right because it provided an opportunity to strike a blow at the Soviet Union and avenge the lost war in Vietnam.But there was one man standing in their way—U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs—who had to be killed.
PDPA Coup
In 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a Marxist political party allied with the Soviet Union, launched a coup against Mohammed Daoud, Afghanistan’s ruler who had overthrown the monarchy in 1973. Daoud was killed along with most of his family by PDPA officers in what is known as Afghanistan’s Saur revolution. Its leaders conceived of it as a national democratic revolution.[2]Brzezinski along with the CIA at this time warned of a Soviet master plan to take over the oil fields of the Middle East, using Afghanistan as a stepping stone. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance dismissed Brzezinski’s claim as a Cold War fantasy and the State Department’s intelligence unit found no evidence of Soviet complicity in the 1978 PDPA coup. While there was an oppressive side, the PDPA is considered the best government in Afghanistan’s history. It focused on building Afghanistan’s infrastructure, and providing education and health care to the masses while advancing women’s rights.
Women support Afghanistan’s Saur revolution. [Source: facebook.com]
The revolution was opposed at every step by religious fundamentalists backed by the CIA who wanted to bring Afghanistan back to the Middle Ages and had a fondness for burning mosques, hospitals, and schools.[3]
Afghan “freedom fighter” set to launch Stinger missile provided by the U.S. [Source: npr.org]
The CIA’s favorites—Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud—financed their terrorist militias through the heroin traffic and threw acid in the faces of women who did not wear the veil. Brzezinski enlisted the Chinese to train Hikmatyar’s rebels in Xinjiang Province.
Richard J. Kerr, Deputy Director of the CIA, meeting with Gulbuddin Hikmatyar in Islamabad in 1988. [Source: rawa.org]
He also sought to provoke a factional struggle within the PDPA in order to destabilize Afghanistan, as declassified government documents reveal. This strategy bore fruit when Hafizullah Amin, a main organizer of the Saur revolution who had studied at the University of Wisconsin, wrestled power from Nur Muhammad Taraki and proceeded to execute many of his political rivals. Amin was a member of the Ghilzai clan, the same clan as Hikmatyar, and wanted to wipe out the rival Durrani family.[4] The Soviets believed that Amin was on the CIA’s payroll.
Conflict with the Deep State
Nicknamed “Spike,” Dubs took up his position as ambassador to Afghanistan in May 1978. A proponent of Nixon’s détente policy and opponent of Brzezinski’s anti-Soviet plots, he was a Soviet expert who had served as chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1973-74. Originally from Chicago, Dubs’ service in the Pacific War had convinced him that humanity’s finest ambition was the pursuit of peace.[5]
Dubs two months before his death. [Source: global-geneva.com]
According to former Washington Post reporter Selig Harrison, Dubs’ assignment as ambassador was to coordinate a multinational and UN effort to control narcotics production and trafficking in Afghanistan and establish a close personal relationship with Amin and detach him from the Soviet Union—make him into a kind of Tito [of Yugoslavia] who was non-aligned.The latter two goals put him in conflict with Brzezinski, Team B and the Safari Club which was using control of the narcotics trade in Afghanistan to finance the campaign to overthrow the PDPA and deal a blow to Soviet power.
U.S. embassy in Kabul, 1970s. [Source: global-geneva.com]
Dubs secretly met with Amin 14 times during his tenure as ambassador. He wanted to keep a back door open to American influence with him while not triggering Soviet countermeasures. Dubs knew that Brzezinski did not approve of the meetings because Brzezinski had been running a covert operation to undermine the Afghan government since January 1977. He wanted religious fundamentalists in charge—not Afghan nationalists—and Dubs was screwing up this strategy.[6] When Dubs complained, Brzezinski blocked Secretary of State Cyrus Vance from doing anything, and sent “his guy,” Thomas P. Thornton from the National Security Council, to tell Dubs to knock it off.[7]On the morning of February 14, 1979, a kidnapper posing as a police officer stopped Dubs’ black Oldsmobile as he was traveling to the U.S. embassy.Dubs’ abductors took him downtown to the Hotel Kabul, now known as the Serena Hotel, and made demands of the Afghan government—that they release a rebel leader—but not of the Americans or Soviets.
Hotel Kabul. [Source: global-geneva.com]
The U.S. embassy reported that the men were Tajik Maoists, whom the CIA had recruited as a backdoor into Beijing and because they despised the dominant Pashtun rulers in Afghanistan.[8] CIA officer Warren Marik and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) attaché Harold “Doug” Wankel, who arrived around noon, observed three Afghan police officers with automatic rifles on the balcony of the bank building across the street.
After Afghan forces stormed Room 117 where Dubs was being held, Dubs was shot in the head and chest and died.
U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (left) and U.S. President Jimmy Carter comfort Mary Anne Dubs, the widow of slain Ambassador Adolph Dubs, as Dubs’ body is returned to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C., on February 18, 1979. [Source: rferl.com]
The kidnappers—patsies in a wider plot—were also killed, one away from the hotel.
Photo in the state-run Kabul Times of the dead alleged kidnappers in the morgue on February 15, 1979. [Source: global-geneva.com]
The U.S. security officer transmitted over the radio that the Afghans had been told not to storm the room, but that they were acting on someone else’s orders.[9] When Wankel, Marik and a third embassy staff returned to Room 117 later in the day, they observed a strange man examining the room and found that the crime scene had been cleaned up and all evidence had been removed.
Soviets Are Blamed
In 1980, the State Department issued a report on its year-long investigation into Dubs’ death, attributing blame to Afghan authorities and Soviet advisers assisting them—though the report raised more questions than answers and was inconclusive.The State Department said that at least three Soviet advisers had played an “operational role” during the storming of the hotel.Chuck Boles, the U.S. embassy security officer saw a tall KGB operative hand a PSM pistol to an Afghan police officer whom he believes carried out the killing—though Dubs’ head wounds were determined to be inconsistent with those of a PSM pistol fired at close range.[10]Moscow acknowledged that its advisers were present but said they had no control over the Afghan decision to storm the hotel room. Russian Lt. Col. Sergei Gavrilovich Bakhturin insisted that, had Soviet special forces run the operation, Dubs would have been rescued.
Sergei Bakhturin, left, with KGB officer Viliov Osadchy (center) and Commandant Sayed Daoud Taroon of the Afghan National Police. [Source: global-geneva.com]
Harold Wankel—whose DEA background included buying drugs from informants, dealers, pimps, and prostitutes in Detroit—maintained that Dubs was killed by Soviet-directed gunfire from the bank balcony across the street and died slumped in his chair.However, U.S. embassy political counsel Bruce Flatin observed that half of Dubs’ body was wet—as though he had been lying on the floor—which had been covered in water from radiators shot up in the barrage.This implies that someone—likely police chief Lal Muhammed working in the service of Amin and the CIA—picked up Dubs and put him in the chair after he was killed—staging the crime scene.[11]Brzezinski claimed that the Soviets had wanted Dubs dead to fulfill their plans to take over Afghanistan, which was to serve as a stepping stone for conquest of the Middle East.[12]However, the Soviets got along famously with Dubs because he was not an anti-Soviet Russophobe like Brzezinski. The Soviets also never wanted to invade Afghanistan—they even went on record throughout the summer of 1979 trying everything to avoid it.The claim that the Soviets killed Dubs because they were afraid he would win Amin away from their control is misleading because Amin was never under Soviet control—the Soviets reviled him and tried everything short of invasion to replace him, including getting the exiled king back to form a new government.[13]
Who Derived Advantage?
The Roman philosopher Seneca once stated that “the one who derives advantage from a crime is the one most likely to have committed it.”In the case of Dubs’ killing, the main beneficiaries were not the Soviets, but neoconservatives within the United States and Europe and CIA who wanted to avenge the American defeat in Vietnam—by drawing the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan.Five months after Dubs’ death, President Carter authorized the CIA to provide $695,000 in cash or non-military supplies to Afghanistan’s insurgents—a directive that set the groundwork for the largest covert operation in U.S. history to that point.
The Soviets had desperately wanted better relations with the U.S. at the time of Dubs’ killing and to withdraw from Afghanistan, but his murder ended any hope of this.Since the Soviets were blamed, Dubs’ death also helped fuel public support for a revitalization of the Cold War and growth in the military budget in the late 1970s and 1980s..
CIA, Safari Club and Brzezinski
In a memoir of their experience as journalists in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould present the theory that Brzezinski was behind Dubs’ assassination as an agent of the CIA and Safari Club.The authors suggest that one of Dubs’ kidnappers was a Safari Club agent who led the others to believe someone would be waiting for them in Room 117 and sent one of the kidnappers to clue in the U.S. embassy.The Safari Club had agents embedded with the Afghan police at the hotel coordinating security for Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein[14] and were advising Afghan chief of police Lal Mohammed—who was involved in drug trafficking—backstage.After the Church Committee hearings and Watergate had exposed CIA abuses, the CIA had gone underground. Carter was a transitional president and Brzezinski was brought in to manage the transition.France’s chief of external intelligence Count Alexandre de Marenches was a key figure along with his cousin, Belgian noble Arnaud de Borchgrave, Clark Clifford, the Democratic Party’s wise man, and CIA Director Richard Helms in setting up the Safari Club—named after a hunting resort in Kenya.
United States President Ronald Reagan during a meeting with Alexandre de Marenches in the Oval Office in June 1983. Reagan’s election had been part of an intelligence operation led by the Safari Club. [Source: wikipedia.org] The Safari Club functioned as an off-the-books covert action force with roots in the old European nobility, whose main purpose was to roll back Soviet power and overthrow left-wing governments around the world.
Clark Clifford [Source: history.defense.gov]
Gould and Fitzgerald write that, “by 1976, the Safari Club had become the real CIA, covertly funded by Saudi Arabia through the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) and run out of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Afghanistan in turn offered the opportunity for BCCI to migrate the lucrative heroin business from Southeast Asia to the Pakistan/Afghan border,” where it was used to fund the covert war against the Soviet Union.[15] Dubs had to be killed because he was probing into the drug trade as part of a UN investigating committee and would have prevented a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which was needed to justify the reinvigoration of the Cold War arms and nuclear arms race.Dubs was further interfering with the Safari Club’s designs to bring Gulbuddin Hikmatyar to Kabul and establish Afghanistan as a base for Saudi Arabia’s religious and economic expansion into Central Asia, which housed lucrative oil and gas fields.[16]
Pallbearers at Dubs’ funeral. [Source: washingtonian.com]
Changing the Course of History
Dubs’ killing set the groundwork for America’s 40-plus year involvement in Afghanistan, which devastated the country. Had he succeeded in his mission of drawing Amin into the U.S orbit and preventing a Soviet invasion, Afghanistan would have been at peace in the 1980s and made progress under PDPA rule. The Taliban would never have come to power, Osama bin Laden would never have gone to Afghanistan, and the U.S. would never have invaded.
History might have turned out differently if Dubs had not been assassinated. [Source: cnn.com]
A new era of peaceful U.S.-Soviet relations might have also extended into the post-Cold War world. Unfortunately, the dark forces of the “deep state” had their own designs which changed the course of history—greatly for the worse
Review: The Valediction – Two Independent Journalists’ Dig for the Truth of the Other Afghanistan War
By Natylie Baldwin
Afghanistan has been in the news recently due to the end of the U.S.’s formal 20-year war there. However, there is a much longer history for the U.S. in that unfortunate nation that has been caught in the middle of imperial rivalries and power plays. That history has largely been obscured since the end of the Cold War. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould have entered to shed light on this history in The Valediction. .
RIAN archive 476785 Soviet Army soldiers return from Afghanistan.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Yuriy Somov / Юрий Сомов) Details Source DMCA
“The Afghan government was supporting Islam but Saudi Arabia wanted to spread radical Islam into Central Asia. They also wanted to control future oil pipeline routes. Pakistan wanted to legitimize its occupation of Afghan lands stolen by the British Empire in the 19th century and control events in Kabul. Communist China wished to curry favor with the United States and expand its control over its Muslim Xinxiang province. And the U.S.? The U.S. wanted to f*ck the Soviet Union for Vietnam and roll back the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 once and for all.” (p. 110)
Afghanistan has been in the news recently due to the end of the U.S.’s formal 20-year war there. However, there is a much longer history for the U.S. in that unfortunate nation that has been caught in the middle of imperial rivalries and power plays. That history has largely been obscured since the end of the Cold War. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould have entered to shed light on this history in The Valediction, a book they describe as a novelized memoir.
The book does read like a novel with a fast-paced and compelling narrative that keeps the reader engaged and wanting to dig into the next chapter to see what happens. Though the book weaves in some longer history, the main focus is on the journalistic odyssey of the authors, which started in 1981 with a trip to Afghanistan to get on-the-ground information on what was really happening in the war that had been framed in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter as the greatest threat to world peace since WWII. The Reagan administration had subsequently intensified the rhetoric against the Soviet Union about the Afghan intervention. It was convenient for both the Carter and Reagan administrations that western journalists generally had little access to Afghanistan within a month of the invasion due to the Afghan government kicking them out under accusations of lying. This led to Americans having scant information about what was really happening there.
The story of how co-author Fitzgerald said he managed to get access to Afghanistan elicited a grin from this writer. He simply looked up who the UN representative for Afghanistan was in that ancient 20th-century artifact known as the phone book and went from there. Needless to say, after the first trip, it was clear things were totally unlike the narrative that was being pushed by the U.S. government and mainstream media.
A war in Afghanistan was, by all rational measures, not in the Soviets’ interests. There had been every indication by the late 1970s that the Soviets had wanted progress on arms control negotiations and a continuation of the de’tente policy. There have been suggestions that Brezhnev did not have consensus support in the Soviet government for the invasion. The authors and some others suspected that the Soviets were provoked into invading.
Many readers are likely familiar with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s infamous boast in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur that, as Carter’s national security advisor, he’d helped goad the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, which he described as “the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”
Central to provoking the Soviet invasion, the book argues, was the assassination of Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Indeed a good portion of the book revolves around the authors’ investigation into unraveling the mystery surrounding the murder, which uncovered conflicting reports from representatives of the State Department, the CIA and DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency], and the KGB. As the authors ask:
“Who would kill an ambassador? Not a rival superpower trying to get the American Congress to sign a nuclear arms deal they’d desperately needed. And certainly not a third-world backwater desperate for U.S. aid and recognition. Only someone trying to provoke retribution. And who would want that retribution? Zbigniew Brzezinski… What was a known Russia-hater doing in the Carter administration in the first place and why had the “Peace President” elevated his role to cabinet level?” (pp. 64-65)
Dubs, who had significant diplomatic experience with the Soviets and more nuanced views, was working at cross-purposes with Brzezinski. He believed he could diplomatically get then-Afghan-leader Hafizullah Amin to move away from any loyalty to the Soviets. To further this project, he’d had fourteen secret meetings with Amin, in order to avoid sabotage by Brzezinski. Dubs thought the kind of destabilization favored by Brzezinski in Afghanistan would provoke the Soviets and was dangerous. According to an interview Fitzgerald conducted with Afghanistan expert Selig Harrison:
“…I met him [Dubs] out there that summer. He was alone and I had a long evening with him. He came out with a very sophisticated conception of what he was going to do, which was to try to make the US-educated Amin into a kind of Tito, in other words, detach him. Dubs knew how subtle an operation it had to be. He had no illusions it could be done quickly. He would 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. He met with Amin fourteen times and quickly understood that he was not a loyal Communist. He even bragged that the Soviets needed him more than he needed them. But the trick would be to keep a back door open to American influence while not triggering Soviet countermeasures… [the Soviets] were greatly alarmed because they thought Amin might be a CIA agent. And Brzezinski was actively promoting an aggressive covert anti-Soviet Afghan policy without the State Department’s knowing much about it. So it was extremely dangerous.” (p. 74)
Though the machinations around Afghanistan were started under Carter and Brzezinski, they were continued and expanded under Ronald Reagan, who had Richard Pipes – another Russophobic ideologue with a Polish background – on his national security council. By 1983, it was becoming clear to those who had genuine knowledge of what was occurring in Afghanistan that the Soviets wanted to get out and were willing to allow a coalition government after getting rid of Amin’s successor, Babrak Karmal, whom they’d grown to greatly distrust. But the U.S. didn’t seem at all interested in a Soviet exit, rebuffing Soviet overtures to negotiate a 6-month withdrawal in which they could save face in exchange for the U.S. giving up its support for the Islamist insurgency. Instead the Reagan administration announced increased support for the extreme nihilistic Islamist insurgents that were fighting the Afghan government.
“The irony was sublime. The U.S. wanted to overthrow a Communist government that the Kremlin viewed as a middle class bourgeois disaster with no support from the population. And the Kremlin was right. Communism couldn’t exist without a working class, and Afghanistan simply did not have one. But that trivial detail didn’t matter to Washington.” (p. 86)
The authors’ efforts to get the real story on Afghanistan were not exactly rewarded by the mainstream media. Pitches to CBS and later ABC were met with attempts to significantly downplay the authors’ actual reporting or kill it since it didn’t fit the narrative established by “Gunga Dan” Rather, a narrative that the White House wanted reinforced: Soviet soldiers were all over Afghanistan, brutalizing civilians and perpetrating their own dirty little Vietnam-style adventure on behalf of an expansionist agenda. Each pillar of this narrative was contradicted by the authors’ research as well as observations and interviews with an array of individuals in Afghanistan.
Often lost in the coverage of Afghanistan and the wars that have been fought there by empires is the Afghans themselves who had their own interests. Those interests included finding ways to modernize their country and improve the quality of life for their citizens. Various Afghan leaders of the 20th century attempted to pursue these objectives under a combination of nationalist and socialist political influences – the details of which would be shaped by the country’s unique geography and culture. But these projects were always tragically derailed by outside hegemons.
As noted in the epigraphic quote to this review, this had gone back at least as far as the British and the sabotage of Afghan society was executed by many opportunistic players during the Cold War. In an interview with Fitzgerald, China was cited, in addition to the U.S. and Pakistan, as a country that had provided training and/or arms by a former fighter for U.S.-backed Islamist terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
There are some things in the book that readers will have to decide for themselves the degree of importance and plausibility to assign to, such as certain connections made to rivalries among royal families and elite institutions from hundreds of years back. Another involves the man who is referenced in the subtitle of the book: Desmond FitzMaurice. He is described as a composite character and, interestingly, he is also the character that seems the most fantastical. It is these aspects that I imagine contribute to classifying this book as a novelized memoir. However, there are many other named people the authors discuss as providing important pieces to the Afghanistan puzzle that, along with the extensive research and contextual on the ground experience during the period in question, make for an interesting and informative read.
Natylie Baldwin is the author of The View from Moscow: Understanding Russia and U.S.-Russia Relations, available at Amazon. Her writing has appeared in Consortium News, RT, OpEd News, The Globe Post, Antiwar.com, The New York Journal of Books, and Dissident Voice.
TrineDay’s Roundtable #3 “Flipping the Script of the Secret Societies”
ROUNDTABLE #2″Afghanistan: America’s Second Vietnam (Forty Years in the Making)”
Our Truth Jihad Interview with Kevin Barrett •
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Expose Political Assassinations and War-Trigger Provocations
Fitzgerald and Gould call The Valediction – Three Nights of Desmond “a novelized memoir.” It details their 1980s discovery that neoconservatives and allied members of the War Party were mounting an ongoing coup d’état against American democracy. That coup would come to full fruition with the 2001 9/11.
The Valediction begins in 1980, when Ted Kennedy was challenging malaise-plagued president Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination. Spearheading the Kennedy campaign was former congressman Allard Lowenstein, “the driving force behind Robert Kennedy’s election campaign in 1968.” Lowenstein told Fitzgerald: “Get Ted elected and we’ll finally bring those CIA sons of bitches that killed Jack and Bobby to justice. ‘Since you’re family I can tell you this. We know who did it and people are willing to talk,’ he said. ‘But we need the presidency to protect them.’” Shortly thereafter Lowenstein was murdered by a mentally ill (MK-Ultra?) acquaintance.
After the Lowenstein assassination opens the book, the action moves to Afghanistan, where another political killing—the mysterious murder of American ambassador Adolph Dubs on Valentine’s Day 1979—triggered the chain of events that led to the Soviet invasion and US-supported resistance. The Valediction follows Fitzgerald and Gould as they travel to Afghanistan to make documentary films on the 1980s war and gradually learn that the dominant US media narrative is a propaganda charade..and that Dubs almost certainly was murdered not by the Russian or Afghan governments, as neocon propaganda suggested, but by the drug dealing wing of the CIA working on behalf of the war party in a successful war-trigger false flag.
And it gets deeper. Behind the neocons and their War Party, Fitzgerald and Gould suggest, is a millennial conspiracy aimed at establishing a one-world government in Occupied Jerusalem.I think they’re barking up the right tree. Listen and see if you agree. Listen to the interview here.
Matt Ehret & Cynthia Chung’s interview with Paul & Liz about The Valediction
Rising Tide Foundation Watch the interview here.
A new book has just been published entitled Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond which provides an invaluable dimension to Afghanistan’s story within the context of world history from the first-hand account of the only two American journalists permitted to enter the war-torn nation in 1981 and again in 1983. The two documentaries produced by the duo during that period went far to shatter the carefully-constructed narrative of a “Russian Vietnam” that had been built up for years by a western deep state. In this Rising Tide Foundation interview, Cynthia Chung and Matt Ehret chat with husband and wife writing team Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould on their autobiographical account which takes readers through a process of discovery not only of those forces manipulating Afghanistan past and present, but also how those same forces took control of American policy making over the dead body of JFK.