Cia Leader Quotes

I long ago became convinced that the most reliable source for arcane and obscure and seemingly unobtainable information does not lie with the government or law enforcement agencies. Apparently neither the CIA nor the military intelligence apparatus inside the Pentagon had even a slight inkling of the Soviet Union's impending collapse, right up to the moment the Kremlin's leaders were trying to cut deals for their memoirs with New York publishers. Or, if a person really wishes a lesson in the subjective nature of official information, he can always call the IRS and ask for help with his tax forms, then call back a half hour later and ask the same questions to a different representative. So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history, and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing? After lunch I drove to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian to find what she could on Junior Crudup.

Never had so much intelligence meant so little. The conduct of the war had been set by a series of lies that the leaders of the United States told one another and the American people.

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history. Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

By 1986, however, that Afghan cause entangled increasingly with the international Islamist networks whose leaders had a more ambitious goal: the toppling of corrupt and antireligious governments across the Islamic world.

The Secret Government went into place in 1947,” Mark explained to a caller. “As did the National Security Act. The Constitution of the United States was founded in truth and justice for all, not for a few self appointed secret leaders operating on the philosophy that ‘secret knowledge equals power.’ Secrets have now compounded to the point where people no longer think to ask the right questions. Technological secrets emerge as technological control. Ask what HAARP is about. Ask about DARPA. Ask now while you can still think to do so because technology is breeding itself through computerization and it’s time we took it out of the hands of the Secret Government.

That’s a mark of superlative subordinates; they make their bosses better leaders.

Self-discipline is central to the leadership of institutions and to reforming them. A favorite saying of mine is "Never miss a good chance to shut up." I won't tell you how many times in a congressional hearing I just wanted to scream. How often in the White House Situation Room I wanted to say, "That's the dumbest idea I ever heard." How often in a briefing at the CIA or the Pentagon I wanted to tell someone where to stick his PowerPoint slides. Senior leaders want to blow off steam-shout at people- all the time. But to be an effective leader, you have to suppress those urges.

Wait a minute,” Billy said. “What about elections?” “What elections?” I asked. “Its easy for them to rig votes with the electronic ballets. If third world countries used archaic methods of voting, we sent in representatives from the US to ‘oversee them.’ Everybody I knew in politics didn’t give elections a thought. They knew that people would believe in the corrupted, controlled polls, and that those appointed to office in accordance with the New World Order were secure.” “So people are misled by their leaders to believe they chose them?” “Not only that,” I answered, “but figureheads are placed while the real power works behind the scenes. For example, when Salinas was Vice President of Mexico, he ran the country while dela Madrid was only a Presidential figurehead. Vice President Bush ran this country while Reagan was acting President.

In a visit to San Salvador in February 1989, Vice President Dan Quayle told army leaders that death squad killings and other human rights violations attributed to the military had to be ended. Ten days later, the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion—which was believed to have a US trainer assigned to it at all times—attacked a guerrilla field hospital, killing at least ten people, including five patients, a doctor and a nurse, and raping at least two of the female victims before shooting them.

the Taliban’s leaders had no idea where this turn in American attitudes had come from. They made little effort to find out. When pressed on the issue of education for girls by the occasional visiting American delegation, they said, “This is God’s law,” recalled the State Department’s Leonard Scensny. “This is the way it’s supposed to be. Leave us alone.

The CIA plan to capture bin Laden also had to accommodate another layer of American law governing covert action: the presidential ban on assassination by the CIA or its agents, a ban initiated by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 and renewed by Reagan in the same Executive Order 12333. To comply with this part of the law, when they met with their agents to develop their plan, the CIA officers had to make clear that the effort to capture bin Laden could not turn into an assassination hit. The Afghans had to try to take bin Laden alive. CIA officers were assigned to sit down with the team leaders to make it as clear as possible. “I want to reinforce this with you,” station chief Gary Schroen told the Afghans, as he later described the meeting in cables to Langley and Washington. “You are to capture him alive.”9

And so, at a December 1981 meeting, Contra leaders, whom Reagan referred to as the “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers,” floated the idea that trafficking cocaine into California would provide enough profits to arm and train the anti-Sandinista guerrillas.108 With most of the network already established, the plan was rather straightforward: There were the Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia; the airports and money laundering in Panama run by President Manuel Noriega; the well-known lack of radar detection that made landing strips in Costa Rica prime transport depots; and weapons and drug warehouses at Ilopango air base outside San Salvador. The problem had been U.S. law enforcement guarding key entry points into a lucrative market. But with the CIA and the National Security Council now ready to run interference and keep the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service,

The Taliban’s “extreme actions now have cracked the Pashtuns,” Massoud told her. “An average Pashtun mullah is asking—he knows the history and simply has a question: Why are there no schools? Why is there no education for women? Why are women not allowed to work?” The Taliban’s religious tenets had been imported from Pakistan and applied inflexibly, Massoud said. Traditional Afghan religious leaders at the village level had now begun to challenge these decrees.8

The US was in tumultuous political turmoil, yet a physical revolution wouldn’t guarantee a change of leadership. This wasn’t about finger pointing at certain corrupt individuals who took over our government; it was about us all. Spiritual evolution through truth’s wisdom was the only way to peace. Wisdom was the only way humankind would think to stop following leaders hell-bent on enslaving us. Attuned with telepathy Marta added, “Freedom is a condition of the soul, not politics.

JFK asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to break up organized crime. Nobody high-up in government has tangled the Mafia. J. E. Hoover, the hired hands of FBI and CIA, ran the assassination teams. They have been used since World War II. JFK was attempting to end the oil-tax depletion rip-offs, to get tax money from oil companies. JFK instituted the nuclear test ban treaty, often called “the kiss of death,” to oppose the Pentagon. JFK called off the Invasion of Cuba. He allowed Castro to live, antagonized narcotics and gambling, oil and sugar interests, formerly in Cuba. JFK asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to break up the CIA, the “hidden government behind my back.” Allen Dulles was fired. Dulles, the attorney for international multinationals, was angry. JFK planned to withdraw troops from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. Nov. 24, 1963, two days after JFK’s burial, the Pentagon escalated the Vietnam war … with no known provocations, after JFK was gone. There was no chance Kennedy could survive antagonizing the CIA, oil companies, Pentagon, organized crime. He was not their man. The assassination of JFK employed people from the Texas-Southwest. It was not a Southern plot. Upstarts could not have controlled the northern CIA, FBI, Kennedy family connections. This was a more detailed, sophisticated conspiracy that was to set the pattern for future murders to take place. The murder was funded by Permindex, with headquarters in Montreal and Switzerland. Their stated purpose was to encourage trade between nations in the Western world. Their actual purpose was fourfold: 1) To fund and direct assassinations of European, Mid-East and world leaders considered threats to the western world, and to Petroleum Interests of their backers. 2) Provide couriers, agents for transporting and depositing funds through Swiss Banks for Vegas, Miami and the international gambling syndicate. 3) Coordinate the espionage activities of White Russian Solidarists and Division V of the FBI, headed by William Sullivan. 4) Build, acquire and operate hotels and gambling casinos. See: Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal, by William Torbitt.

Rosalynn toured seven nations for meetings with presidents and other top officials. After careful briefings from the State Department and the CIA, she carried personal messages from me urging President Ernesto Geisel of Brazil to abandon his plans to reprocess nuclear fuel for weapons and the leaders of Peru and Chile to reduce their purchases of armaments, and to inform the president of Colombia that one of his cabinet officers was accepting bribes from drug cartels. Rosalynn was, if anything, more frank and forceful in her presentations than Secretary of State Cyrus Vance or I would have been.

Some of the guys said he’s been macking on this little brunette who works in operations.” “What, are you jealous?” Oh my God, why did I say that? As the SOG, or Special Operations Group, team leader, Colt was one of the few men who knew what Meg really did for the CIA. He’d been around the block a few times, and with multiple tours in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, he had a disarming manner that Meg found sexy. It didn’t hurt that he was good-looking and believed she was an asset for the Algiers station. The only problem was that he treated Meg like she was his little sister. “Why would I be jealous?” he asked with a confused look that annoyed the hell out of Meg

I’m haunted every day by what I did as an economic hit man (EHM). I’m haunted by the lies I told back then about the World Bank. I’m haunted by the ways in which that bank, its sister organizations, and I empowered US corporations to spread their cancerous tentacles across the planet. I’m haunted by the payoffs to the leaders of poor countries, the blackmail, and the threats that if they resisted, if they refused to accept loans that would enslave their countries in debt, the CIA’s jackals would overthrow or assassinate them. I wake up sometimes to the horrifying images of heads of state, friends of mine, who died violent deaths because they refused to betray their people. Like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, I try to scrub the blood from my hands. But the blood is merely a symptom.

The Names, in fact, is a study in American ignorance; then as now, few Americans knew the difference between Sunni and Shiite, or how to pronounce Iran (“E-ron”). DeLillo’s protagonist, Axton, is a risk analyst for an insurance company that counsels multinational corporations on pressing questions about the world. Which country is risky? Where will the next bomb go off? Who creates the risk? Axton is also, as my Turkish friends liked to imagine I was, an unwitting agent for the CIA, the spy who doesn’t know he’s a spy. “Are they killing Americans?” is his main question. Axton and the Americans abroad can’t make sense of the world, can’t grab onto anything. They are not so much arrogant as confused. They perceive their vulnerability, their noses wrinkling at smells in the air: “Wasn’t there a sense, we Americans felt, in which we had it coming?” A Greek man named Eliades, with the aspect of a grumpy sage, says to the Americans: I think it’s only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes. I will tell you. The whole world takes an interest in this curious way Americans educate themselves.

For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn.

People are as blinded by emotion as you were a few minutes ago. There are very few people these days who have eyes-to-see and ears-to-hear truth. Social engineering through cover-up, censorship, and contrived news keeps the public fearful and emotionally arguing over ancient issues like abortion, cloning, gun control, and song lyrics. People hopelessly rely on government to tell them what to do, then blindly blame and fight each other in drug and race wars designed to separate them from the truth and each other.” “People are so easily led, it’s no wonder the criminals I knew in DC refer to them as sheeple. Byrd even said that 95% of the people want to be led by the ruling 5%.” “That is a widely known fact,” Mark said, “that gives folks like me hope. We only need the majority of that 5% to know and live truth in order to have leaders like Von Raab in power.

Groups have powerful self-reinforcing mechanisms at work. These can lead to group polarization—a tendency for members of the group to end up in a more extreme position than they started in because they have heard the views repeated frequently. At the extreme limit of group behavior is groupthink. This occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” The original work was conducted with reference to the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, it rears its head again and again, whether it is in connection with the Challenger space shuttle disaster or the CIA intelligence failure over the WMD of Saddam Hussein. Groupthink tends to have eight symptoms: 1 . An illusion of invulnerability. This creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks. [...] 2. Collective rationalization. Members of the group discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions. [...] 3. Belief in inherent morality. Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions. 4. Stereotyped views of out-groups. Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary. Remember how those who wouldn't go along with the dot-com bubble were dismissed as simply not getting it. 5. Direct pressure on dissenters. Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views. 6. Self-censorship. Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed. 7. Illusion of unanimity. The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous. 8. "Mind guards" are appointed. Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group's cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions. This is confirmatory bias writ large.

In 2012, a Taliban leader in northern Pakistan banned polio vaccination in his region until the United States ceased drone strikes there. Vaccination campaigns, he claimed, were a form of American espionage. While resembling the rumors of secret plots in Nigeria, this was, unfortunately, more easily verifiable. In pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the CIA had used a fake vaccination campaign—administering real hep B vaccine, but not the three doses necessary for immunity—to gather DNA evidence to help verify bin Laden’s location. This deception, like other acts of war, would cost the lives of women and children. The Lady Health Workers of Pakistan, a team of over 110,000 women trained to deliver health care door-to-door, had already endured years of brutal intimidation by the Taliban and hardly needed association with the CIA. Not long after the Taliban banned immunization, nine polio vaccinators, five of them women, were murdered in a coordinated series of attacks.

During the hostage crisis we sent a number of secret delegations into Iran, which was fairly easy to do because the Iranian leaders wanted to maintain as normal an environment as possible and relished all the favorable publicity that resulted from visits by foreign news media. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini gave personal interviews to American journalists. On one occasion we had a few CIA agents in Tehran who were traveling with false German passports, since many Iranian leaders had been educated in Germany. As our people were leaving, one of them had his credentials checked and was waved past by the customs officials. He was called back, however, and the official said, “Something is wrong with your passport. I’ve been here more than twenty years and this is the first time I’ve seen a German document that used a middle initial instead of a full name. Your name is given as Josef H. Schmidt and I don’t understand it.” The quick-thinking agent said, “Well, when I was born my given middle name was Hitler, and I have received special permission not to use it.” The official smiled, nodded, and approved his departure.

Dostum offered this exoneration as evidence of his loyalty to the Americans. But his conviction that the Americans were by his side during the incident raised another set of difficult questions about whether the Special Forces and CIA personnel witnessed any of the communications between Dostum and his commanders about the murders, and failed to either stop them, or report them after the fact. Nutsch told me he knew of no abuses. “My team has been investigated multiple times over this,” he said. “We did not witness, nor observe, anything.” Just as Dostum considered the American special forces blood brothers, the camaraderie was apparent on Nutsch’s side. “I saw him as a charismatic leader. Led from the front. Took care of his guys,” he added. In a celebratory Hollywood rendition of 595’s collaboration with Dostum called 12 Strong, Nutsch was portrayed, with exaggerated brawn and smolder, by Chris Hemsworth, the actor who played the superhero Thor. Nutsch grew testy when I asked a series of questions about the more complicated realities of the story. “Dostum’s enemies are the ones accusing him of these things,” he said. When I told him Dostum had admitted the killings may have occurred, and suggested two of his commanders may have been involved, Nutsch paused, then replied, “I don’t have a reaction to that.

While I am free to speak my mind, Kelly, now 14, is not so fortunate. Kelly has yet to receive rehabilitation for her shattered personality and programmed young mind. The high tech sophistication of the Project Monarch trauma based mind-control procedures she endured, literally since birth, reportedly requires highly specialized, qualified care to aid her in eventually gaining control of her mind and life. Due to the political affluence of our abusers, all efforts to obtain her inalienable right to rehabilitation and seek justice have been blocked under the guise of so-called "National Security." As a result, Kelly remains warehoused in a mental institution in the custody of the state of Tennessee--a victim of the system—a system controlled and manipulated by our abusive government "leaders" a system where State Forms make no allowances to report military TOP SECRET abuses--a system that exists on federal funding directed by our perverse, corrupt abusers in Washington, D.C. She remains a political prisoner in a mental institution to this moment, waiting and hurting! Violations of laws and rights, Psychological Warfare intimidation tactics, threats to our lives, and various other forms of CIA Damage Containment practices thus far have remained unhindered and unchecked due to the National Security Act of 1947 AND the 1986 Reagan Amendment to same which allows those in control of our government to censor and/or cover up anything they choose.

Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] The media, of course, must walk a fine line covering this story. With more we turn to Steve Carell in the Daily Show news center. Steve? Steve Carell: [standing in front of a bank of TV monitors] Jon, this is in many ways an unprecedented situation for us. [A blue band with white letters—the “crawl,” or “chyron” in TV lingo—scrolls across the screen, at Carell’s waist level] Crawl: MAJORITY LEADER DASCHLE RECEIVES LETTER CONTAINING ANTHRAX. Steve Carell: On the one hand, we must alert the country to the latest events. Crawl: AL QAEDA VOWS NEW ATTACKS. Steve Carell: And on the other hand, we musn’t cause undue alarm. Crawl: FBI WARNS SOMETHING BAD TO HAPPEN SOMEWHERE SOMETIME. Steve Carell: Scaremongering isn’t the way to go. Crawl: WHITE POWDER FOUND ON DONUT IN ST. LOUIS. Steve Carell: So far the media has in fact shown restraint. Crawl: STORMS BATTER NEW ENGLAND—LINK TO TERRORISM STILL UNDETERMINED. Steve Carell: And I must stress this—there is absolutely no need to panic. Crawl: [picking up speed as it moves left to right] CIA: THAT GUY SITTING ACROSS FROM YOU ON THE BUS LOOKS A LITTLE SHIFTY. Steve Carell: Patience, diligence, and above all, responsibility. Crawl: A FRIEND OF THIS GUY I KNOW CONFIRMS HIS GIRLFRIEND TOLD HIM “THEY’RE PLANNING SOMETHING IN A MALL OR SOMETHING.” Steve Carell: Jon, we have a job to do here, but we also need perspective. Crawl: [accelerating] OH, F—! WHAT WAS THAT SOUND? SERIOUSLY, DID YOU HEAR A SOUND? Steve Carell: And in keeping that perspective— Crawl: “THE HORROR, THE HORROR”—KURTZ. POLL: 91% OF AMERICANS “WANT MOMMY.” Steve Carell: Okay, that was—no, no, no, that was unacceptable. Jon, would you excuse me for a minute? [walks out of frame] Crawl: CHICKEN LITTLE: “THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!” OH GOD, OH GOD. [Carell confronts technician typing the crawl, beats him up as screen goes snowy] Jon Stewart: We’re having some technical difficulties with the crawl. Ah, Steve Carell is back! Steve Carell: Sorry about that, Jon. As I was saying, we journalists have to make sure that our worst instincts are curbed in the sake of national interest. Crawl: EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE JUST WONDERFUL WITH LOLLIPOPS AND RAINBOWS AND HAPPY FEELINGS FOR EVERYONE. Steve Carell: It’s a unique challenge, but one I think the greatest free press in the world can easily attain. Crawl: BUNNIES ARE CUTE, CUDDLY, AND COMFORTING. Steve Carell: Jon?

American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry

The White House espionage group was responsible for killing 28 Black Panthers and other minority leaders. They also were determined to exterminate leaders inside the prison. Eldridge Cleaver, writer and Panther, fled to Algeria to avoid a prison sentence. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents were making a deal with Sonny Barger, Hell’s Angels leader, to “bring Cleaver home dead in a box.” Larry Shears, the agent who exposed this arrangement, also revealed the plans of ATF to kill Cesar Chavez.47 This was at a time when John Caulfield and G. Gordon Liddy worked for the Treasury Department’s ATF. Tackwood stated at his 1971 press conference that the LAPD Criminal Conspiracy Section, with links to the CIA and FBI, had foreknowledge of the Judge Haley murder, Marin Courthouse shootout and the San Quentin killing of George Jackson. In line with murdering political leaders, writers and Black Panthers, George Jackson had been marked for death several years in advance of the shootout. Many prisoners were offered parole to kill or frame him. Refusal to comply brought more charges and punishments. Ronald Reagan, Governor of California, had information on the San Quentin killings on his desk four months in advance. But like other staged riots and acts of violence, this was meant to take place.

Thirdly, Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin. The ISI had encouraged this since 1982 and by now all the other players had their reasons for supporting the idea. President Zia aimed to cement Islamic unity, turn Pakistan into the leader of the Muslim world and foster an Islamic opposition in Central Asia. Washington wanted to demonstrate that the entire Muslim world was fighting the Soviet Union alongside the Afghans and their American benefactors.

Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

homes and streets buzzing with rickshaws is the most visible symbol of the fading Western legacy in this onetime fortress of Taliban rule: a giant white balloon, bristling with photo lenses and listening equipment. The surveillance blimp is tethered to the former home of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, which for the past 13 years has been a base for the C.I.A. and the Afghan paramilitary forces. Officials say there are no immediate plans to close that complex, the last Western military base inside the city limits. And so, what remains of the Western presence is marked by this all-seeing eye, watching over Afghanistan’s second city as it jolts into an uncertain post-American future. For years, Kandahar has been a testing

this information without sharing it with me? This is all new information to me. I feel sandbagged.” To his relief and slight embarrassment, I pointed out that it was his own information. We had merely given it some analytical horsepower, in the spirit of broadened collaboration. After that, he became more trustful of the CNC, and a number of his senior leaders became major supporters of the center. Beyond this new trust and cooperation among federal agencies, the other new and innovative component of the linear strategy was the way we started dealing with our liaison partners in foreign intelligence agencies. Brian Bramson, a veteran CIA operations officer and Latin America hand, led the way here—and has never been fully recognized for this achievement. Traditionally, we tried to give liaison partners as little support and intelligence as we could get away with to stay in the game. We did not want to develop their skills to the point where they could jeopardize our other unilateral operations if they turned against us. I understood this reluctance, having seen trusted liaison partners become criminal liabilities. Nevertheless, when it came to attacking drug cartels at the CNC in the early 1990s, we made a decision to truly build up liaison capabilities and share with the locals even high-end resources—everything that could be used to damage the narcotic-trafficking networks. Our strategy was to use our liaison partners as a genuine force multiplier. Combining their on-the-ground knowledge, language abilities, and existing networks with our skills, training, and equipment, we went from minimal bilateral liaison to enhanced multilateral liaison. “The kind of information we were looking for had to be gathered in-country by our good liaison contacts that we trusted … liaison relationships were key,” Brian Bramson said.5 Soon we were building powerful and effective

Dollmann was fond of Braun, and a sweet and simple young woman who confided her sad life to him. She was known throughout the world as the German strongman's mistress, but, as she confessed to Dollmann, there was no sexual intimacy between her and the Führer. 'He says to me that his only love is Germany and to forget it, even for a moment, would shatter the mystical forces of his mission.' ¶ Dollmann strongly suspected that the Führer had other passions besides Germany. On Christmas Eve 1923, when he was a university student in Munich, Dollman had been invited to an extravagant, candelit party at the house of General Otto von Lossow, who had helped put down Hitler's Beer Hall putsch in November 1923. During the evening, Lossow took Dollmann and some of his other guests into his parlor, where he entertained them by reading selections from Hitler's thick police dossier. 'In a café near the university on the evening of, Herr Hitler was observed . . . " Lossow's voice was matter-of-fact as he read through the depositions and eyewitness reports about Germany's future leader. The general's small audience listened in rapt silence, transfixed by the portrait of a Hitler who was more interested in boyish men than in national politics.

Dollmann was fond of Braun, and a sweet and simple young woman who confided her sad life to him. She was known throughout the world as the German strongman's mistress, but, as she confessed to Dollmann, there was no sexual intimacy between her and the Führer. 'He says to me that his only love is Germany and to forget it, even for a moment, would shatter the mystical forces of his mission.' ¶ Dollmann strongly suspected that the Führer had other passions besides Germany. On Christmas Eve 1923, when he was a university student in Munich, Dollman had been invited to an extravagant, candelit party at the house of General Otto von Lossow, who had helped put down Hitler's Beer Hall putsch in November 1923. During the evening, Lossow took Dollmann and some of his other guests into his parlor, where he entertained them by reading selections from Hitler's thick police dossier. 'In a café near the university on the evening of, Herr Hitler was observed . . . ' Lossow's voice was matter-of-fact as he read through the depositions and eyewitness reports about Germany's future leader. The general's small audience listened in rapt silence, transfixed by the portrait of a Hitler who was more interested in boyish men than in national politics.

Why is this bird following me?” Nek Muhammad Wazir sat inside a mud building in South Waziristan, surrounded by his followers and talking on his satellite phone to a BBC reporter. Looking out the window, the young commander with long, jet-black hair noticed something hovering above, glinting in the sun. He asked one of his lieutenants about the coruscating metal object in the sky. Nek Muhammad had just humbled Pakistani troops, and the CIA was following him. He had emerged as the undisputed rock star of Pakistan’s tribal areas, a brash member of the Wazir tribe who had raised an army to fight government forces in the spring of 2004 and brought Islamabad to the negotiating table. His rise had taken Pakistan’s leaders by surprise, and now they wanted him dead.

The Illuminati use several umbrella organizations whose leaders usually don’t know that they are being manipulated and controlled. One of the Illuminati organizations working from behind the scenes of visible world politics is the Association of the Round Table. Just like the Order of the Illuminati this society is devoted to the destruction of national states, and they strive for a sort of international super-state: the prototype of the so-called New World Order! The Round Table was founded in 1891 by the politician Cecil Rhodes and is built in the same way as the Order of the Illuminati. In 1902 the Association of Helpers (a group of supporters from the outside from seven different countries) was created. This group created the Round Table Societies in different countries. The North American branch of the Round Table Group was initially called National Civic Federation, a name that was changed in 1921 by Colonel Mandell House into Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).[46] Today the organization claims approximately 2000 members. It is striking that almost all members of the CFR hold important positions in the government of the United States, the CIA and the American financial world. Aside from the enormous influence of the organization over the majority of American public life, it also exercises considerable pressure on the Congress and the government of the United States. At the moment the CFR is the most important component of the “World Government” operating behind the scenes.[47] The grandson of Franklin Roosevelt declared that the President completely depended on the CFR; every step he took was dictated by this institution. In 1975 retired Navy Admiral Chester Ward, former Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Navy and former CFR member, wrote in a critique that the goal of the CFR is the submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all powerful One World government. In one of the first issues of Foreign Affairs (1922), the Council on Foreign Relations magazine, World Government is already endorsed:

The Interview is a 2014 American action comedy film co-produced and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg in their second directorial work, following This Is the End (2013). The screenplay was written by Dan Sterling, based on a story he co-wrote with Rogen and Goldberg. The film stars Rogen and James Franco as journalists who set up an interview with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (Randall Park), and are then recruited by the CIA to assassinate him. The film is heavily inspired by a 2012 Vice documentary.In June 2014, The Guardian reported that the film had "touched a nerve" within the North Korean government, as they are "notoriously paranoid about perceived threats to their safety.” The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the state news agency of North Korea, reported that their government promised "stern" and "merciless" retaliation if the film was released. KCNA said that the release of a film portraying the assassination of the North Korean leader would not be allowed and it would be considered the "most blatant act of terrorism and war. Wikipedia

Land was not surprised by digital photography. He’d argued for that loonshot in front of the president of the United States. He did so before anyone else was even in the game. In a 1988 ceremony honoring Land, the director of the CIA, William Webster, declared, “The contributions Dr. Land has made to national security are innumerable, and the influence he has had on our present intelligence capabilities is unequaled.” So what happened with Polaroid? Why didn’t Land jump on digital for his own company, exploit the head start from his national intelligence connections, and use those advantages to beat Sony, Canon, and Nikon to the punch? FALLING IN LOVE Moses Trap: When ideas advance only at the pleasure of a holy leader, who acts for love of loonshots rather than strength of strategy

Brotherhood leaders appeared to have found common ground with German agents, with former CIA officer Miles Copeland having described the organization as ‘virtually a German intelligence unit’, while others claimed German officers were helping to set up its military wing.

Although he was wanted in Europe for Nazi war crimes, senior State Department and CIA leaders intervened on Hilger’s behalf and brought him to the United States under an alias, giving him high-level security clearance and the veneer of respectability through postings at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Hilger made no apologies for his Nazi loyalties.

In the early seventies a fog of grievance settled over the land. Never have Americans hated authorities like they did after the Vietnam War turned sour; after Watergate taught us the incorrigible venality of our elected leaders. Big government seemed omnipotent and yet incompetent; it possessed the world’s greatest military machine but it couldn’t do anything right. In the long list of groups it aimed to serve, We the People always seemed to come last. This snarling mood of disillusionment was the characteristic sensibility of the decade: the “wellsprings of trust” had been “poisoned,” two self-designated populist authors wrote back in 1972.1 They are still poisoned today. The whole country was mad as hell, to use a favorite catchphrase, and the discontent seemed to go in every direction at once. It was economic, it was political; it was racial, it was cultural; it was liberal, it was conservative. Americans despised the CIA and also the Soviet Union. We cheered for Clint Eastwood as a rule-breaking cop who blasted lowlifes even when the lawyers told him to stop … and then we cheered for Burt Reynolds as a “bandit” in a black Trans Am, the roads behind him littered with the smoking remains of the Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia highway patrols. Responding to the new sensibility, our politicians tried to impress us with their humility. They courted us with soft southern accents, with tales of peanut farms and pork rinds. They posed as defenders of the people, the forgotten man, the silent majority, the great overtaxed middle, the “normal” Americans suffering the contempt of shadowy TV network elites.

We are content with discord; we are content with alarms; we are content with blood; but we will never be content with a master. —A PASHTUN LEADER TO BRITISH MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM EPHINSTONE

Few Republicans challenge Trump on his conspiracy obsessions, treating him like an addled senior citizen who calls his congressman’s office demanding to know why the CIA is talking to him through his dentures. The shrug and smile that so many Republican leaders have adopted has allowed Trump to dismiss those who challenge his lunacy as “angry Democrats,” because it is Democrats who seem capable of explaining that Ted Cruz’s dad didn’t kill JFK. But Trump isn’t an addled senior citizen—actually he is, but he’s one who happens to be the president of the United States. The acceptance of the conspiracy theories is just one station in the slaughterhouse of truth that is the Trump presidency. Once there is no challenge to the craziest of ideas that have no basis in fact, it is easy for Trump to take one small bit of truth and spin it into an elaborate fantasy. This

On September 11, 2001 there were several hundred humiliation-enraged, young Saudis training at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They had gone there not to fight Russians, like their older brothers, but to support the country’s Taliban government. When US Special Forces units and CIA officers organized Operation Anaconda to topple the Taliban regime, these Saudis found themselves on the run. Some were killed; some found shelter in Iran. More than 100 were captured and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, the detention camp set up at an American naval base in Cuba. Their leaders, including Osama bin Laden, retreated into Pakistan. Most of the others, between 300 and 1,000 deeply committed individuals, simply went home to Saudi Arabia.9 These Afghan veterans provided the bulk of the leadership and many of the foot soldiers for AQAP, which remained largely restricted to the Afghan alumni network, their friends, and relatives.10 For two years they organized a five-cell structure in the kingdom with military, finance, media, and religious units.

The man who organized the Bilderberg Group, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, has the power to veto the Vatican's choice of any Pope it selects. Prince Bernhard has the veto power because his family, the Hapsburgs, are descended from the Roman Emperors. Prince Bernhard is the leader of the "Black Families." He claims descent from the house of David and thus can truly say that he is related to Jesus. Prince Bernhard, with the help of the CIA, brought the hidden body of the Illuminati into public knowledge as the Bilderberg Group. This is the official alliance that makes up the world governing body.

Attempts on Castro’s Life According to Castro’s former bodyguard, Fabián Escalante, and Ramiro Valdés, head of the Cuban G-2 secret service, there were a total of 638 attempts to kill the Cuban leader, including the attempt by Marita Lorenz when she concealed the poison capsules in a jar of cold cream, before bringing them into her hotel room. Another time a fungus-impregnated scuba outfit was prepared, expecting that Fidel would wear it. This was followed by an exploding cigar attempt. Still another time, the CIA supposedly impregnated some of Castro’s favorite cigars with botulin, but they never got to him. Cigars as a vehicle to kill Castro were abandoned, when he gave up smoking in 1985.

The CIA found in Laos a country where it already had amassed influence, in the heart of a Cold War battlefield, and which had been largely ignored by the American military. These CIA leaders saw that an inexpensive—in American money and lives, at least—proxy war could be a template for fights in other places around the world, at a time when presidents were looking for ways to continue the Cold War without going through Congress or committing ground troops.

The foreign leaders with whom Nixon got along best, like President Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan of Pakistan, were almost always authoritarian strongmen.

In the summer of 2016, according to the Washington Post, the FBI convinced a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there was probable cause to believe that Trump advisor Carter Page was acting as a Russian agent, and they received a warrant to monitor his communications. The FBI also began investigating a dossier prepared by a well-respected former British spy that contained explosive and salacious allegations about compromising information the Russians had on Trump. The Intelligence Community took the dossier seriously enough that it briefed both President Obama and President Elect Trump on its contents before the inauguration. By the spring of 2017, a federal grand jury was issuing subpoenas to business associates of Michael Flynn, who resigned as Trump’s national security advisor after lying about his Russian contacts. We’ve also learned a lot about how various parts of the U.S. government reacted differently to the intelligence coming in over the course of 2016 about ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The CIA seems to have been most alarmed and was also convinced that the Russian goal was to help Trump and hurt me. As early as August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan called his counterpart in Moscow and warned him to stop interfering in the election. Brennan also individually briefed the “gang of eight” congressional leaders and shared his concerns.

the frustration was knowing that the FBI’s silence had helped Putin succeed and that more exposure could have given the American people the information they needed. While Brennan and Reid had their hair on fire and Comey was dragging his feet, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was actively playing defense for Trump and the Russians. We know now that even after he was fully briefed by the CIA, McConnell rejected the intelligence and warned the Obama administration that if it made any attempt to inform the public, he would attack it for playing politics. I can’t think of a more shameful example of a national leader so blatantly putting partisanship over national security. McConnell knew better, but he did it anyway. I know some former Obama administration officials have regrets about how this all unfolded. Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told the House Intelligence Committee in June 2017 that the administration didn’t take a more aggressive public stance because it was concerned about reinforcing Trump’s complaints that the election was “rigged” and being “perceived as taking sides in the election.” Former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, whom I’d come to trust and value when we worked together in President Obama’s first term, told the Washington Post that the Obama administration was focused on a traditional cyber threat, while “the Russians were playing this much bigger game” of multifaceted information warfare

Early in his administration, President Kennedy asked his cabinet officials and members of the National Security Council to read Barbara Tuchman’s book The Guns of August. He said it graphically portrayed how Europe’s leaders had bungled into the debacle of World War I. And he emphasized: “I don’t ever want to be in that position.” Kennedy told us after we had done our reading, “We are not going to bungle into war.” Throughout his presidency, Kennedy seemed to keep that lesson in mind. During the Bay of Pigs crisis in April 1961, against intense pressure from the CIA and the military chiefs, he kept to his conviction—as he had made explicitly clear to the Cuban exiles beforehand—that under no conditions would the United States intervene with military force to support the invasion. He held to this position even when it became evident that without that support the invasion would fail, as it did.

Things changed radically between the early 1990s and 2019. The spread of fracking turned the United States into the world’s biggest oil producer by 2013. The American economy wasn’t dependent on Saudi oil anymore. Now it could pump its own. Then Barack Obama made the nuclear deal with Iran, alienating Saudi leaders. Mohammed had high hopes that Donald Trump, with his visit to the kingdom early in his presidency, would renew the kind of relationship Saudi Arabia had under previous presidents. But as Trump showed Mohammed in that embarrassing White House visit, when the president displayed a poster board showing arms sales to the kingdom, this new White House was purely transactional. The decades-long US-Saudi alliance didn’t mean much to Trump and his deputies, and many of the old officials who kept that alliance going for both sides, men like Mohammed bin Nayef and former CIA director John Brennan, had been sent off to retirement, or worse.

Tenet, Black, and Blee warned the Bush administration about Al Qaeda clearly and repeatedly during 2001. They were not the only people in the government to issue such warnings. Richard Clarke at the National Security Council repeatedly urged Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration leaders to focus on Bin Laden and take more aggressive action. Al Qaeda specialists at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department also understood well the threat Bin Laden posed.

Soviet and Afghan Communists purposefully decimated the country’s educated elites, executing or exiling traditional leaders. By the time I turned up, this culling had left much of the field to radical preachers and armed opportunists.

Among the historical rivals of the Mehsuds were the Wazirs. They had been influenced by radical ideology as well, but their leaders saw less cause to act in overt hostility to Pakistan, at least for now. Musharraf adapted the British colonial strategy of playing one tribal network against the other. The Pakistani military’s lines of communication to Afghanistan had long run through Wazir territory in North Waziristan. Musharraf and his corps commanders “thought we should play ball with the Wazirs,” as Musharraf put it. When American officials protested, he told them, “Leave the tactical matters to us. We know our people.”9

Obama chose the infamous Leon Panetta for the position of CIA Director, as Brennan was a “leader” on President-elect Obama’s “intelligence transition team.”[751

Larry Goodson, an American scholar of Afghanistan, interviewed Taliban leaders along the Pakistan border during this period and found that the movement benefited from “a perception that the Americans would leave, that reconstruction would not succeed, and that Afghanistan would return to chaos.

Russia selling arms to China, U.S. Navy concerned July 30, 1997 Web posted at: 12:00 P.M. EST (1700 GMT) From Washington chief correspondent Michael Flasetti WASHINGTON (TCN)—As tensions mount in the South China Sea, a confrontation between the Chinese and UN military, led by the U.S. Navy, seems inevitable. Adding to the danger of the situation is the news, reportedly obtained by the CIA, that Russia has been arming China with advanced weapons, among them nuclear attack submarines that may be deployed into the waters surrounding the Spratly Islands. The news that Russia has been selling arms to the Chinese is not new. Over the past two years, China has taken delivery of four Russian Kilo-class diesel submarines, which are considerably less advanced than Russia’s nuclear submarines. However, the possibility that Russia has sold more advanced submarines to the Chinese is of great concern to White House military advisers. A source close to the Joint Chiefs of Staff has disclosed that the Russians have even collaborated with the Chinese on a prototype nuclear attack submarine, and that the submarine may see action in the Spratly conflict. If true, this presents a possible shift in the balance of naval power in the region, and a great concern to the recently downsized U.S. Navy. Russian president Gennadi Zyuganov, himself a conservative Communist like Chinese leader Li Peng, refused to comment on the possibility of advanced weapons sales to China, yet did say that Russia enjoys a balanced trade agreement with China on the sales of certain weapons, including Kilo class submarines. Russia, cash-poor since the breakup of the Soviet Union, clearly depends on submarine sales to China to help fund social and economic projects, as well as the upgrading of its own navy.

The C.I.A.’s main target that spring was a long-haired, charismatic militant leader of the Wazirs named Nek Mohammad. He ruled Wana and distrusted the Pakistan Army. He was a complicated figure—a tribal nationalist who consorted with international terrorists. He accepted Al Qaeda and Uzbek refugees. In Islamabad, C.I.A. station chief Rich Blee used the assassination attempts against Musharraf to try to motivate the president and I.S.I. to strike back: “You have to kill them or they’re going to kill us.

Lansdale had been with Roxas earlier that same day, part of the president’s press corps entourage, but about all he could find to say by way of eulogizing the fallen leader was, “now that I’ve switched to Chesterfields, he didn’t bum Camels from me as he used to do.

From its ancient roots to its modern application, the practical utility of the Enneagram has been appropriated by the CIA to profile world leaders, written about in The Paris Review, Newsweek, Forbes, and CNN.com, and taught in graduate courses at several academic institutions, including Stanford University. The Enneagram is even used to explain leadership styles and decision making styles in the workplace.

it was this Service at its most persuasive that talked a power-mad CIA into turfing out the best leader Iran ever had, and thereby precipitated the whole godawful Revolution.

According to Senate investigation, domestic programs that have violated these strictures in the Bill of Rights include the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, the FBI’s campaign “to ‘neutralize’ [Martin Luther King] as an effective civil rights leader,” the CIA’s mail opening program which the FBI and CIA heads declared illegal in 1970 even as it continued, the NSA collection of millions of cables sent by private citizens, widespread wiretapping and bugging without warrant, the collection and dissemination of purely political or personal information obtained through electronic surveillance, hundreds (during the 1960s alone) of warrantless CIA/FBI break-ins which often involved theft and bugging, and the widespread use of informants to infiltrate and surveil “peaceful, law-abiding groups.

This so-called “independent” monitoring and accountability body’s purpose was to validate the imposition of police state controls by global and local political leaders and technocrats, endorsing their efforts to take the kind of harsh actions that Gates’s simulation modeled: subduing resistance, ruthlessly censoring dissent, isolating the healthy, collapsing economies, and compelling vaccination during a projected worldwide health crises. GPMB’s board includes a pantheon of technocrats whose cumulative global power to dictate global health policy is virtually irresistible: Anthony Fauci; Sir Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome Trust; Christ Elias of BMGF; China’s CDC director, George Gao; Russian health minister, Veronika Skvortsova; WHO’s health director, Michael Ryan; its former director, Gro Harlem Brundtland; its former programming director, Ilona Kickbusch; and UNICEF’s Henrietta Holsman Fore, who is former director of USAID, that used to be a reliable CIA front.

William Blum, the former State Department employee who became one of its most severe and encyclopedic critics, drew up a disturbing balance sheet of American interventions since the end of the Second World War, and there are numerous cases of overturning democratically elected governments. He also emphasized Washington’s meddling in elections, as it has not hesitated to invest considerable sums and to use very dubious tactics—from misinformation campaigns and economic destabilization efforts to clandestine cia operations—to swing so-called democratic elections in a direction favorable to its own interests. In one of his most recent books, entitled quite simply America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, he reaches the conclusion that the American administration, for which the question of democracy remains utterly secondary, aims above all at world domination. For the United States has shown itself to be hostile to any popular movement likely to contest its hegemony. It is in this vein that it has • endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected; • grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries; • attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders; • dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries; • attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries. Needless to say, such a performance inevitably calls into question the history of the spectacular blossoming of democracy. Numerous other specialists have corroborated Blum’s conclusions, often with detailed investigations bearing on individual cases of what Chomsky judiciously named “deterring democracy.

These Southern Cone intelligence agencies functioned essentially as CIA franchises, carrying out Operation Condor in which tens of thousands of South American leftists, labor leaders, and religious clergy were assassinated, tortured, disappeared, or forced into exile.

American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry Nik Smotrov, Natalya’s husband Yevgeny Filipov, aide to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky Vera Pletner, Dimka’s secretary Valentin, Dimka’s friend Marshal Mikhail Pushnoy REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister under Khrushchev Rodion Malinovsky, defense minister under Khrushchev Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor Yuri Andropov, successor to Brezhnev Konstantin Chernenko, successor to Andropov Mikhail Gorbachev, successor to Chernenko Other Nations Paz Oliva, Cuban general Frederik Bíró, Hungarian politician Enok Andersen, Danish accountant

the National Program Office called the Presidential Successor Support System, or PS3 for short. The five preselected PS3 teams each consisted of veteran officials who could fill almost every top job in government. Under PS3, which traced its roots to the Carter administration and had no clear constitutional grounding, respected former officials like Howard H. Baker Jr., the onetime Senate Republican leader, former CIA director Richard Helms, former United Nations ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, and former cabinet secretary James Schlesinger

This reticence was not new. It had been present in 1954, at the time of the CIA covert operation in Guatemala, in 1957–58, during the covert operation against Indonesia, and in 1961, in the weeks before the Bay of Pigs. “If the leaders of the U.S. government decide that all the risks and perils of a major covert operation are required . . . it is not the business of individual newspapermen to put professional gain over that of country,” the prominent columnist, Joseph Alsop, explained.

The CIA team in the north expected Washington to take action earlier.58 One Taliban leader or al-Qaeda operative after the next was fleeing to Pakistan. There had been some delay at first as Pakistan tried to persuade its old ally Mullah Omar to hand bin Laden over peacefully. In the mean time Mullah Omar secretly had tried to arrange with the CIA Bin Laden’s transfer to a neutral third country, but Washington demanded an uncondtioonal handover. For two days, leading Pakistanis and Taliban leaders conferred about the extradition. While the Americans had high hopes, messengers from Pakistani president Musharraf did the opposite. They warned Mullah Omar of the plans of the US to invade, so he could prepare himself. Within the ISI (the Pakistani secret service) chaos reigned. Some helped the Americans by pointing out possible targets while others swiftly transferred truckloads of weapons, munitions and fuel to Kandahar to reinforce the Taliban

Dulles had arranged to send Dr. Cameron to Nuremberg to assess the mental state of Rudolf Hess prior to his trial. In May 1941, the Deputy Fuhrer had flown to Scotland with the avowed aim of ending the war. Hess had been brought to Nuremberg to stand trial with other Nazi leaders, having been pronounced sane by a British psychiatrist. The Americans and the Russians were co-prosecutors in the war crimes trial and insisted on their own psychiatric evaluation. On a late autumn day in 1945, Dr. Cameron arrived in Nuremberg a city which had been the nursery of Nazism. Over dinner in the cavernous dining room of the refurbished Grand Hotel, Dulles told Dr. Cameron an astounding story. He said he had reason to believe that the man Dr. Cameron was to examine was not Rudolf Hess but an impostor. The real Deputy-Fuhrer had been secretly executed on Churchill’s orders. Dulles explained how Dr. Cameron could confirm the point by a simple physical examination of the man’s torso. If he was the genuine Hess, there should be scar tissue over his left lung, a legacy from the day the young Hess had been wounded in World War I. Dr. Cameron had agreed to try to physically examine the prisoner.

Some of these researchers had become expert at deciphering the hidden keys and references in documents pointing to other relevant documents which weren’t being produced as part of the “complete” files on a subject. Where were they? Well, said the Agency’s bureaucrats, they may be missing. Or perhaps misfiled. Or perchance they had been routinely destroyed. But, as we later learned when we discovered the CIA memo regarding Oswald’s 201 file, information was being deliberately withheld. What we knew at the time was that we were encountering quite a blatant display of ultimate control and the Committee had to deal with it. After all, what the hell difference did it make to the CIA that Admiral Turner had signed an agreement? He’d be gone soon enough. He was an outsider, the temporary leader of an institution which had its own priorities.

It took eleven weeks to organize the hunt for Osama bin Laden. When that hunt began in earnest, I was in eastern Afghanistan, in and around Jalalabad, where I had traveled on five trips over the years. An old acquaintance named Haji Abdul Qadir had just reclaimed his post as the provincial governor, two days after the fall of the Taliban. Haji Qadir was an exemplar of Afghan democracy. A well-educated and highly cultured Pathan tribal leader in his early sixties, a wealthy dealer in opium and weapons and other basic staples of the Afghan economy, he had been a CIA-supported commander in the fight against the Soviet occupation, the governor of his province from 1992 to 1996, and a close associate of the Taliban in their time. He personally welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan and helped him establish a compound outside Jalalabad. Now he welcomed the American occupation. Haji Qadir was a good host. We walked in the gardens of the governor’s palace, through swayback palms and feathery tamarisks. He was expecting a visit from his American friends any day now, and he was looking forward to the renewal of old ties and the ritual exchange of cash for information.

This view, that being Nazi and resolutely anti-Soviet/anti-Communist go hand-in-hand, thus making a Nazi a potentially good partner for the United States, was then, and in some instances, continues to be, the prevailing view of US foreign policy leaders, particularly in the CIA. I remind readers here of Operation Paperclip, a plan instituted just after WWII pursuant to which

In Japan, meanwhile, the United States quickly moved to restore fascist-era leaders to power to ensure that Japan would not turn to socialism, and so that it would be a reliable ally in suppressing anticolonial movements in Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The chief leader the United States selected to secure its interests in Japan and the Pacific was Nobusuke Kishi, also known as the “Shōwa (Emperor) era monster/devil”—the war criminal, famous for his brutality, who oversaw the use of coerced Korean and Chinese labor in Japan’s Manchurian munitions factories.22 The United States exonerated Kishi for his WWII-era war crimes, and he went on to serve two terms as Japan’s prime minister in the 1950s, becoming widely known as “America’s favorite war criminal.”23 In addition, the United States and Britain got busy right after WWII in helping to install and prop up fascist regimes in countries like Greece as a bulwark against Communism.

As just one example, Great Britain had supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as far back as 1928, as it identified it as “an anti-nationalist and anti-liberal vehicle” to be used against the prodemocracy forces in that country. It continued to back the Brotherhood against the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a secularist who had the audacity “to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic.”3 And indeed, just around the same time it was trying to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran, Britain was trying to assassinate Nasser, who represented the distinct danger of spreading secular democracy throughout the Arab world.4 As for Iran, when its revolution came in 1979, it was led by the Islamic leaders of that country more than the Left, which the United States had made sure was suppressed and crushed throughout the reign of the Shah, and even later as we will see. In other words, it was the United States’ own policies that made a revolution, and specifically an Islamic revolution, both possible and probable.

As Christopher Davidson sets forth in his recent book, Shadow Wars, the United States and Britain continued to aid and abet Iran, even more intensely after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, in the physical extermination of Iran’s left-wing. As Davidson explains, in 1983 “the CIA and MI6 jointly began to pass on information to the Tehran regime about Iranian communists and other leftists. Going far further than the Shah ever had, Khomeini made over a thousand arrests and executed several leaders of the Tudeh Party. As James Bill describes, this was regarded in the West as successfully ‘completing the dismantling of the Iranian left,’ even though the CIA and MI6 had long been aware of the Islamic Republic’s propensity for executing political prisoners without trial.”13

Nothing but total capitulation by the Sandinistas would suffice for Reagan. Thus, as the ICJ related, revolutionary leader and then Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega made it clear that he would give in to all of Reagan’s stated demands (i.e., that he would send home the Cuban and Russians advisers and not support the FMLN guerillas in El Salvador) in return for only “one thing: that they don’t attack us, that the United States stop arming and financing … the gangs that kill our people, burn our crops and force us to divert enormous human and economic resources into war when we desperately need them for development.”10 But Reagan would not relent until the Sandinistas and Ortega were out of power altogether. Ultimately, Reagan’s terror campaign would work, with the Nicaraguan people finally crying uncle in 1990, and voting the Sandinistas out of power. The Sandinistas would be voted back in, however, in 2007, and they remain the governing party to this day, with Daniel Ortega as president. Meanwhile, the United States continues to punish Nicaragua, the most stable and prosperous country in Central America after successfully breaking off from US domination, for its impertinence in overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship, having the audacity to survive the Contra War which claimed fifty thousand lives, voting back in the Sandinistas, and for now working with the Chinese to build the canal that the United States has coveted for so long. Thus, as I write these lines, the US Senate is considering passage of the “Nica Act,” already passed by the House, which would cut Nicaragua off from multilateral loans (e.g., from the World Bank, IMF). This, apparently, will show Nicaragua and other countries what they get for deciding to go their own way.

The Prince alighted from his gleaming silver-blue jet, his mind firmly on the task at hand: to persuade his close friend to go to war. Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington, was in Crawford, Texas, in August 2002 to visit the President of the United States, his close friend George W. Bush. At the President’s ranch the two men, comfortable in one another’s company, chatted for an hour. The President was in determined mood. Bandar’s exhortation that he should not back off, that he should complete what his father had failed to do, that he should destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein once and for all, gratified the President. Satisfied by their mutual reinforcement, the dapper enigmatic Prince and the cowboy President took lunch with their wives and seven of Bandar’s eight children. A few weeks later, President Bush met the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, at Camp David. The two leaders declared they had sufficient evidence that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction to justify their acting against Saddam, with or without the support of the United Nations. Prince Bandar’s role in Washington and London was unique: diplomat, peacemaker, bagman for covert CIA operations and arms dealer extraordinaire. He constructed a special relationship between Washington, Riyadh and London, and made himself very, very wealthy in the process. The £75m Airbus, painted in the colours of the Prince’s beloved Dallas Cowboys, was a gift from the British arms company BAE Systems. It was a token of gratitude for the Prince’s role, as son of the country’s Defence Minister, in the biggest arms deal the world has seen. The Al Yamamah – ‘the dove’ – deal signed between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia in 1985 was worth over £40bn. It was also arguably the most corrupt transaction in trading history. Over £1bn was paid into accounts controlled by Bandar. The Airbus – maintained and operated by BAE at least until 2007 – was a little extra, presented to Bandar on his birthday in 1988. A significant portion of the more than £1bn was paid into personal and Saudi embassy accounts at the venerable Riggs Bank opposite the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. The bank of choice for Presidents, ambassadors and embassies had close ties to the CIA, with several bank officers holding full agency security clearance. Jonathan Bush, uncle of the President, was a senior executive of the bank at the time. But Riggs and the White House were stunned by the revelation that from 1999 money had inadvertently flowed from the account of Prince Bandar’s wife to two of the fifteen Saudis among the 9/11 hijackers.

how the FBI abused its power by harassing dissident political groups and conducting illegal investigations; how the CIA, Army Intelligence and the National Security Agency were involved in domestic snooping; and how the intelligence agencies had planned assassination attempts on foreign leaders.

One factor that led the Central Intelligence Agency to believe it could topple Castro was its success in Guatemala in 1954. Using a force of only 150 exiles and a handful of World War II P-47 fighters flown by American contract pilots, the CIA brought down the legally elected government of Socialist President Jacobo Arbenz in less than a week, firing hardly a shot, and installed the Agency’s handpicked leader, Carlos Castillo Armas.

Clinton had placed leaders at Langley whom he liked and trusted. Yet the president remained skeptical of the CIA as an institution.

Hoover was able to expand the list of COINTELPRO targets in the years to come to include such enemies of the people as civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,

In the previously mentioned article, there is an embedded one hour fifteen minute video that you need to watch. It is a round table discussion headed by former CIA Director James Woolsey and many other high level military leaders and scientists discussing the near miss and the effect it would

But then I realized that this is true: American citizens don't expect deception - some American leaders however, exhale it like carbon-dioxide.

It was the United States, after all, which poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp