Russia’s Criminal Oligarchy: The Role of Bush Senior and the CIA

 

This Guns and Butter interview is full of astonishing information (that you will never find in the corporate media) about the role of Bush senior and CIA-funded foundations in the creation of Russia’s criminal oligarchy and the systematic dismantling of communist Poland and the Soviet Union. Bonnie Faulkner and F William Engdahl are discussing his new book Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance.

In the first 15 minutes of the interview, Engdahl describes Reagan’s creation of the CIA-funded National Endowment for Democracy and its sister groups National Democratic Institute (NDI), International Republican Institute (IRI) Freedom House, and Solidarity Center. The formation of the so-called independent foundations enabled the CIA to fund a full range of illegal covert activities without being subject to congressional scrutiny. All worked closely with various foundations funded by George Soros to deliberately destabilize the Warsaw Pact.

15.30 Engdahl discusses the CIA conspiracy to bring down Poland’s communist government, starting with the secret pact Reagan and Pope John Paul II (the first Polish pope) formed in 1982. In this clandestine campaign, NED invested tens of millions of dollar in fax, copy machines, etc, which they smuggled into Poland with the help of Polish priests. This equipment, in turn, was used to facilitate mass protests supposedly organized by Solidarnosc, the dockworkers union led by Lech Walesa.

20.19 Engdahl talks about the 300 CIA agents left over from George Herbert Walker Bush’s tenure as CIA director – and how Bush senior regrouped them into private entities to engage in covert activities in Poland and the USSR.

21.00 Engdahl covers the mass protests leading to the collapse of the communist government in 1989 and the election of Lech Walesa as president. Walesa, in turn, opened the door for George Soros and Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs to strip the Polish economy of all its assets and impose harsh austerity measures.

32.00 Engdahl discusses Executive Order 12333 (signed by Reagan), which put Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush in charge of all US foreign and national security policy after 1981 – and Executive Order 13233 signed by George W Bush, which severely limited public access to the records of prior presidents.

36.00 Engdahl talks about the Enterprise, a private intelligence/security network created by George Herbert Walker Bush that included teams run by Oliver North and Richard Secord. In addition to organizing illegal weapons sales to Iran (Iran Contra), The Enterprise recruited corrupt KGB generals to help  bring down Gorbachev’s government. According to Engdahl, these generals were the real origin (not the Russian mafia) of Russia’s corrupt billionaire oligarchs. The oligarchs were young proteges of these generals.

39.00 Engdahl explains Operation Hammer which financed the KGB generals’ coup against Korbachev in 1991 and installed Boris Yeltsin as president. The latter allowed the oligarchs, with the help of George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs and other Harvard economists to loot Russia exactly as they had looted Poland.

49.54 Engdahl describes how the Open Russia Foundation bribed corrupt legislators in the Duma to privatize all Russia’s natural resources and richest industries (minerals, oil, gas, the largest aluminum smelter in the world) and how Sachs, Soros and their cronies assisted the oligarchs in selling off all these industries for pennies on the dollar. When the giant Russian oil company Yukos was privatized, international banker Jacob Rothschild, George Soros and Henry Kissinger were appointed as Yukos board members.

52.00 Engdahl traces the downfall of Yeltsin starting in 1998 when the Duma refused to approve Chernomyrdin as prime minister. Yeltsin then appointed Yevgeny Primakov, who immediately filed criminal charges against oligarch Boris Berezovksy, who fled to London. When Clinton began bombing Serbia in March 1999, Primakov was en route to Washington DC and order his pilot to turn around and return to Moscow. When he demanded Yeltsin support the Serbs, Yeltsin sacked him.

54.00 After Yeltsin lost control of the Russian military, which dispatched troops to seize the airport in Kosovo, he appointed Putin as Prime Minister. Engdahl attributes this decision to KGB  deception operation that convinced Yeltsin and his oligarch buddies that Putin would play along. Instead Putin threatened Yeltsin with corruption charges unless he resigned. Putin would serve as acting president until he was elected in his own right in March 2000.

 

 

The 1972 US Coup Against Australia

Hot Money and the Politics of Debt

RT Naylor

McGill-Queens University Press (2004)

Book Review

Hot Money is about the trillions of dollars of global financial activity that is never recorded in official economic statistics. Corporate money laundering of illegal narcotics profits is the form of “hot money” that gets the most publicity. However according to Naylor, it accounts for a relatively small proportion of “hot money” percolating through offshore banks and dummy corporations.

Most “hot money” starts out as funds generated via “legitimate” business which rich elites sebd offshore to avoid taxes or in anticipation of economic calamity or regime change. All the world’s most ruthless dictators stashed funds in Swiss banks or similar financial havens prior to being deposed.

A sizeable chunk of hot money is generated from other illegal enterprises, such as gun running, illegal arms deals, prostitution, phony charities and religious groups (eg Reverend Moon’s Unification Church and L Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology) and government agencies (eg CIA) who use “hot money” to finance coups and insurgencies.

For me, the high point of Hot Money  is the excellent history Naylor provides of the CIA role in the world heroin and cocaine trade, especially their move to make Afghanistan the major global supplier of heroin.

Nalylor also provides a detailed history about the role of the Vatican Bank as a “hot money” center, the rise and fall of Propaganda Due (P2), a secret collaboration between the CIA, Mafia and right wing Masonic lodges that infiltrated all aspects of Italian public life in the 1970s; the role of Nazi war criminals Klaus Barbie and Josef Mengele in setting up Latin American death squads and cocaine networks; the rise and fall of the two biggest CIA banks, Australia’s Nugan Hand Bank and the Bank of Commerce and Credit International;  and the importance of “hot money” in the Iran Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran to finance the Contra war against Nicaragua.

The most shocking chapter describes the role of the Nugan Hand Bank in funding a bloodless coup US Naval Intelligence carried out against Australia in 1972 – to remove a prime minister whose political views were inconsistent with US interests. Most Americans are totally unaware of this heinous attack against a close US ally. I’ve only learned of it since moving to New Zealand (Australia is New Zealand’s closest neighbor).

The Billionaires Who Helped Destroy Democracy

The Mayfair Set: Four Stories About the Rise of Business and the Decline of Political Power

Directed by Adam Curtis (1999)

Film Review

The Mayfair Set is a four part documentary series profiling the right wing financiers responsible for the financialization of the British-American economy in the seventies and eighties. It also explores the simultaneous transfer of real power away from elected representatives to banks and financial markets. “Mayfair Set” refers to a private London gambling club – the Clermont Club – where many of these future billionaires were members.

Part 1 – concerns British aristocrat Colonel David Sterling, founder of the British SAS (Special Air Service). In the sixties and seventies, Sterling created a series of private mercenary armies to fight independence movements in Africa and elsewhere. In addition to secretly fighting Egypt’s invasion of Yemen in 1962, he also set up numerous arms deals for Saudi Arabia,* with the assistance of notorious Saudi arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi.** He also created the Saudi air force.

Part 2 – concerns two right wing Clermont Club members John Slater and Tiny Rollin. Slater was a corporate raider who almost singlehandedly wiped out Britain’s manufacturing sector in the seventies and eighties. He did so by targeting specific companies for hostile takeover, stripping their assets, sacking thousands of workers, and investing the proceeds in the share market. Rollin was responsible for bilking newly independent African nations of their mines, factories and plantations.

Part 3 – concerns Slater’s fellow corporate raider, Michael Goldsmith, who emigrated to the US in 1980 and paired up with junk bond guru Michael Milken to destroy America’s manufacturing base by initiating dozens of hostile takeovers of US companies. In 1990 Milken was sentenced to 3 ½ years prison on 94 counts of fraud, racketeering and insider trading.

Part 4 – concerns the rise to power of Clermont Club darling Margaret Thatcher and her (controversial) embrace of Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed. Al-Fayed saved her government when currency speculator George Soros led a vicious attack on the British pound in 1992. Al-Fayed would subsequently blow the whistle to the Guardian on all the British MPs who accepted bribes from him. Al-Fayed was father to Dodi, the boyfriend killed in the car crash with Princess Diana.

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*British arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which continue to the present day, have become extremely controversial owing to the Saudis’ carpet bombing of Yemen and the resulting humanitarian crisis.  See Shelve UK arms sales to Saudis over Yemen, say two MPs’ committees

**Khashoggi first came to public attention for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which George Herbert Walker Bush and other members of the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran to finance their illegal war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Khashoggi also had direct links with the alleged 9-11 terrorists (see Spike the News) and was the uncle of Dodi Al Fayed, the boyfriend killed in the car crash with Princess Diana.

 

Mae Brussell and the John Lennon Assassination

The second of two posts about the late political researcher Mae Brussell

Operation Chaos

In addition to her other research, Mae Brussell also played a vital role in bringing the CIA’s Operation CHAOS to public attention. According to Brussell CHAOS, which was launched in 1967, played a significant role in “neutralizing” popular rock musicians who were contributing to the rise of the New Left. According to Brussell, most of these murders were disguised to look like accidental drug overdoses or plane crashes. However, as with the JFK assassination, there was always a typical pattern of lost or destroyed evidence and an official report that was full of contradictions and discrepancies.

The list of prematurely dead rock musicians, entertainers and managers Brussell investigated includes John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendris, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Duane Allman, Mama Cass Elliot, Phil Oakes, Keith Moon Jim Reaves, Jim Croce, Lenny Bruce, Bon Scott (AC/DC), Bob Marley, Sal Mineo, Rod McKernan (Grateful Dead), Brian Epstein (Beatles manager), Michael Jeffery (Jimi Hendrix’s manager and Donald Rex Jackson (grateful Dead manager).

John Lennon’s Assassin Mark Chapman

Brussell had a special interest in John Lennon’s alleged assassin Mark Chapman and all the unanswered questions posed by the “official” police account. In a 1981 interview with Tom Davis, Brussell talks at length about Chapman’s unusual background, which clearly suggests prior intelligence involvement.

She also raises a number of troubling questions the New York police should have investigated (and which likely would have come out at trial if Chapman hadn’t been pressured to plead guilty):

• Why did a security guard Chapman met in DeKalb Georgia arrange for him to spend six months in war torn Lebanon (Brussell believed it was to attend a CIA-run military training camp)?
• Why did Chapman return from Lebanon to Fort Chaffee Arkansas to work at a World Vision camp for Vietnam refugees (World Vision, run by Bush senior’s friend John Hinckley Sr, was closely linked with the CIA, which frequently used their refugee camps to recruit operatives)?
• Who paid for Chapman, who was chronically unemployed, to take a long round the world trip shortly before he shot Lennon?
• Where did Chapman get the money to purchase $7,500 worth of Norman Rockwell lithographs and to stay in expensive hotels?
• How could someone who was hospitalized for mental illness in Hawaii manage to buy a weapon there – and transport it to the mainland? And why did the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have no interest in investigating this?

Forced Off the Air by Death Threats

After 17 years on the radio, Brussell left the air in March 1988 as a result of a death threat related to her investigation of followers of satanic cults in the military. She continued to record weekly audiotapes, which she sent to her followers, until June 1988. She died, from breast cancer, in October 1988.

In the following 1971 broadcast, she discusses the 28,000 page cross filing system she used to analyze the Warren Commission report and establish clear links between Oswald, his probable CIA handler George DeMohrenschildt and 28 white Russian CIA assets in Dallas/Fort Worth.

photo credit: Flickred! via photopin cc

Also posted at Veterans Today

Mae Brussell: Forgotten Superhero

Part I of a two-part post on political researcher Mae Brussell

For more than 25 years, Mae Brussell (1922-1988) was America’s preeminent researcher into the suppressed history of political assassinations, covert operations, mind control, secret societies, organized banking crime and international fascism.

When I first learned of her work in 1992, Brussell had already been dead for four years. I had contacted the Christic Institute* to request copies of the literature they were putting out regarding their lawsuit against CIA operatives involved in either the Iran Contra Affair** or the CIA-backed cocaine trafficking used to finance the Contra war against Nicaragua. The staff member I talked to phone informed me the judge had dismissed their suit as frivolous and stripped them of their non-profit status. They had turned all their literature and tapes over to Prevailing Winds Research (PWR) in Santa Barbara. If I wanted more information, I would need to contact them.

Accessing Suppressed Documents Before the Internet

As I was to learn, PWR was an archival service for political activists, journalists, academics and former intelligence operatives whose writing on government crimes had been suppressed by the mainstream media. In 2015, most of this material is widely available on the Internet. Back in 1992, you had to order it through the PWR catalog.A week after I contacted them, they sent me an astonishing catalog of economically priced books, articles, tapes and monographs that had suppressed by the mainstream media (including, but not limited to, Philip Agee, Peter Dale Scott, Mae Brussell, Ralph Schoenman, Larry Flynt, John Judge, Seymour Hersh, John Stockwell and Abbie Hoffman).Given my strong interest in the JFK assassination, my first order consisted of Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal by William Torbitt, a collection of interviews with the late JFK assassination researcher John Judge*** and a collection of Mae Brussell’s articles.

Just an Ordinary Housewife (and Mother of Five)

Brussell had doubts about the official version of the JFK assassination from the moment she watched Jack Ruby assassinate Lee Harvey Oswald on live nation televisions. When Brussell’s daughter first saw Oswald in the hallway of the Dallas jail, it was obvious he’d been beaten and she felt sorry for him. She was wrapping up her teddy bear to send him when they saw Ruby shoot him.

Because it also bothered Brussell that the newspaper and TV coverage regarding Oswald’s background was full of discrepancies and contradictions. In 1964 she paid $86 to purchase the 26 volume Warren Commission report of the Kennedy assassination, which contained even more discrepancies and contradictions. As she stated in a 1974 interview with Playgirl Magazine, “Twenty-three adjectives were used to describe him in the Warren Report. They said he had no friends, no meaningful relationships, couldn’t hold a job, and so on. But the evidence all pointed in the opposite direction.”

So she began a seven-year project to cross index all the key witnesses and findings, filling dozens of notebooks with 28,000 pages of files on each witness and their specific link to Oswald. What she ultimately discovered was that the international terror network had gone underground and were continuing their fascist campaign to take over one country after another, including the US.

Thirty-Nine File Cabinets

Her determination to dig deeper into the JFK and other assassinations led her to read 15 newspapers every day and subscribe to more than 150 periodicals. The clippings she cut and saved would eventually fill 39 file cabinets.

As a result of her careful research, Brussell would conclude that the Kennedy assassinations, Martin Luther King’s assassination, the Manson family murders, Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick affair and the Patty Hearst kidnapping were all orchestrated by the far right, the CIA, the FBI and the Mafia with the dual purpose of discrediting the left and establishing a fascist state.

World Watchers International

Starting in 1971, Brussell hosted a weekly radio program called World Watchers International. She broadcast on KLRB in Carmel from 1971 from 1971 to 1983 and on public radio station KAZU in Pacific Grove from 1983-1988. Her program was syndicated to a half dozen stations around the country (including Sacramento, Boston, Syracuse and San Francisco), and hundreds of followers subscribed to her tapes and bibliographies. She also lectured extensively and had articles published in the Realist, People’s Almanac, Berkeley Barb, Penthouse and Hustler.

Other Assassinations

In addition to researching the US intelligence link to the Kennedy assassinations, the Martin Luther King Assassination and the attempted assassinations on Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and Pope John Paul II, assassination researcher Mae Brussell investigated the assassination of John Lennon and the suspicious deaths of dozens of other rock stars.

She was the first to uncover the role of former Nazi war criminals in the JFK assassination, as well as the US intelligence link to the Watergate break-in in June 1972. Brussell always believed Watergate was a coup to remove Nixon from power, a hypothesis corroborated more than thirty years later by Russ Baker in his 2009 book about the Bush family, Family of Secrets. In investigating the assassination attempt on Reagan, Brussell was the first to uncover that the father of the alleged assassin, John Hinkley Sr was an oil tycoon and close family friend and supporter of vice president George H. W. Bush.

Brussell’s friend (and former Chicago 7  defendant****) Paul Krassner published her the article she wrote about Watergate in August 1972, Why Was Martha Mitchell Kidnapped? John Lennon, who had undergone years of FBI surveillance and harassment, paid the $5,000 printing bill.

Brussell first published her article The Nazi Connection to the JFK Assassination in Larry Flint’s short lived publication The Rebel in 1984.

The following is an early interview with Mae from 7/21/71. In it she discusses the longstanding power struggle between the Eastern banking/oil elite and the Western military/space elite and the role of John Kennedy’s murder in this power struggle. She also discusses Oswald’s role as an intelligence operative.

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*The Christic Institute was a public interest law firm founded by Daniel Sheehan in 1980. Christic represented victims of the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island; they prosecuted KKK members for killing civil rights demonstrators in the Greensboro Massacre, and they defended Catholic workers providing sanctuary to Salvadoran refugees (American Sanctuary Movement). Most famously, the Christic Institute uncovered the Iran Contra Affair, and led the lawsuit at the heart of the scandal.Along with the suit, the Institute launched a massive public education campaign to raise public consciousness about the Iran Contra affair. Their work eventually led to the appointment of Iran Contra special Prosecutor Lawrence Welsh. His investigation led to the convictions of both former National Security Adviser John Poindexter and National Security Council member Oliver North, although both convictions were subsequently reversed.

**The Iran–Contra affair, also referred to as Irangate, was a political scandal in which senior Reagan administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of weapons to Iran, which was illegal under a US embargo. The allowed the CIA to fund efforts by the Nicaraguan Contras to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress.

***In addition to his work as an independent assassinations researcher, John Judge (1947-2014) was also co-founder of 9-11 Citizen Watch, Special Projects Assistant to former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and cofounder of the Coalition on Political Assassination. COPA was founded in 1994 following the release of thousands of classified JFK documents by Clinton’s Assassination Review Board, and Special Projects Assistant former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

****The Chicago Seven were seven defendants charged with conspiracy, inciting to riot, and other charges related to street protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

photo credit: http://www.maebrussell.com

Also published in Veterans Today

To be continued, with a discussion of Brussell’s research into John Lennon’s assassination