Part 2 of Counter-intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations
“Deep state” is Part 2 of a five part documentary by Scott Noble called Counter-Intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations. Historian and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott coined the term Deep State to describe the shadow government that operates outside our so-called democratic institutions to service the needs of America’s wealthy elite.
This episode focuses on close historical links between the Mafia and CIA and the role of narcotics trafficking in all major CIA covert operations. CIA drug trafficking serves two main purposes. In addition to providing off the books (not reportable to Congress) income for clandestine operations, it’s also a source of ready-made criminal networks. The latter are valuable as a conduits for weapons delivery to CIA mercenaries and as lethal enforcers of corporate interests against labor and human rights activists.
Scott, who is interviewed at length, stresses the instrumental role of the CIA in ALL global narcotics trafficking. The converse is also true. Citing the French Connection (centered in Marseilles) and the Golden Triangle (in Southeast Asia) as prime examples, he makes the case that all major narcotics hubs collapse following CIA withdrawal from the region.
“Deep State” also shines a light on current drug operations in Afghanistan and Columbia. At present Afghanistan is the world’s leading heroin producer, a direct result of CIA involvement in the region. Colombia, in turn is the world’s largest purveyor of cocaine, thanks to the CIA decision to use Colombia to “block the spread” of communism from Cuba to the rest of Latin America.
According to filmmaker Scott Noble, all major Wall Street banks have engaged in laundering profits from illicit narcotics. Illegal drugs are America’s third biggest commodity, with the wealthy elite siphoning off the vast majority of drug profits. They also rake in immense profits from the prison industrial complex, a growth industry that owes its existence to the so-called War on Drugs. Wells Fargo and other Wall Street banks are major investors in the prison privatization industry.
Counter-intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations
Counter-intelligence is a five-part documentary examining the history, structure and function of America’s National Security State. The latter is a secretive, quasi-legal bureaucracy whose primary purpose is to enforce the will of the wealthy elite without interference by elected representatives. Laying out the series like a college course, filmmaker Scott Noble reveals the mechanism by which this invisible shadow government exercises near total control over US foreign and domestic policy. Part 1 discusses the CIA, the Joint Services Operation Command and the NSA
Noble defines “black operations” as illegal clandestine operations that are carried out without Congressional oversight or accountability. The National Security Act President Harry Truman signed in 1947 made covert operations the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Group, which wouldn’t become part of the CIA until the 1950s. .
Truman appointed a number of Wall Street bankers and lawyers to run covert operations. Their foreign trade experience (especially with fascist countries) supposedly made them “experts” in foreign relations. Traditionally top CIA officials have been recruited from the children of Wall Street elites at Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League universities.
Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones society has been a particularly fertile ground for recruiting CIA officers. The requirement for new Skull and Bones members to commit an illegal act (usually grave robbing) prepares them for the illegal covert operations they will carry out for the CIA.
Plausible Deniability
“The Company” emphasizes the role of private foundations and contractors (mercenaries) in concealing the CIA’s role in assassinations, foreign coups and drug trafficking. The CIA funded the 2002 against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez by funneling millions of dollars through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). This made it possible for the Bush administration to deny they played any role whatsoever in the coup.
Unlimited Budgets
A major feature of the National Security State is the total absence of oversight or accountability to any elected branch of government. Budgets are virtually unlimited, and there is no requirement for agencies that engage in black operations to report how they spend their funding.
The Joint Services Operation Command (JSOC) is a prime example. The JSOC, which technically falls under Pentagon, receives even less oversight than the CIA. JSOC has a 75 billion dollar budget and employs 200,000 covert operatives, many of them mercenaries. Noble believes the JSOC is a major culprit in trillions that have gone missing from the Pentagon budget.
Owing to its total lack of oversight or accountability, the JSOC is free to contract with a scumbag company like DynCorps, despite their collaboration with the Serbian mafia in sex trafficking – or the sex parties, involving little boys, they throw for Afghan officials.
The National Security Administration (NSA) enjoys even less fiscal accountability. The NSA, which has more operatives than the CIA and FBI combined (40,000), had an $11.6 billion budget in 2012. It also has its own film festival, ski club and yacht club.
CIA Domestic Spying
Noble concludes by touching on the CIA’s repeated and ongoing violation of the federal law prohibiting them from engaging in domestic covert operations. He briefly discusses Operation Chaos (a 1967-73 covert operation against anti-Vietnam war and civil rights activists), MK-Ultra (a 1957-73 project involving mind control experimentation on unwitting Americans) and Operation Mockingbird (a 1950-ongoing operation in which the CIA “recruits” journalists to present the Company in a favorable light).
Counter-intelligence: Shining a Light on Black OperationsScott Noble Metanoia Films (2013)
In the face of growing international concern over the ongoing nuclear disaster at Fukushima, an excellent 2009 French/German film (with English subtitles) about nuclear waste has been re-released and is making the rounds of cyberspace. This is truly a life and death issue, owing to the research evidence linking high environmental radiation levels (from the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown) to a big spike in European cancer levels. Important facts come out in this film that the nuclear industry and government are doing their best to conceal:
1. The whole issue of nuclear waste is characterized by secrecy, cover-up, lies and deception by the nuclear industry and pro-nuclear governments (including the extremely pro-nuclear Obama administration).
2. As the world waits with baited breath for the nuclear industry to come up with a permanent solution for deadly waste that will take 100,000 years to decontaminate, massive amounts have been dumped in the ocean, released to the air or stored in leaky containers that are contaminating groundwater and rivers. In La Hague France a nuclear energy company called Areva is releasing it into the air and into the English Channel through a drain pipe d water or open air storage pools. In La Hague France a nuclear energy company is releasing it into the English Channel through a drain pipe (as of 2009, when this film was made).
3. The US and Russian government are covering up the devastating health impacts of the world’s two most contaminated nuclear sites: the Hanford nuclear reservation in Eastern Washington and the Chelyabinsk region in the former Soviet Union. The latter experienced massive contamination when a nuclear waste dump at the Mayak nuclear facility exploded in 1957. The very first nuclear disaster in history was covered up by both the Soviets and, at the behest of America’s fledgling nuclear power industry, the CIA
4. There has never been full disclosure about the 100,000 tons of nuclear waste dumped into the ocean prior to 1993 (as the film was made in 2009, this number excludes the four tons daily dumped into the Pacific Ocean at Fukushima), when the practice was banned by international treaty. Nor has there been any effort to investigate where these radionucleotides ended up or whether they have contaminated the food chain.
4. The nuclear industry – and government – are willfully ignoring the “no threshold model” doctors use to evaluate cumulative radiation risk when they assure us that occasional releases from nuclear power plants are no more harmful than a “transatlantic jet flight” (due to higher radiation levels in the outer atmosphere) Under this model every exposure – no matter how small – increases your risk of developing cancer or having children with birth defects.
The Nuclear Nightmare at Hanford
As a former Washington resident, I took particular interest in the segment on Hanford, the desert site where the Manhattan Project secretly produced plutonium for the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Hanford also produced the vast majority of plutonium for America’s cold war arsenal (1950-1980). Most of Hanford’s nuclear waste is stored in 170 temporary underground concrete tanks. These were meant to be temporary until a permanent storage solution could be found. Beginning in 2001 the tanks, which were only built to last twenty years, were found to be leaking radionuclotides into the groundwater adjacent to the Columbia River.
According to the US Department of Energy, which is responsible for the Hanford clean-up, there are no nuclear contaminants in the Columbia River. This is virtually impossible for independent scientists to verify, as anyone trespassing on the Hanford reservation is subject to arrest and prosecution. The filmmakers accompanied an activist who entered the reservation secretly to take soil and water samples. French scientists at CRIIRAD (Commission de Recherche et d’Information Indépendantes sur la Radioactivité) who tested them found high levels of tritium (exceeding the drinking water standard), Iodine 129, Technetium 99 and Europium 152. The film also talks about an independent study local activists did in 2002, in which the majority of Columbia River fish they sampled contained high levels of Strontium 90.
The People in Muslimovo Who Are Waiting to Die
The situation of Russian farmers living adjacent to the Techa River in Chelyabinsk is far more tragic. After more than fifty years the Techa, which locals rely on to water their crops and pastures, remains contaminated with high levels of Cesium 137, tritium, Strontium 90 and Plutonium 239 and 240 – as do vegetables and milk produced in nearby farms.
The residents are all fully aware of the bleak future they face, as they watch family, neighbors and even their children and grandchildren succumb to cancer. Each family has been offered 20,000 Euros (about $25,000) to abandon their land and homes and voluntarily relocate. This is a paltry sum that would support them a few months at most. The government also tells them not to eat locally grown food. However with incomes averaging 80 euros a month, eating food trucked in from other regions is an unaffordable luxury. As one local woman states, “We have no choice but to stay here until we die.”
Part 2 focuses on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 – and how the CIA funded and trained the Islamist Mujahideen to combat the occupation.
Both Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and the neoconservatives claim credit for the hare-brained and incredibly short sighted scheme to recruit, fund and train a jihadist army in Afghanistan. In addition to providing sophisticated weaponry, the CIA trained the Mujahideen in terror techniques, such as assassination, car bombs and improvised explosive devices (IDEs).
Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian who led the Mujahideen, put out a call for all Muslims to join Afghanistan’s holy war. He believed that victory in Afghanistan would inspire foreign fighters to return to their homelands and overthrow corrupt secular dictators the US was propping up.
One Saudi who answered this call was a phenomenally wealthy construction contractor named Osama bin Laden. He, too, provided funding for the Mujahideen.
Arab governments, recognizing a unique opportunity to expel their own jihadist troublemakers, opened their jails and exiled their Islamic extremists to Afhanistan. Egypt released Islamic Jihad founder Dr Zawahiri and his followers.
Gorbachov Orders Soviet Withdrawal
In 1987 when Gorbachov came to power, the Soviet Union was on the brink of economic collapse. Believing he could still save it through political reform, Gorby quickly commenced Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also reached out to the Bush senior administration to help install a stable government in Kabul. He warned that failure to do so would allow the Mujahideen to install an Islamic dictatorship. The neoconservatives who ran the Pentagon and State Department refused. With Pakistani support, the Mujahideen (renamed the Taliban) took control of Afghanistan and installed a brutal fundamentalist regime.
Both the neoconservatives and the Taliban/Mujahideen would claim sole credit for victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan. Both groups (and Zbigniew Brzezinski) would also credit US intervention in Afghanistan for the demise of the Soviet Union. In reality the USSR collapsed due to gross economic mismanagement and internal decay.
The Split Between Azzam and Zawahiri
Following the Soviet withdrawal, a major rift occurred between Zawahiri and Azzam. As it turned out, torture also radicalized Zawahiri. Who now proclaimed that politicians who were in bed with the Americans – and their civilian supporters – were legitimate targets for assassination.
Azzam, in contrast, compelled Islamic freedom fighters to swear an oath not to kill innocent civilians. Osama Bin Laden, former deputy to Azzam, joined forces with Zawahiri shortly before the latter’s assassination in 1989.
By the early nineties, powerful movements the Islamic Jihad (and related groups) had built in Egypt and Algeria were on track to win national elections. Aided by the US and France, the Algerian military launched a coup and cancelled the Algerian elections. Egypt, in turn, banned the Muslim Brotherhood and arrested and tortured their leadership.
Islamic Jihad responded by attempting to launch violent jihad in both countries. Owing to their failure to attract a mass following, in May 1998 Zawahuri and Bin Laden would announce a new strategy: taking jihad to their real enemies: the US and Israel.
Meanwhile Back in Washington
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the neoconservatives were more committed than ever to promoting the myth that the US was the sole force for good in a world of evil regimes. Fingering Saddam Hussein as the next satan to be overthrown, in 1990 they put immense pressure on Bush senior to overthrow the Iraqi government during the first Gulf War. Bush wisely took the sage advice of Pentagon advisers who warned that a full scale invasion of Iraq would result in a hopeless quagmire.
Mainstream Republicans Back Clinton
In 1992, mainstream Republicans, frightened by the religious fundamentalism that had overtaken the Republican Party, voted for Clinton in droves. The neocons, in turn, latched onto Clinton as the new evil. They began a vicious propaganda campaign against him, spearheaded by the conservative American Spectator. The campaign widely disseminated spurious allegations that the Clintons had committed financial fraud in Whitewater*, murdered their friend Vince Foster and participated in drug smuggling at the Mena Airport in Arkansas.**
Under immense pressure, Clinton agreed to appoint Kenneth Starr as special prosecutor to investigate these allegations. Starr couldn’t find any evidence of Clinton wrongdoing until he stumbled onto the President’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Following their failure to impeach Clinton, the neocons became as marginalized in the US as Bin Laden, Zawahiri and their ragtag followers in the Arab world.
All this would change with 9-11, which would propel both the Islamists and the neocons.
*The Whitewater controversy involved a questionable real estate deal Clinton engaged in while he was attorney general of Arkansas. The Whitewater investigations would result in criminal convictions for several of Clinton’s associates. Although there was insufficient evidence to file criminal charges against the President, his conduct was clearly unethical: see Whitewater Scandal
**While there’s no evidence Governor Clinton was directly involved in cocaine smuggling, he was unresponsive to strong grassroots demand that he investigate the CIA’a drug-gun smuggling operation at the Mena Airport – and to Ross Perot’s (presidential candidate in 1992 and 1996) request that Clinton back the Internal Revenue’s investigation of Menta.
Part 2 in this series discusses how utopian ideas about computers led the scientific community to promote a totally erroneous model of natural ecosystems.
The term ecosystem was first defined by ecologist Arthur Tansley. He mistakenly believed that ecosystems work just like computers – that all of nature is linked through organized networks that self-regulate by means of feedback loops. As ecology became the predominant scientific discipline of the early seventies, he and his colleagues went so far as to portray these interconnected networks as electrical circuits. Meanwhile Silicon Valley computer engineers, heavily influenced by Ayn Rand’s radical individualism (earlier post), as well as this erroneous view of ecosystems, made a deliberate decision in 1968 to focus on personal computer technology rather than mainframe computers.
The work of Tansley and his colleagues would be totally discredited by new data that would emerge demonstrating were chaotic and unpredictable and tended towards wild fluctuations that never returned to an equilibrium point. Like many scientists, the early ecologists had oversimplified and distorted the data they collected to fit their model of nature as a self regulating system.
The Rise of Cybernetics
Meanwhile the scientific community’s fascination with computers would also give rise to the field of cybernetics, which looks at society as if human beings were a vast interconnected system of machines. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, was a strong proponent of this systems-oriented view of both nature and society. A strong egalitarian, Bucky envisioned a society (which he referred to as Spaceship Earth) that did away with authoritarian hierarchies and allowed people to live together as equal members of a closed system that would self-regulate – as a spacecraft does.
In the early seventies, disillusioned by the failure of the anti-Vietnam War, a half million young Americans left the cities to start experimental non-hierarchical communes in the countryside. It would be the largest mass migration in US history. Their goal was to create egalitarian communities in which people sacrificed their individuality for the benefit of the system.
Most of these communes would fail. Curtis blames their failure, without any real evidence, on a rigid absence of structure that allowed stronger and more dominant personalities to dominate and bully weaker ones. He likens the failure of the commune movement to the failed Color Revolutions* of the 1990s – which left Eastern European countries even more corrupt and unequal.
He seems to be making the case that egalitarian societies are impossible, which I strongly question. In my view the Color Revolutions failed for the same reason as the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions: because they were instigated, organized and funded by the CIA, State Department (and George Soros in the case of Eastern Europe) for the purpose of installing new governments favorable to US corporate interests.**
Enter the Club of Rome***
Two additional outcomes of the new field of ecology would be the formation, in 1968, of the elite roundtable group the Club of Rome and the first international environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.
In 1972 the Club of Rome commissioned a study based on the theory that all human and natural activity was merely a vast interconnected system of feedback loops. The MIT computer scientists they hired developed a complex computer model based on the best population, resource, industrial production, agricultural production and pollution data. Their modeling, which the Club of Rome published in their 1973 bestseller The End of Growth, predicted major economic and environmental collapse in the first decade of the 21st century. The book maintained that the only way to prevent environmental and economic collapse was for western societies to give up their fixation with continuous economic growth.
The European left became extremely concerned that growth restriction would lock the ruling elite (who ran the Club of Rome) into their existing positions of privilege and power. They launched major protests against The End of Growth. They argued the proper role of the environmental movement should be to end the greed of political elites. That being said, the computer modeling on which the book is based predicted the 2008 economic collapse.
* Title of 1967 monograph distributed free by California cybernetics enthusiast Richard Brautigan. Available for $400 from Abe Books
**Serbia Otpor (Resistance) Revolution (2000), Georgia Rose Revolution (2003), Ukraine Orange Revolution (2004) and Kirghizistan Cotton Revolution (2005) – see The CIA Role in the Arab Spring
***The early Club of Rome was financed by corporate oligarch David Rockefeller, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (see and the Ford Foundation. The two latter entities are well known conduits for CIA funding (see CIA-funded Foundations)
Who Paid the Piper: The Cultural Cold War is about the covert “cultural” propaganda the CIA carried out between 1950 and 1967. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the centerpiece of this operation, had offices in 35 countries, published over 20 magazines, held art exhibitions and provided major financial support for American artists, poets, authors and playwrights. Its primary purpose was to “nudge” the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from Marxism and communism towards a more accommodating view of US interests.
At the end of World War II, Europeans tended to view the US as “a culturally barren nation of gum chewing, Chevy driving, Dupont-sheathed Philistines.” To counteract this stigma, Truman issued an appendix to executive order NSC-4A, directing the CIA director to undertake covert psychological activities in support of American anti-Communist policies.
As Saunders details, this strategy included CIA support for both US and foreign Non-Communist Left (NCL) organizations, trade unions who agreed to weed out “dangerous radicals” and leftist intellectuals. The rationale was to create and support “parallel” organizations to provide an alternative to Communist groups over which the CIA had no control.
A strong advocate of this approach was “liberal” Kennedy adviser and biographer Arthur Schlesinger, a long time member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He was one of the few non non-CIA employees Congress members who knew the CIA was running it. Schlesinger also sat on the executive committee of Radio Free Europe, which the CIA set up in 1950.
Without Budgetary Limits or Oversight
Over the next two decades the CIA acted as a de facto ministry of culture, pumping millions of dollars into the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Congress had no budgetary limits and was accountable to no one for the way they spent their money.
Via the this front organization, the CIA built the reputations of numerous American composers by funding European premiers of their work. Among the most prominent were Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Menotti and Aaron Copeland.
They also financed European performances of American plays, in essence solidifying the careers of Lillian Hellman, Eugene O’Neill, Thorton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan, Clifford Odets, and John Steinbeck.
And paid for the European distribution of American books, by authors such as Louisa May Alcott, Faulkner, Hemingway, James Thurber, Edith Wharton, Thomas Wolfe, T.S. Eliot and socialists Norman Cousins and Carl Sandburg.
The Wall Street Families Who Started the CIA
Who Paid the Piper focuses heavily on the personalities of the men who founded the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), which in 1947 would evolve into the CIA. Nearly all were from wealthy Ivy League and Wall Street families who attended the same cocktail parties and sent their kids to the same prep schools. They automatically identified the “American way” with the privileges of their class, including a well-rounded classical education. During this period, it was fairly common for high level CIA officers to edit literary magazines, as well as publishing poetry and fiction and writing book reviews for the New York Times.
The Rise of CIA-Funded Foundations
Although Tom Braden, director of the CIA’s International Operations Division (IOD), ran the Congress, on paper it appeared to drive its funding from “pass-through” foundations. The best known foundations serving as a conduit for covert CIA funds were (are?) the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kaplan Foundation, the Whitney Trust and the Farfield Foundation. Many of these foundations set up separate administrative units to handle CIA pass through money and collaborate with them on specific projects.
Arthur Schlesinger sat on the board of Farfield Foundation, as did William van den Heuvel, another prominent liberal close to the Kennedy family (and father of Katherine van den Heuvel editor of the “left leaning” Nation magazine).
C. D. Jackson, long time managing director of Time-Life International was another high profile Congress member.2 The Congress also assigned a full time CIA operative to Paramount pictures. His role was to edit and reject scripts that portrayed the US in an unfavorable light.
Tom Braden Goes Public
In 1966, details of the CIA role in the Congress for Cultural Freedom were leaked to the radical zine Ramparts and ended up as a New York Times expose. A few months later Braden, who left the CIA in 1956, published a confessional in the Saturday Evening Post. In “I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral,” he brags about all the reporters and trade unions on the CIA payroll when he ran the OID.
A growing body of research indicates that the CIA continues to fund the Non-Communist Left. Based on the work of Sherman Skolnick, Bob Feldman, Brian Salter and others who research the 990A tax returns of so-called “liberal” foundations, CIA pass-through foundations are clearly alive and well.
Frequently referred to as “Left Gatekeeping Foundations,” they fund numerous so-called “alternative” media outlets. This may be why the Nation, Democracy Now, FAIR and similar outlets that rely on pass-through founding categorically refuse to cover the 9-11 Truth movement or the clear government role in the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.
1The book was published in the US under the title The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. The CIA has posted a review of the US edition on website 2In 1953-54, Jackson was instrumental in establishing the Bilderberg Group. In 1963 he purchased the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination and kept it out of the public domain by locking it in a Time-Life vault for 15 years.
In the following video, liberal feminist Gloria Steinem discusses the funding she received from the CIA for her work:
Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil
By Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett
1995 Harper Collins
I recently picked up this book again – after reading it when it first came out nearly 20 years ago. Charlotte Dennett, one of the authors, got a of media attention prior to Obama’s election in 2008, due to her her efforts to bring murder charges against George W. Bush.
Thy Will Be Done lays out the systematic economic colonization of the Amazon Basin by US corporate interests (led by Nelson Rockefeller) and the CIA – and their unscrupulous use of fundamentalist missionaries and Bible translators to indoctrinate and displace indigenous tribes who stood in the way of clear cutting for agriculture and oil and mineral extraction.
As CIA-liaison during the Eisenhower administration, Rockefeller developed close and enduring relationships at the CIA. This would lead to an ongoing collaboration in opening up Central and South America – and Southeast Asia – to U.S. corporate interests.
In addition to examining the Rockefeller/CIA campaign to introduce fundamentalist Christianity to the native tribes of Central and South America, this 960-page book also catalogs, in extensive detail, the full range of illegal CIA activities (and direct or indirect involvement of Rockefeller and the Rockefeller Foundation) under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter.
The book also chronicles the CIA role in installing brutal genocidal dictatorships in Guatemala and El Salvador.
The material presented is from presidential libraries, declassified documents and Congressional. It’s meticulously referenced and features a comprehensive index.
Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters
by Andrew Kreig (Eagle View Books 2013)
Book Review
Presidential Puppetry is a comprehensive expose of the wealthy corporate interests who are the real power behind the federal government. Kreig orients his book around Obama and Romney, the major presidential candidates in the 2012 elections. However in discussing Mitt Romney’s hidden ties to the financial oligarchy, he also explores the Bush family’s Wall Street connections, the history and structure of the Mormon Church (especially as it relates to corporate America) and Karl Rove’s role in orchestrating Republican dirty tricks and voting fraud. Presidential Puppetry is meticulously researched and sourced, with a 17 page bibliography and 110 pages of footnotes and references.
Kreig, a lawyer and respected Washington DC journalist, takes the 2012 presidential debates as his point of departure, noting the deliberate secrecy of both candidates around their personal background. This deliberate secrecy should have been a campaign issue. Yet neither raised it in the debates – there seemed to be a gentleman’s agreement not to do so. Kreig is also scathingly critical of the mainstream media’s failure to challenge either the secrecy or corrupt corporate influences it concealed.
Obama Was Groomed
For his part, Obama refused to release any of his university transcripts, as well as having his passport records secretly scrubbed at the State Department. According to Kreig, this refusal to release educational records is unprecedented, especially for a candidate with virtually no public record of their political background or views. Kreig believes there are two reasons for Obama’s secrecy about his records from Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. The first was to conceal his early links to the CIA, via a CIA front organization he worked for called Business International Corporation (BIC). The second was to hide his early “grooming” for political office by Zbigniew Brzesinski and possibly other members of Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission. All three are secretive round table groups that allow wealthy financial elites access to major public officials.
By tracing the background of the Bush, Carter, Clinton and Reagan presidencies, Kreig makes a very compelling case that the ruling elite selects and grooms individuals it offers up to us as presidential candidates. What’s more, of our past five presidents, only George W Bush has no documented history of working for US intelligence. Krieg alleges Reagan secretly passed information to the FBI about Hollywood leftists, Bush senior performed various services for the CIA as founder and director of Zapata Oil Company, and Clinton informed on anti-Vietnam War protestors as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.
Romney’s Cayman Island Tax Shelters
Romney’s big secret was his tax returns. It’s standard for presidential candidates to release ten years of returns. What the Republican candidate sought to conceal, according to Kreig, was systematic tax avoidance that included a Swiss bank account and tax shelters in the Cayman Islands. Both the Democrats and the corporate media failed in their duty to the public by refusing to bring any of this to light.
Broken Campaign Promises and a Trail of Bodies
Kreig goes on to examine Obama’s first term in light of his hidden history. The American people thought they were voting for a progressive community organizer but ended up with someone even more pro-Wall Street and pro-war than his Republican predecessor.
The most disturbing aspect of the book relates to cases Kreig details in which both Republican and Democratic insiders have tried to expose corporate interference with specific federal office holders. Largely owing to the refusal of the corporate media to support these whistleblowers, many have ended up dead under suspicious circumstances or in prison on trumped up charges.
Kreig tries to finish on an optimistic note by reminding us of all the brave independent journalists (on whose work Presidential Puppetry is based) whose investigative work is beginning to give us a true picture of how our so-called democracy really works. He encourages people (I assume he means whistleblowers) to send him tips (i.e. leaks) via his Justice Integrity Project website.
A recent post there is a moving tribute to the late John Judge, past president of the Coalition on Political Assassinations. The latter archives and promotes scholarly research offering alternatives to official accounts of the JFK assassination and other high profile political deaths, including those of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
In my view, a fiction writer has a fundamental responsibility to reflect the era they write about. The majority of contemporary novelists balk at accurately depicting the criminal element that has seized control of our western democracies. Most 21st century spy thrillers are a hollow glorification of the War on Terror, celebrating the virtue and bravery of patriotic intelligence operatives who keep us safe from so-called fanatical Islamic fundamentalists.
Not Le Carre. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the British author used his gift for characterization to write masterful thrillers in which we made the intimate acquaintance of British and Russian spymasters, moles and bureaucratic government careerists with all their flaws and foibles. With the advent of the War on Terror, his more recent novels revolve around the privatization and criminalization of British intelligence, under the influence of the CIA and thuggish security contractors like Blackwater, who have no official accountability whatsoever to the taxpayers who pay their salaries.
Most of LeCarre’s recent thrillers end on a pretty bleak note. Owing to the mafia-like grip the sociopathic elite and their hired mercenaries have over British and US intelligence, the good guys almost always lose.
A Delicate Truth ends somewhat more optimistically. The plot revolves around the cover-up of a failed extraordinary rendition (i.e. the kidnapping of a suspected terrorist to a country where he can be legally tortured). A program that clearly hasn’t ended under Obama, despite his campaign promises. The heroes are two would-be whistleblowers who try to expose the cover-up because they’re too naïve to appreciate the total depravity of the forces arrayed against them.
I think I can detect the influence of real life whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in LeCarre’s new note of cautious optimism.
Former CIA asset Susan Lindauer describes how the Department of Homeland Security locked her up on a military base for 12 months and tried to detain her indefinitely without a hearing and drug her with Haldol and other psychotropic medication. Why? Because she possesses extensive documentary evidence that the CIA had foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks as early as February 2001. This, along with other important documents related to the Lockerbie bombing and the US wars on Iraq and Libya, are published as an appendix in her 2010 book Extreme Prejudice.
Prior to her arrest, Lindauer was the chief CIA asset in charge of Iraqi and Libyan back-channel communications. She was under indictment for five years. Eventually her late partner’s exhaustive efforts to publicize her case paid off and she was granted a hearing – and released.
Towards the end of her talk, she describes her late partner’s conversation with Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! Amy’s flimsy excuses for refusing to cover the story, during a period when Lindauer was being held incommunicado at Caswell Air Force Base, aren’t at all surprising. Especially when you have a look at the CIA-funded foundations that finance Democracy Now! See Does the CIA Fund Both the Right and the Left?
The Most Revolutionary Act 