NSA and Israel targeted Lebanese leaders by Wayne Madsen

NSA and Israel targeted Lebanese leaders

by Wayne Madsen
For years the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU), also known as Unit 8200, which is a Third Party partner of the U.S. National Security Agency, has maintained a massive communications surveillance operation against Lebanon. Of particular interest to ISNU is the highly-advanced fiber optics network installed by Lebanese Hezbollah for its own operations. WMR has learned that in some cases, the Lebanese government has used the Hezbollah network because is affords more security against Israeli eavesdropping than official Lebanese government networks.

The latest release of classified NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden reveal that NSA's Information Technology Directorate (ITD) has maintained a surveillance operation against Lebanese communications since at least 2007. Although the latest released information does not specifically state that Israel receives intercepted signals intelligence gathered by ITD and NSA Georgia from Lebanon, a previously-released NSA-ISNU memorandum of understanding (MOU) states that ISNU is provided "raw SIGINT data (i..e., signals intelligence information that has not been reviewed for foreign intelligence purposes or minimized)."

In January 2007, NSA Georgia at Fort Gordon, Georgia maintained surveillance of Lebanon's leadership, including the "Ministry of Interior, Parliament Members, and Presidential Palace." Also targeted were the former commander of the Common Border Force. Lebanon is the only country in the world with an agency called the "Common Border Force." The presidents of Lebanon at the time of the surveillance were Emile Lahoud and acting president Fouad Siniora, who was previously prime minister. The Interior Ministers was Hassan Sabeh. The prime minister until 2005 was Najib Mikati.
  
Targeted by NSA acting in concert with Israel: President Emile Lahoud [left], Prime Minister and President Fouad Siniora [center], and Interior Minister Hassan Sabeh [right].
According to the United Nations, the Lebanese Common Border Force was "established by the Lebanese Council of Ministers on 28 July 2007, within the context of a pilot project led by Germany along Lebanon's northern border with the Syrian Arab Republic. Responsible for the surveillance and control of Lebanon's northern border with the Syrian Arab Republic to ensure that the passage of all goods is restricted to legal crossing points only, preventing the smuggling of weapons, ammunition and prohibited material through the establishment of permanent and mobile observation points. The Common Border Force brings together elements from the four principal security agencies responsible for border management and security, namely the Lebanese Armed Forces, the Internal Security Forces, General Security and Customs."

Other Lebanese military officers monitored by NSA Georgia were a colonel in the Information Technology (IT) Directorate, a general in the Medical Command, a general whose affiliation was unknown, an instructor colonel in the Army Staff and Command College, and a Lieutenant Colonel in the Defense Ministry.

Incredibly, NSA Georgia gave high priority to downloading from the Lebanese Defense Ministry a document on the Lebanese Armed Forces review of personnel issues regarding retirement, communications, and health care.



The most recent release of documents from NSA also includes one describing how GSM cellular equipment bound for the "Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (STE)" GSM network were implanted with a "beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction." The beacon, once in place, "called back" to the "NSA covert infrastructure." The call back enabled NSA to "further exploit the device and survey the network." This black bag work was carried out under the auspices of NSA's "Tailored Access Operations" or TAO.

TAO oversees an operation where shipments of computer network devices (servers, routers, etc.) are intercepted. Next, they are redirected to a secret location where TAO/Access Operations (NSA AO-S426), with the support of Remote Operations Center (S321), enable the installation of beacon implants directly into NSA's targets' electronic devices. Hard-target networks around the world provide pre-positioned access points for NSA eavesdropping.

On June 20, 2008, WMR reported: "A cable-based telecommunications system installed by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut was so elaborate, the Israelis could neither destroy it nor eavesdrop on it during Israel's 2006 war against Lebanon, according to an Egyptian intelligence source. It is being reported that the sophisticated Hezbollah system is now being extended to northern Lebanon. In addition to the Israelis, the US National Security Agency (NSA) is having trouble conducting surveillance on the Hezbollah system.


Is NSA doing Israel's dirty work in the Middle East?

. . . It is also believed that the January 2008 car bombing of Lebanese Internal Security Force Information Branch officer, Captain Wissam Eid, a noted communications engineer, may have been linked in some way to the Hezbollah communications network. Although the bombing was blamed on Hezbollah, Syria, Hezbollah's ally, was among the first to condemn Eid's assassination."

NSA, according to the Snowden release, managed to intercept communications on the Hezbollah cable communications system by bugging it with implanted Cisco routers and other devices.

There are limits to inciteful speech by Wayne Madsen

There are limits to inciteful speech by Wayne Madsen

As unlikely a pair as Pope Francis I and Charlie Hebdo founder have weighed in on the flagrant incitement of believers of a major religion with the intent of causing violence. On his way to the Philippines, the Pope said, "You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others." He also said that if someone insulted his mother, he "could expect a punch" in return.

The founder and former editor of Charlie Hebdo, Henri Roussel, voiced his misgivings about one of his successors as editor, Stephane Charbonnier, among the satirical newspaper's staff gunned down by two Islamist radicals seeking revenge for the paper's cartoon portrayals of the Prophet Mohammed. Roussel blamed Charbonnier for needlessly dragging his staff to their deaths, pointing out that the late editor, known as "Charb" played a dangerous "game of one-upmanship" in provoking radical Muslims to act. Roussel said that after the paper's offices were firebombed in 2011 after it published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed considered by Muslims to be blasphemous.

Roussel criticized the most recent management of Charlie Hebdo. He accused Charbonnier's predecessor as editor, Philippe Val, of turning the paper into a "Zionist and Islamophobic organ," especially after Val fired longtime cartoonist Maurice Sine for publishing a cartoon of the marriage of former President Nicolas Sarkozy' son to a Jewish electronic chain heiress. Val considered that cartoon to be anti-Semitic, but, as Roussel pointed out, the paper's management had no problem repeatedly mocking and insulting Islam. Roussel pointed out that after "Charb" published an offensive Mohammed cartoon in 2011 and the paper's offices were firebombed, he proceeded to do the same thing again in 2012. Roussel said Charbonnier "shouldn’t have done it."

The peak inside the inner workings of Charlie Hebdo is reminiscent of the activities of the neo-conservative-influenced and financed protest groups FEMEN, Pussy Riot, and Voina, which have received international publicity over their inciteful and lewd protests at Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian cathedrals, as well as Islamic mosques. There is no record of these protesters committing any actions against Jewish synagogues in any of the countries where they have protested against Christianity and Islam. 

These facts certainly point to the actions of Charlie Hebdo, FEMEN, Pussy Riot, and Voina being directed by well-organized and money-flush Zionist interests. The corporate news media have been full of stories on the sale of over five million copies of the "survivors' edition" of Charlie Hebdo and how French police have been rounding up those who have been charged with inciting "anti-Semitic" speech. At the same time, the Pope, Muslim clerics, and informed observers like Roussel have been slammed hard by the corporate, and largely Zionist-owned media, for their views on what can only be termed as "anti-Gentilic" speech. It certainly appears that the Pope and France's four top imams had Charlie Hebdo's actions in mind when they issued a joint statement condemning the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher Jewish market but urging the media to restrain itself from publishing content disrespectful of religious faiths.

The Charlie Hebdo "survivors' edition" can be downloaded by clicking here. Apparently, the surviving staff saw fit to disregard the wishes of their former editor and founder, the Pope, and France's four chief imams. After examining this much-heralded issue, it is clear that Charlie Hebdo's modus operandi is to provide a single stock caricature of a bearded Jewish man in a one cartoon while devoting the remainder of its pages to bashing Islam and Christianity. A single caricature does not constitute a license to incite. 

Anti-Christian and Islam "comedian" Bill Maher recently said the following in comparing Christianity and Islam, "one is herpes and one is cancer." Not everyone in Hollywood thinks Maher is funny and actor Ben Affleck called Maher on his Islamophobia. The Zionists, using their Talmud as their inspirational guide, want to convince the world that it is perfectly okay to mock, ridicule, blaspheme, and incite Muslims and Christians but to utter one word of condemnation of Jewish practices, including the ritual genital mutilation of infant boys, is "anti-Semitic." Monsieur Roussel, Pope Francis, the French imams, and others, including this website, see the hypocrisy being carried out. President Obama was right to miss out on the navel-gazing "march," that is, the photo-op, of world leaders in Paris. The only march the world needs is one to expose the hypocrisy of the world's elites because once again, they have perpetrated a cruel hoax on the civilized people and nations of the world.

Kiev was hotbed of neo-Nazism even during Soviet times by Wayne Madsen

Kiev was hotbed of neo-Nazism even during Soviet times

by Wayne Madsen

The CIA archives contain an obscure newspaper article from the New York Herald Tribune, dated September 14, 1964 that points out that neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism ran rampant in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev even during the time of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This fact makes the current love affair between neoconservative Zionists like Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, and incoming Central Intelligence Agency director David Cohen and the neo-Nazi imbued government of Ukraine all the more perplexing.


Senator John McCain, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is flanked by neo-Nazi Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnbok [right] and gives his very best "Heil Hitler" salute to protesters at Maidan Square in Kiev last year.

The neo-Nazism of the Ukrainian government was recently on full display when Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, known affectionately as "Yats" by Nuland, described the Soviet Red Army's move into Nazi Germany not as a "liberation" but as an "invasion." Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko recently awarded one of Ukraine's top medals to Belarusian Serhiy Korotkykh, a member of the far-right Russian National Unity party and founding member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Society (NSS) in Russia. Korotokykh has recently been engaged in a pogrom of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine as a member of the Azov Battalion, the Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary unit financed and armed by Ukrainian-Israeli Zionist billionaire tycoon Ihor Kolomoisky.

The head of the Azov Battalion is Andriy Biletsky, a neo-Nazi activist who has switched his allegiance between the two main neo-Nazi parties, Svoboda and Right Sector. The alliance between Zionists like Kolomoisky and neo-Nazis like Biletsky must be viewed in the context of Ukrainian history where even Ukrainian Communist leaders during the Soviet Union expressed neo-Nazi sympathies in direct challenges to Moscow's wishes.

The Herald Tribune article describes the Ideological Commission of the Soviet Communist Party and Communist Party General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev as being furious over the 1963 publication by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences of an anti-Semitic publication, complete with Nazi-like caricatures, titled "Judaism Without Embellishment." That publication was followed in 1964 by another book published by the State Publishing House of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic in Kishniev titled "Contemporary Judaism and Zionism," which expressed similar Nazi-like views to the Ukrainian book but without the Nazi cartoons.
 
Nikita Khrushchev [left], like Vladimir Putin, had to deal with neo-Nazis in Kiev.

Today, the ideological sons and daughters of the crypto-Nazis who proclaimed they were Ukrainian Communists are in power in Kiev. Their major support comes from neoconservatives like Nuland, Pyatt, and B'nai B'rith. In 1964, the latter organization rented a room in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York where B'nai B'rith president Label A. Katz condemned the Nazi-like policies of the Ukrainian Communist Party which his successors actively support today in pro-Western Ukraine.

It is not the Russian government that should stand accused before the international court of public opinion but the neo-Nazis of Kiev and their Zionist Jewish enablers in New York and Washington, DC.

THE ROVING EYE - Who profits from killing Charlie? By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Who profits from killing Charlie? By Pepe Escobar Putin did it. Sorry, he didn't. In the end, it was not Russia "aggression" that attacked the heart of Europe. It was a pro-style jihadi commando. Cui bono?  Careful planning and preparation; Kalashnikovs; rocket-propelled grenade launcher; balaclavas; sand-colored ammunition vest stuffed with spare magazines; army boots; piece of cake escape in a black Citroen. And the icing on the lethal cake; faultless Paris-based logistical support to pull that off. A former top French military commander, Frederic Gallois, has stressed the perfect application of "urban guerrilla technique" (where are those notorious Western counter-terrorism "experts" when one needs them?) They might have spoken perfect French; others said it was broken French. Anyway, what matters is that they uttered the magic word; "We're al-Qaeda." Better yet; they told a man in the street, "Tell the media that this is al-Qaeda in Yemen", which means, in American terror terminology, al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP), which had Charlie Hebdo's editor/cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier ("Charb") on a hit list duly promoted by AQAP's glossy magazine Inspire. Accusation: "Insulting the Prophet Mohammed." And just to make sure everyone had the perpetrators implanted on their brain, the killers also said, "Allahu Akbar"; "We have killed Charlie Hebdo"; and "We have avenged the Prophet." Case closed? Well, it took only a few hours for French police to identify the (usual?) suspects; French-Algerian brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi. The third man - the driver of the black Citroen, 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad - then turned himself in with an ironclad alibi. So the third man remains a cipher. They all wore balaclavas. The Kouachi brothers have not been captured. But the police seem to know very well who they are. Because they found an abandoned ID in the black Citroen (oh, the troubles of being a command in a rush ...) How come they didn't know anything before the carnage? Right on cue, Cherif Kouachi's bio was splattered all over. He was on a global watch list. Along with six others, he was sentenced in May 2008 to 3 years in prison for "terrorism"; in fact unloading a dozen young Frenchmen via madrassas in Egypt and Syria to none other than Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the killed-by-an-American-missile former head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the spiritual father of Daesh/ISIS/ISIL. Also right on clue, a full narrative was ready for mass consumption. The key point; French police privileges the hypothesis of "Islamic terrorism". According to their "experts", this could be an attack "ordered from abroad and executed by jihadis coming back from Syria that have escaped us", or it could be "suburban idiots that radicalized themselves and concocted this military attack in the name of al-Qaeda." Scrap option two, please; this was a pro job. And staying with option one, this points right at - what else - blowback. Yes, they could be Daesh/ISIS/ISIL mercenaries trained by NATO (crucially, France included) in Turkey and/or Jordan. But it might get even false-flag nastier. They could also be former or current French special forces. Blast Islam, will travel  Predictably, Islamofascism peddlers are already having a field day/week/month/year. For simpletons/trolls/hordes exhibiting an IQ worthy of sub-zoology, when in doubt, demonize Islam. It's so convenient to forget that untold millions from Pakistan's tribal areas to street markets across Iraq continue to feel pain devastating their hearts and lives as they are expendable victims of the jihadi mindset - or "Kalashnikov culture", as it is known in Pakistan - profiting the "West", directly or indirectly, for decades now. Think ritual droning of Pakistani, Yemeni, Syrian, Iraqi or Libyan civilians. Think Sadr City witnessing carnages over 10 times worse than Paris. What French President Francois Hollande defined as "an act of exceptional barbarism" - and it is - does not apply when the "West", France in the front line, from King Sarko to General Hollande himself, weaponizes, trains and remote-controls assorted mercenaries/beheaders from Libya to Syria. Oh yeah; killing civilians in Tripoli or Aleppo is perfectly all right. But don't do that in Paris. So this, in the heart of Europe, is what blowback feels like. This is what people feel in the Waziristans when a wedding party is incinerated by a Hellfire missile. In parallel, it's absolutely impossible that the oh so sophisticated Western intel network had not seen blowback coming - and was impotent to prevent it (how come the scapegoats du jour, the Kouachi brothers, were not in the gallows?) Of course the ultra-elaborate Western counter-terrorism expert network - so proficient at strip-teasing us all at every airport - saw it coming; but in shadow warland, portmanteau "al-Qaeda" and its myriad declinations, including "renegade" Daesh/ISIS/ISIL, are used as much as a mercenary army as a convenient domestic threat "against our freedoms". Who profits?  US Think Tankland, also predictably, is busy spinning the drama of an "intra-Muslim" split which provides jihadis a lot of geopolitical space to exploit - all this sucking the Western world into a Muslim civil war. This is absolutely ridiculous. The Empire of Chaos, already during the 70s, was busy cultivating jihadi/Kalashnikov culture to fight anything from the USSR to nationalist movements all across the Global South. Divide and Rule has always been used to fan the flames "intra-Islam", from the Clinton administration getting cozy with the Taliban to the Cheney regime - helped by Persian Gulf vassals - advancing the sectarian Sunni/Shi'ite schism. Cui bono, then, with killing Charlie? Only those whose agenda is to demonize Islam. Not even a bunch of brainwashed fanatics would pull off the Charlie carnage to show people who accuse them of being barbarians that they are, in fact, barbarians. French intel at least has concluded that this is no underwear bomber stunt. This is a pro job. That happens to take place just a few days after France recognizes Palestinian statehood. And just a few days after General Hollande demanded the lifting of sanctions against the Russian "threat". The Masters of the Universe who pull the real levers of the Empire of Chaos are freaking out with the systemic chaos in the racket they so far had the illusion of controlling. Make no mistake - the Empire of Chaos will do what it can to exploit the post-Charlie environment - be it blowback or false flag. The Obama administration is already mobilizing the UN Security Council. The FBI is "helping" with the French investigation. And as an Italian analyst memorably put it, jihadis don't attack a vulture hedge fund; they attack a satirical rag. This is not religion; this is hardcore geopolitics. Reminds me of David Bowie: "This is not rock'n roll. This is suicide." The Obama administration is already mobilized to offer "protection" - Mob-style - to a Western Europe that is just, only just, starting to be diffident of the pre-fabricated Russian "threat". And just as it happens, when the Empire of Chaos mostly needs it, evil "terra" once again rears its ugly head. And yes, I am Charlie. Not only because they made us laugh; but because they were sacrificial lambs in a much nastier, gruesome, never-ending shadowplay. Pepe Escobar's latest book is Empire of Chaos. Follow him onFacebook. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Hebdo attack rife with "false flag" clues by Wayne Madsen

 Hebdo attack rife with "false flag" clues

by Wayne Madsen

The reliance of governments and non-state actors on carrying out "false flag" terrorist attacks, which, in the modern-era, began in Europe with the 1980 time-bombing of the Bologna train station that killed 85 and injured over 200, is beginning to yield predictable clues. This is certainly the case with the three-man professional military assault carried out in a precision manner by three alleged Islamist terrorists on the Paris editorial offices of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo. 

The 1980 attack on the Bologna train station began the age of modern false flag attacks. Although the Italian government and media originally blamed the bombing on leftist radical Italian guerrillas, it was, in fact, carried out by an underground fascist cell that obtained the bomb materials from hidden caches belonging to the secret NATO "stay behind" paramilitary network known as "Gladio." 

Gladio was intended to mobilize guerrilla forces to fight the Soviets in the event of a ground war in Europe. Weapons and materials were hidden underground and in caves throughout Western Europe for future guerrilla assaults on occupying Soviet troops. However, Italian rightists and Zionists attempted to use the discredited Mitrokhin Dossier, obtained from KGB files, to pin the blame for the Bologna attack on the Soviets acting in concert with radical Arabs, including Palestinian groups. It was later discovered that it was the CIA that funded such news stories in a psychological warfare operation against the Soviets and the Arab countries. From his Paris jail cell in 2005, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the famed terrorist known as "Carlos," revealed that it was the CIA and Mossad that carried out the Bologna bombing and that the Mitrokhin File was being used to "falsify history."

Ever since Bologna, the tell-tale signs of Western intelligence false flag operations are extremely evident in attack after attack. By sticking to the same doctrine for over 40 years, Western intelligence fingerprints, including those of Mossad, are becoming as clear as day.

One such tell-tale sign of a false flag operation is the convenient discovery by police of evidence linking attacks to the perpetrators, be they unknowing double agents or patsies who believe in whatever cause has been dangled before them.

One sign of a false flag operation is that "evidence" linking the intended perpetrators to the crime scene is always discovered. French police claim they were able to pin the attack on two Franco-Algerian brothers, Cherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi, because Said, the eldest brother, left his French identification card in a black Citroen used as a getaway car. Police would not say whose identification card they found. Some French security experts warned that the ID card may have been purposely planted in the car to confuse the police. Police also conveniently found Molotov cocktails and Islamist jihadist flags inside the getaway car.

  
From Bologna 1980 [left] to Paris 2015 [right], false flag operations all bear the same telltale signs and clues. They are becoming standardized, always a clue of government involvement.

Alleged 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta's passport was supposedly found in pristine condition in the rubble of the World Trade Center. A third suspect identified by French police, Hamyd Mourad, the 18-year old brother-in-law of the Kouachis, was said to be the third gunman but he has an alibi. Mourad was in school at the time of the attack. That means that the third gunman has not been captured, let alone identified. Mourad surrendered to authorities after his name appeared in the media as a supposed suspect.

Often, the true perpetrators of false flag attacks are masked. This was the case with the three gunmen who killed 12 people at the Charlie Hedbooffices who were wearing balaclavas during their assault on the newspaper's offices.

There are always other attacks in the region to confuse police. For example, while French police were concentrating their search for the gunmen from northern Paris to the Belgian border, a French police woman was shot and killed in Montrouge, south of Paris. French authorities were quick to say the events south of Paris and at Charlie Hebdo were not linked. A gas station in Villers-Cotteret in Picardy, northern France, was robbed by two men said to be the terrorists.

Another false flag clue is that the alleged perpetrators are almost always known to the police in advance. In 2008, Cherif Kouachi was convicted by French authorities for trying to recruit fighters for the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. However, he never served a day of his sentence because half of his three-year sentence was suspended and the rest if his pre-trial prison time was recognized as time served. 

Pre-attack knowledge by the authorities of an alleged perpetrator was certainly the case in the Merah affair in March 2012 when Mohammed Merah, a French national, was killed by French police. Merah was accused of killing three French paratroopers in Montauban and three students and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse. It was later discovered that not only did the French Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence (DCRI) have a dossier on Merah but that it tried to recruit him as an agent. Merah traveled with ease to Afghanistan and Pakistan with the foreknowledge of French intelligence. The then-governing conservatives of President Nicolas Sarkozy and the opposition, now ruling, Socialist Party conspired to cover up Merah's links to French intelligence.

The Kouachi brothers are said to have returned from Syria this past summer, where the CIA and French intelligence have been backing Islamist guerrilla groups battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad. 

Where government stories about terrorist perpetrators start to break apart is when descriptions of the alleged terrorists fail to meet popular conceptions. Although Cherif Kouachi was said to be a follower of Islamic cleric Farid Benyettou at the Addawa mosque in Paris, he was also reported by associates to be a drinker, smoker, carouser around women, and beardless. Similarly, the alleged 9/11 hijackers, far from being hard core Islamists, preferred to drink alcohol, spend time in topless bars, and use drugs. 

Another common denominator in false flag operations is the release of information by authorities that the alleged perpetrators were bent on attacking Jewish targets. Cherif Kouachi was said to have planned attacks on Jewish targets in France just as Merah was identified as the attacker of the Jewish school in Toulouse.

The attack in Paris was the deadliest in Europe since the July 11, 2011 attack on a Norwegian Labor Party youth camp and government buildings in Oslo. Although the attack was originally believed by the corporate media to be an Islamist attack, it was later pinned on Norwegian fascist right-winger Anders Breivik. Breivik attacked the socialist party youth camp because it had just rallied in support of Palestine. Breivik, a neo-Nazi, maintained close links with European rightists, some of whom had traveled to Israel and even lived for a while on kibbutzes. Breivik's links to Zionists were quickly erased by the media from the public discourse.

CIA cold case becomes murkier by Wayne Madsen

CIA cold case becomes murkier

On December 16, 2014, WMR reported on the suspicious death of CIA stenographer Joanne (also reported as Jeanne) Fecteau in 1953. CIA archives include two Washington, DC newspaper articles that stated Fecteau's husband, described as an Army civilian, disappeared in December 1952 on a C-47 military flight from Japan to Korea. In fact, Joanne's husband, Richard G. Fecteau, was a CIA agent who was shot down over Manchuria in mainland China along with John T. Downey. The two CIA agents were dropping supplies to anti-Communist agents. Other reports suggest that the two agents were trying to pick up a CIA agent in Manchuria when their plane was downed.

Fecteau and Downey were later released by the Chinese, Fecteau in 1971 and Downey in 1973. Fecteau was released as a Chinese gesture to the United States after secret talks paved the way for President Richard Nixon's historic trip to China. Downey was only released after Nixon agreed to publicly admit that Downey worked for the CIA. Up until that time, the U.S. State Department maintained that Fecteau and Downey were "civilian Army employees lost on a 'routine flight' from Seoul, South Korea, to Japan." However, The Washington Post reported at the time of Joanne's death that Fecteau was on a flight from Japan to Korea, not the other way around. In November 2013, the CIA awarded Fecteau and Downey the Distinguished Intelligence Cross. The CIA admitted that the CIA asset that agents Downey and Fecteau were to rescue in China had already been compromised by Chinese intelligence. The Chinese were waiting for the CIA aircraft and they hit it with anti-aircraft fire. The plane made a controlled crash but the CIA said the two CIA Civil Air Transport (CAT) proprietary firm pilots, Robert C. Snoddy and Norman A. Schwartz, died. Snoddy's remains were later recovered and buried in Eugene, Oregon. Schwartz's remains were never recovered.

The CIA's agent exfiltration operation was doomed from the start. The CIA had decided to airdrop Chinese nationalist exiles into Manchuria in order to link up with anti-Mao Zedong renegade communist generals. The problem was that no such generals existed. Mao had ironclad support from the leadership of the People's Liberation Army.

CIA director John Brennan said at the ceremony honoring Downey and Fecteau that, “It has been 61 years since Dick and Jack took to the skies over North Korea and China during the Korean War, and their ordeal remains among the most compelling accounts of courage, resolve, and endurance in the history of our agency." Amid all the honorific press stories about Fecteau and Downey, there is no mention of Fecteau's wife Joanne and the suspicious fire that took the life of the CIA stenographer on one autumn day on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The Boston Globe attempted to interview Fecteau, a resident of Lynn, Massachusetts, after his award from Brennan but the paper reported that he could not be reached for comment. Downey, who became a Connecticut state judge in 1987, died on November 17, 2014.



Neither the Nashua Telegraph of January 6, 1972 nor any other periodical to this day mentions the suspicious death of Richard Fecteau's CIA wife Joanne nine months after he was captured by the Chinese.

The few stories written about Fecteau after his release by the Chinese fail to mention Joanne Fecteau and her suspicious death. One news article appearing in Yankee magazine in 1982 states Fecteau, who returned to work for the CIA until 1976 when he became assistant athletic coach at his Boston University alma mater, rekindled his relationship with his ex-wife Peg (Margaret), who he divorced before marrying Joanne. The article states that Fecteau's two daughters were 22 at the time of his release. They were two-years old at the time of his capture. Fecteau was 25 years old at the time of his capture and he was already divorced and remarried, relatively rare for 1952 American society. The Yankee article states: "He [Fecteau] rekindled his relationship with his ex-wife Peg, who had "waited and prayed for him for 19 years." Fecteau and his ex-wife remarried in 1976.  On the same day that President Bill Clinton arrived in Beijing in 1998, CIA director George Tenet presented Fecteau and Downey with the CIA Director's Award at a ceremony at the Langley headquarters. A documentary film released by the CIA in 2011 about the ordeal of Fecteau and Downey, titled "Extraordinary Fidelity," omits any mention of Joanne. The CIA simply erased its employee Joanne Fecteau from their history except for two newspaper articles on her death contained in the CIA archival files.

The CIA in 2011 released a film, "Extraordinary Fidelity, - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/ns/obituary.aspx?n=john-downey&pid=173197122#sthash.XuEv10pO.dpuf

Downey [left] and Fecteau [right] after being awarded the CIA's top honor in November 2013.

The following is what WMR reported last month:

"CIA archives contain two articles dated September 29, 1953, published in The Washington Post and Washington Star, regarding the horrible death by burning of a stunningly attractive red-headed stenographer for the CIA. CIA veterans confirm that as a stenographer, Joanne Fecteau, 27, would have had access to the senior executives of the agency, including director Allen Dulles. Fecteau's burned body was found on September 29 underneath a bed in a cabin in Avalon Shores, Maryland, between Annapolis and Chesapeake Beach. The story of the beautiful CIA stenographer becomes murkier. Her husband, Army civilian administrative assistant Richard G. Fecteau had disappeared in December 1952 while on a transport flight from Japan to Korea.

The cabin where Joanne Fecteau's body was discovered was owned by Major Carl Garver, 39, an Air Force ROTC instructor at George Washington University. When flames broke out inside the cabin at around 6 pm, Garver claimed he tried frantically to break into the house but was 'driven back' by the flames. The conclusion by fire inspectors was that the fire was caused by faulty wiring in a hot plate in the kitchen. The Anne Arundel coroner stated that Fecteau's death was caused by burns and carbon monoxide poisoning.


Another possible murder cold case from the files of the CIA: CIA stenographer Joanne Fecteau burned to death in Maryland cabin on the infamous Chesapeake Bay, the bay that also claimed the lives of CIA director William Colby and CIA operations officer John Paisley.

According to the Post article, Garver's residence was at the Army-Navy Club in downtown Washington while Fecteau's residence was listed as the Dupont Plaza Hotel, a luxury hotel on Dupont Circle in downtown DC. The Star reported Garver's residence as 3801 Connecticut Avenue in Washington, just north of the Cleveland Park neighborhood."

* Update 1x. Curiously, The Washington Post had Mrs. Fecteau's name as "Joanne" while The Washington Star reported her name as "Jeanne." A handwritten CIA notation on the Star article has the name "Joanne" written in cursive letters before "FECTEAU," which is written in block capital letters. The Post article has a CIA handwritten note of "Richard G. Fecteau" under a redacted notation. The Star reported that the Washington, DC homicide squad told Anne Arundel authorities that Fecteau had suffered a burn on her hand during an earlier August 13, 1953 blaze in an apartment on the 2600 block of Tunlaw Road in Northwest Washington. Police said the fire was caused by careless smoking. There is no explanation of why DC homicide was involved in two blazes allegedly caused by a faulty hot plate in Maryland and careless smoking in DC.

 
Joanne or Jeanne? DC's two major newspapers conflicted on name of dead CIA employee.

NSA targets airline networks, banks, and power companies by Wayne Madsen

NSA targets airline networks, banks, and power companies

The latest tranche of classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents have been published, with the normal amount of redactions, by Der Spiegel. A set of PowerPoint slides developed by NSA's Canadian counterpart, the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), that deal with Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption services use a fictitious country called "Canuckistan" on a sample test report. The use of such a xenophobic term is an indication of the right-wing mindset of the careerists who work within the English-speaking FIVE EYES signals intelligence alliance.





The xenophobic terminology for Canada is followed by CSEC's new motto: "Safeguarding Canada's security through information superiority." The rhetorical verbiage is in keeping with the extremist right-wing views of the government of Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party.

An NSA slide on Signals Intelligence Development (SIGDEV) tactics states that Somalia's Hormuud telecommunications network was a priority target for the FIVE EYES. Another slide describes how a successful use of TOYGRIPPE metadata resulted in the discovery of an Iranian corporate Virtual Private Network intranet with a hub in Tehran and nodes in Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir, and Turkey; and Malaysia, Armenia, and South Korea.

An NSA Cryptographic Classification Guide reveals that NSA "makes cryptographic modifications to commercial or indigenous cryptographic information security devices or systems in order to make then exploitable." This is one of the rare times when an actual document proves what has been written and spoken about for decades: that NSA has implanted Trojan horses and back doors in most of the world's encryption systems in order to have access to plaintext encrypted data.

NSA has declared war on anonymity providers around the world. One NSA slide states that NSA must ensure such services are provided to foreign customers of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors in order to get around "Internet blockage" imposed on "Radio Free Asia and VOA Persian news sites."

Another NSA slide dealing with the TOR anonymity service states that surveillance by NSA of TOR relay exit nodes, most of which are in Germany and the second most of which are in the United States, is "scary" because of "Kiddie Porn."



One TOP SECRET/COMINT NSA slide, titled "End Results: Tactical and Strategic, contained in a PowerPoint presentation on the 2012 SIGDEV Conference, states that one way NSA conducts Internet surveillance is through "behavior detection" of users. Another heavily-redacted slide released earlier in the month described how NSA successfully used "behavior analysis" to track the Google Earth and wikimapia searches by alleged terrorist Zarrar Shah before the 2008 attacks on Mumbai's Taj Hotel, Gateway of India, other tourist sites, power plants, dams, and potential boat landings. Of course, NSA conducted its post-analysis of Shah's on-line activities after the attacks but used the Shah behavioral analysis to advocate for expanded similar capabilities to prevent future attacks.

Another NSA slide states that "sustained Skype collection began in Feb 2011 against "in" and "out" modes, where one end is a Skype user and the other is a landline or cell phone user.

NSA Office of Target Pursuit (OTP) slides provide an organizational chart of the agency's operations against virtual private networks (VPNs) around the world:

S: Signals Intelligence Division (SID)
S3: Data Acquisition
S31: Cryptanalytic Exploitation Services
S311: Office of Target Pursuit (OTP)
S3117: Cryptanalytic Exploitation and Discovery
S31171: PRC, N. Korea, SE Asia, Japan [Eastern and Southeast Asia]
S31172: Iran, Hamas, Iraq, Saudi Arabia [Arabian Peninsula]
S31173: Africa, Levant, Latin America, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan [Central Asia]
S31174: Russia, Counter-Intel, Europe, FTM [Follow the Money] [International Targets]
S31176: Custom Thread Development for Network Encryption
S31175: Cross-Target Support Branch
S31176: OTP VPN Exploitation Team

OTP VPN penetration success stories include Iran Air (IRTAA), Royal Jordanian Air (JOTAA), Transaero Airlines (RUCAC) (Russia), Mir Telematiki (Russia), Afghani Wimex, Mexican diplomatic network (MXDBB), Pakistani General Intelligence (PKRAQ), Turkish diplomatic network (TUDAT), and the Afghan government (AFYAD). The five letter nomenclatures are NSA system titles. Those for the Afghan Wimex and Mir Telematiki were pending when the slide was prepared. Other penetrated networks were the Somali Zaad Financial e-wallet system; Kabul Bank; Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) transactions over Flexy, Telkom Indonesia's fixed wireless network; and the Nigerian power company's internal network. Oddly, the Zaad e-wallet network, run by Somalia's Hormuud Telecom, has been charged by the Al Shabaab guerillas of funneling money to the Somali central government in Mogadishu. NSA now shares something in common with the Al Qaeda affiliate, Al Shabaab: they both are targeting Hormuud Telecom.

Business International Corp. and Business Security International linked in 80s anti-Nicaragua activities By Wayne Madsen

Business International Corp. and Business Security International linked in 80s anti-Nicaragua activities

Another link has emerged between the post-graduate Central Intelligence Agency "non-official cover" or "NOC" work of Barack Obama for known CIA front Business International Corporation (BIC) and Ronald Reagan administration anti-Communist paramilitary operations. As previously reported by WMR, Obama worked as a CIA cover "journalist" for BIC after he graduated from an international relations studies program at Columbia University, the details of which remain undisclosed by the White House. While at the New York City-based BIC, Obama covered events in Latin America for the company's various newsletters. BIC admitted that it provided journalistic cover for CIA agents around the world.

It turns out that BIC was not the only CIA front company operating in Latin America at the time Obama was providing reports on such countries as Mexico and Brazil. A shadowy company with a similar-sounding name to BIC, Business Security International (BSI), was established by Langley to provide paramilitary U.S. Support for the Nicaraguan Contras at a time when the Boland Amendment expressly prohibited such assistance to the anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan guerrillas. Obama's failure to bring officials of the CIA's torture program to justice and his failure to prosecute the agency and its director, John Brennan, for spying on U.S. Senate computers likely has its roots in the CIA front companies' participation in the illegal Nicaraguan Contra support network run by Langley during Obama's employment at BIC.

BIC and BSI were popular under the CIA directorship of William Casey, an advocate of using "off-the-shelf" companies to evade Congressional and Inspector General oversight. BSI was headquartered in Annandale, Virginia. The firm's chief was Army Lt. Col. Dale Duncan, who was later convicted of fraud and was sentenced to 10 years in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Much of the transcript of Duncan's court-martial remains classified to this day. While BIC provided the CIA intelligence on the threats posed by nationalistic and left-wing governments and political parties in Latin America and elsewhere, BSI concentrated on left-wing political and guerrilla insurgency threats. the two companies made for a perfect pair for an administration that was convinced it had to re-ignite the Cold War.

Norman Wellen, BIC's chief executive officer while Obama worked for the firm, was very concerned about Central America. Wellen was concerned that the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and the leftist insurgency in El Salvador could pose a threat to U.S. business activities in those nations. Wellen, who worked for Bear Stearns after BIC was told to The Economistin 1986 and merged into its Economist Intelligence Unit, a bevvy of former British MI-6 agents, worried about "spillover" from the conflicts in Nicaragua and El Salvador on business. BIC specialized in providing intelligence on direct foreign investment in Latin America and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador were seen as threats to such investments by U.S.-based multinational corporations. Wellen's 2011 obituary in the Newark Star-Ledger described him as "a real Mensch."

One of Obama's co-workers at BIC's Manhattan office, Gary Springer, specifically tracked events in Nicaragua for the company, which, in turn, provided the analysis to "The Company" Langley. Springer founded the firm Strategic Eventualities, Inc. in 2001. However, curiously, his biography merely states that in the 1980s he was the associate editor of 
Business Latin America (now a division of the Economist Intelligence Unit) in New York City. No mention is made of BIC, which published Business Latin America. Springer is not the only ex-BIC employee to omit a reference to the firm in later writings. In his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama failed to mention that the firm he went to work for in Manhattan after graduating from Columbia was, in fact, BIC. Obama only revealed that he worked for "a consulting house to multinational corporations" where he was a "research assistant" and "financial writer."
Obama's fellow BIC editor Lou Celi also concentrated on Latin American affairs. Reagan later appointed him as a member of the White House’s business advisory committee for Latin America. Obama's first CIA-directed coup against a democratically-elected president was overthrew Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009, Obama's first year in office. That was followed by Obama authorizing destabilization and coup-making operations against the democratically-elected governments of Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, Haiti, Suriname, Guatemala, Brazil, Panama, Argentina, and Nicaragua. Obama has been much more aggressive against Latin America than was his neo-conservative predecessor, George W. Bush, whose 2002 coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was quickly reversed. There were no reversals of the Obama coups against Zelaya and Paraguay's Fernando Lugo.

Obama: always at home with his NOC employer.

To carry out its clandestine activities in Central America, BSI utilized a Credit Suisse bank account in Switzerland and the company operated under a classified project called Operation YELLOW FRUIT. Those Reagan administration officials with access to the Credit Suisse account included Lt. Col. Oliver North, Casey's "eyes and ears" inside the National Security Council, and Air Force General Richard Secord. Some of the money that ended up in the Swiss bank account was provided by Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar bin Sultan. BSI allegedly provided a satellite communications link between the Contras based in Honduras and CIA headquarters in Langley. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger denied any knowledge of BSI or YELLOW FRUIT and it appears that the operation was a CIA cut-out within the Army. Another classified project involving BSI was code-named SEASPRAY and it was responsible for flying reconnaissance missions for the Contras on behalf of the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA). Some of these aircraft were involved in smuggling weapons to Central America and drugs from the region into the United States. One of YELLOW FRUIT's key operatives was Drug Enforcement Administration informant Barry Seal, who was gunned down in Baton Rouge in 1986 prior to his testifying in a trial that would have implicated Vice President George H W Bush in drug and arms smuggling in the Iran-Contra scandal. BSI also reportedly provided the CIA with cover for its operations in the Middle East. Within the Pentagon and CIA, the BSI operation was known as "2 BSI / YELLOW FRUIT."

Young Barack Obama's entrée into the world of covert CIA operations came at a time when the Reagan administration not only flouted the will of Congress but when Casey and his clandestine operatives, who included John Brennan, relied on firms like BSI and BIC to evade oversight by Congress, auditors, Inspectors General, and the press.

Obama's reticence in holding the CIA and NSA accountable for their massive crimes against the U.S. Constitution and the American people can best be explained by what Obama said in 2008 about Ronald Reagan, the president who gave the green light for U.S. intelligence excesses after they had been curtailed following the Nixon administration and Watergate:
"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.  He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.  I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.  I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

Barack Hussein Obama, who, during his CIA stint was also known on his valid Indonesian passport as Barry Soetoro, and as Barry Obama in other facets, was a "company man" in the 1980s and he continues to be one to this day.
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THE ROVING EYE Russia, China mock divide and rule By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Russia, China mock divide and rule By Pepe Escobar ROME and BEIJING - The Roman Empire did it. The British Empire copied it in style. The Empire of Chaos has always done it. They all do it. Divide et impera. Divide and rule - or divide and conquer. It's nasty, brutish and effective. Not forever though, like diamonds, because empires do crumble. A room with a view to the Pantheon may be a celebration of Venus - but also a glimpse on the works of Mars. I had been in Rome essentially for a symposium - Global WARning - organized by a very committed, talented group led by a former member of European Parliament, Giulietto Chiesa. Three days later, as the run on the rouble was unleashed, Chiesa was arrested and expelled from Estonia as persona non grata, yet another graphic illustration of the anti-Russia hysteria gripping the Baltic nations and the Orwellian grip NATO has on Europe's weak links. [1] Dissent is simply not allowed. At the symposium, held in a divinely frescoed former 15th century Dominican refectory now part of the Italian parliament's library, Sergey Glazyev, on the phone from Moscow, gave a stark reading of Cold War 2.0. There's no real "government" in Kiev; the US ambassador is in charge. An anti-Russia doctrine has been hatched in Washington to foment war in Europe - and European politicians are its collaborators. Washington wants a war in Europe because it is losing the competition with China. Glazyev addressed the sanctions dementia: Russia is trying simultaneously to reorganize the politics of the International Monetary Fund, fight capital flight and minimize the effect of banks closing credit lines for many businessmen. Yet the end result of sanctions, he says, is that Europe will be the ultimate losers economically; bureaucracy in Europe has lost economic focus as American geopoliticians have taken over. Only three days before the run on the rouble, I asked Rosneft's Mikhail Leontyev (Press-Secretary - Director of the Information and Advertisement Department) about the growing rumors of the Russian government getting ready to apply currency controls. At the time, no one knew an attack on rouble would be so swift, and conceived as a checkmate to destroy the Russian economy. After sublime espressos at the Tazza d'Oro, right by the Pantheon, Leontyev told me that currency controls were indeed a possibility. But not yet. What he did emphasize was this was outright financial war, helped by a fifth column in the Russian establishment. The only equal component in this asymmetrical war was nuclear forces. And yet Russia would not surrender. Leontyev characterized Europe not as a historical subject but as an object: "The European project is an American project." And "democracy" had become fiction. The run on the rouble came and went like a devastating economic hurricane. Yet you don't threat a checkmate against a skilled chess player unless your firepower is stronger than Jupiter's lightning bolt. Moscow survived. Gazprom heeded the request of President Vladimir Putin and will sell its US dollar reserves on the domestic market. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier went on the record against the EU further "turning the screw" as in more counterproductive sanctions against Moscow. And at his annual press conference, Putin emphasized how Russia would weather the storm. Yet I was especially intrigued by what he did not say. [2] As Mars took over, in a frenetic acceleration of history, I retreated to my Pantheon room trying to channel Seneca; from euthymia - interior serenity - to that state of imperturbability the Stoics defined as aponia. Still, it's hard to cultivate euthymia when Cold War 2.0 rages. Show me your imperturbable missile Russia could always deploy an economic "nuclear" option, declaring a moratorium on its foreign debt. Then, if Western banks seized Russian assets, Moscow could seize every Western investment in Russia. In any event, the Pentagon and NATO's aim of a shooting war in the European theater would not happen; unless Washington was foolish enough to start it. Still, that remains a serious possibility, with the Empire of Chaos accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) even as it prepares to force Europe in 2015 to accept the deployment of US nuclear cruise missiles. Russia could outmaneuver Western financial markets by cutting them off from its wealth of oil and natural gas. The markets would inevitably collapse - uncontrolled chaos for the Empire of Chaos (or "controlled chaos", in Putin's own words). Imagine the crumbling of the quadrillion-plus of derivatives. It would take years for the "West" to replace Russian oil and natural gas, but the EU's economy would be instantly devastated. Just this lightning-bolt Western attack on the rouble - and oil prices - using the crushing power of Wall Street firms had already shaken European banks exposed to Russia to the core; their credit default swaps soared. Imagine those banks collapsing in a Lehman Brothers-style house of cards if Russia decided to default - thus unleashing a chain reaction. Think about a non-nuclear MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) - in fact warless. Still, Russia is self-sufficient in all kinds of energy, mineral wealth and agriculture. Europe isn't. This could become the lethal result of war by sanctions. Essentially, the Empire of Chaos is bluffing, using Europe as pawns. The Empire of Chaos is as lousy at chess as it is at history. What it excels in is in upping the ante to force Russia to back down. Russia won't back down. Darkness dawns at the break of chaos  Paraphrasing Bob Dylan in When I Paint My Masterpiece, I left Rome and landed in Beijing. Today's Marco Polos travel Air China; in 10 years, they will be zooming up in reverse, taking high-speed rail from Shanghai to Berlin. [3] From a room in imperial Rome to a room in a peaceful hutong - a lateral reminiscence of imperial China. In Rome, the barbarians swarm inside the gates, softly pillaging the crumbs of such a rich heritage, and that includes the local Mafia. In Beijing, the barbarians are kept under strict surveillance; of course there's a Panopticon element to it, essential to assure internal social peace. The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) - ever since the earth-shattering reforms by the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping - is perfectly conscious that its Mandate of Heaven is directly conditioned by the perfect fine-tuning of nationalism and what we could term "neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics". In a different vein of the "soft beds of the East" seducing Marcus Aurelius, the silky splendors of chic Beijing offer a glimpse of an extremely self-assured emerging power. After all, Europe is nothing but a catalogue of multiple sclerosis and Japan is under its sixth recession in 20 years. To top it off, in 2014 President Xi Jinping has deployed unprecedented diplomatic/geostrategic frenzy - ultimately tied to the long-term project of slowly but surely keeping on erasing US supremacy in Asia and rearranging the global chessboard. What Xi said in Shanghai in May encapsulates the project; "It's time for Asians to manage the affairs of Asia." At the APEC meeting in November, he doubled down, promoting an "Asia-Pacific dream". Meanwhile, frenzy is the norm. Apart from the two monster, US$725 billion gas deals - Power of Siberia and Altai pipeline - and a recent New Silk Road-related offensive in Eastern Europe, [4] virtually no one in the West remembers that in September Chinese Prime Minister Li Keiqiang signed no fewer than 38 trade deals with the Russians, including a swap deal and a fiscal deal, which imply total economic interplay. A case can be made that the geopolitical shift towards Russia-China integration is arguably the greatest strategic maneuver of the last 100 years. Xi's ultimate master plan is unambiguous: a Russia-China-Germany trade/commerce alliance. German business/industry wants it badly, although German politicians still haven't got the message. Xi - and Putin - are building a new economic reality on the Eurasian ground, crammed with crucial political, economic and strategic ramifications. Of course, this will be an extremely rocky road. It has not leaked to Western corporate media yet, but independent-minded academics in Europe (yes, they do exist, almost like a secret society) are increasingly alarmed there is no alternative model to the chaotic, entropic hardcore neoliberalism/casino capitalism racket promoted by the Masters of the Universe. Even if Eurasian integration prevails in the long run, and Wall Street becomes a sort of local stock exchange, the Chinese and the emerging multipolar world still seem to be locked into the existing neoliberal model. And yet, as much as Lao Tzu, already an octogenarian, gave the young Confucius an intellectual slap on the face, the "West" could do with a wake-up call. Divide et impera? It's not working. And it's bound to fail miserably. As it stands, what we do know is that 2015 will be a hair-raising year in myriad aspects. Because from Europe to Asia, from the ruins of the Roman empire to the re-emerging Middle Kingdom, we all still remain under the sign of a fearful, dangerous, rampantly irrational Empire of Chaos. Notes: 1. See here. 2. What Putin is not telling us, Russia Today, December 18, 2014. 3. Eurasian Integration vs. the Empire of Chaos, TomDispatch, December 16, 2014. 4. China set to make tracks for Europe, China Daily, December 18, 2014. China's Li cements new export corridor into Europe, Channel News Asia, December 16, 2014. Pepe Escobar's latest book, just out, is Empire of Chaos. Follow him on Facebook. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

CIA-linked program official advising Ukrainian police by Wayne Madsen

 CIA-linked program official advising Ukrainian police

Ron Glensor, an official of the U.S. Department of Justice's International

International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), - See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/12659#sthash.LU7PBJaj.dpuf

International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), - See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/12659#sthash.LU7PBJaj.dpuf

International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), - See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/12659#sthash.LU7PBJaj.dpuf

 Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) program and U.S. citizen, is now advising Ukrainian police with his initial posting at the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Khmelnytsky region. Glensor's appointment follows the naming of U.S. citizen Natalie Jaresko, another U.S. citizen, as Ukraine's Finance Minister. To overcome Ukrainian constitutional prohibitions against foreign nationals serving as government leaders, Jaresko was given Ukrainian citizenship by the Kiev regime.

Jaresko is currently involved in a contentious divorce with her ex-husband and ex-business partner, Ihor Figlus, over ownership of the assets of Jaresko's and Figlus's joint company, Kiev-based Horizon Capital, established 20 years ago with a $150 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Horizon Capital operated the Emerging Europe Growth Fund, a group charged with illegal insider trading of Ukrainian securities. According to court divorce documents, Horizon Capital bought Ukrainian artwork, Georgian carpets, expensive cars, and antique furniture. Jaresko also managed the USAID-financed
Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), a CIA contrivance that steered U.S. investment dollars into "pro-democracy" movements in Moldova and Belarus. WNISEF and Horizon also laundered a sizable chunk of the $5 billion in U.S. aid that helped overthrow the government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

The U.S. taxpayers not only paid for the couple's opulent life style but they helped pay the freight to embed Natalie Jaresko in a major Ukrainian government post in order to help steer Ukraine closer to the NATO and western economic orbit. As a member of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's Cabinet, Jaresko was instrumental in urging the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) to end Ukraine's status as a non-aligned country and subjugate Ukraine's economy to the IMF anf World Bank.

Jaresko is not the only foreigner in Ukraine's Cabinet. She is joined by the Lithuanian-Jewish Aivaras Abromavicius, who serves as the Economy Minister, and Aleksandr Kvitashili, the Health Minister who is also a Georgian citizen. Furthermore, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has been serving as an adviser to the Ukrainian government of President Petro Poroshenko. Abromavicius was a partner of East Capital and in 2012 he participated in the 9th Annual Yalta Meeting where a number of neocons and CIA assets in Eastern Europe were also present. The Yalta Meeting is a mini-Davos meeting, which has been sponsored annually since 2004 by Ukrainian Jewish billionaire Victor Pinchuk, a friend of Steven Spielberg and Henry Kissinger. The 2012 meeting brought together all the key players in the 2013 coup against Yanukovych, including Yatsenyuk, Poroshenko, Abromavicius, and Elena Andrianova of the Rothschild Trust Group responsible for Russia and the former Soviet Eurasian countries. Also present at Yalta were some of the habitués of George Soros-sponsored international "New World Order" symposia, including Yatsenyuk's wife and head of the Soros-financed Open Ukraine Foundation Tereziya Yatsenyuk, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, Newt Gingrich, Condoleezza Rice, Rebecca Harms of the European Parliament's Green Party bloc, Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute, Levi Matusof of the European Center for Jewish Public Affairs (Europe's version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee-AIPAC), former World Bank president Robert Zoellick, and former International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Ukraine's new top traffic cop, Glensor, is a retired assistant chief of police of the Reno, Nevada police department and a former fellow of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) in Washington, D.C.  In 1999, the editor reported in The Progressive that "Janice Stromsen, a career employee of the Justice Department who served as ICITAP's director, resisted the program's takeover by CIA elements. In February [1999], Stromsen was relieved of her duties after complaining to the Justice Department Inspector General that ICITAP was being used by the CIA to recruit agents among foreign police officials." The Progressive article was cited by Project Censored as among the top 25 censored news stories of 1999. Stromsen died from pancreatic cancer in 2012.


ICITAP is used by the CIA to recruit foreign police officers, including in Ukraine.

Mostly outsourced to a favorite CIA contractor, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), ICITAP provided cover for the CIA to infiltrate police agencies around the world. After initiially blowing the whistle on ICITAP's intelligence-related operations, Stromsen was joined by another ICITAP employee, Martin "Mick" Andersen, who charged that agencies other than the Justice Department were engaging in “illegal activities” in Haiti. Charles Allen, who worked for the Richardson, Texas police department and was assigned to ICITAP in 1995, said that the CIA would approach foreign police students enrolled in ICITAP training programs during off hours and weekends in an attempt to recruit them to be American spies. Other CIA recruitment of foreign police officers occurred during ICITAP training sessions at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

ICITAP first began providing the CIA with "official cover" to infiltrate foreign police agencies in 1990 when it began its first operations in Panama after the U.S. military invasion. These operations were then expanded to Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Georgia, the Eastern Slavonia province of Croatia, Serbia, Armenia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Macedonia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Albania, Liberia, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, South Africa, and Iraq. ICITAP and CIA operations were closely linked in counter-narcotics/insurgency operations in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, Haiti, and Panama.

ICITAP grew out of a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program started in the early 1960s that saw U.S. police officers assigned to foreign police agencies for the purpose of training. However, it soon became obvious that the CIA was using the USAID program to gain influence over foreign police agencies to combat Soviet and Chinese influence. This was particularly the case in Somalia, where the Somali National Police served as a pro-U.S. counterpart to the pro-Communist bloc Somali armed forces. The chief CIA liaison working with the Somali National Police was a police officer on loan from the Los Angeles Police Department.