Engineered bedlam: a fictional and real-life theme by Wayne Madsen

 Engineered bedlam: a fictional and real-life theme

by Wayne Madsen
From the newly-established Syrian and other Asian migrant camps in Europe to acts of terrorism throughout the world, there is but one small group of elitists who owe their loyalty to a single individual that benefits from global bedlam. While this is the theme of the last four James Bond movies, including the latest, "SPECTRE," the theme actually has a real-life counterpart.

WMR reported in 2010 that international Quantum hedge fund tycoon George Soros was so upset with the Bond movie, "Quantum of Solace" and its not-so-veiled references to "Quantum" as an all-powerful international villainous organization, he tried to buy, through front men, MGM and the Bond production company, EON Production of London, which films at the famed Pinewood Studios near Heathrow International Airport outside of London.

Soros's and his friend Leonard Blavatnik's ploy failed and in the latest Bond movie, "SPECTRE," the screen writers launch a full-blown blast at Soros.This is a spoiler alert. If you have not seen the film, you may not want to read on!



It turns out that all of 007's villains in the last four films all worked for the same uber-wealthy man, an individual who heads up Quantum and is known by one name, Franz Oberhauer, but was born under another, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. George Soros was born Gyorgy Schwartz and it is claimed that the name Soros is Esperanto for "to soar." Schwartz's father. Tivadar Schwartz, said he chose Soros as his family's last name so they could, as Hungarian Jews, easily blend into Nazi-occupied Hungary. Tivadar was a proponent of Esperanto as a global language.

It is unusual that MGM and EON survived Soros's hostile takeover bid. On April 26, 2010, WMR reported: "Blavatnik, a one-time Soviet Jewish refusenik who emigrated to the United States and a Soros ally -- is pressuring MGM to sell to him. Production has ceased on the Quantum sequel, given the working title of "Bond 23,"  even after a major script re-writing, said also be as a result of pressure from Soros." "Bond 23" turned out to be Skyfall and after the Soros-Blavatnik bid failed, Quantum again became Bond's chief nemesis.

Before Soros's MGM takeover bid collapsed, there was some suspicious activity involving MGM stock, activity that pointed to Soros's "stock-in-trade" -- shorting shares of stock. WMR reported: "MGM was bought by a group of investors in 2005 for $5 billion. They stood to take a financial bath because MGM was not expected to fetch more than $2 billion. Two of the MGM investors, Sony Corporation and Comcast, wrote off their investments as losses." These behind-the-scenes machinations drove down the value of MGM stock, making it vulnerable to a takeover by Soros and Blavatnik. However, in May 2010, the Soros deal went sour. The Quantum-fighting Bond, played by actor Daniel Craig, continued to battle against Quantum another day.

Soros is considered a major enemy by Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) so there should be no surprise that the agency would martial its fictional top agent Bond to battle the Soros doppelganger chief of Quantum. In 1992, Soros committed the sin of trying to short the British pound. An attack upon sterling in Britain is considered an attack on the Queen herself. From that time onward, MI-6 had Soros in its figurative sights. MI-6 has always held huge sway over Bond movie scripts and the last four were no different. In "SPECTRE," Bond is told that all of his last several enemies, including one Israeli Mossad veteran, all worked for Oberhauser/Blofeld, the real head of Quantum.

Bond also discovers that most of the world's terrorist attacks, coups, revolutions, and other upheavals are all the work of Quantum, which is trying to unite the world's intelligence agencies under the framework of "NINE EYES," which will actually be controlled by -- you guessed it -- Quantum. In real life, the National Security Agency (NSA) and its English-speaking allies are united under the FIVE EYES intelligence-sharing pact.

In "SPECTRE," one of the NINE EYES countries, South Africa, is the only one to vote against combining the nations' intelligence surveillance databases, thus preventing the plan moving forward. It changes its vote to "yes," after a huge terrorist bomb strikes Cape Town.

In "SPECTRE," a "cocky" Tony Blair-like character named Max Denbigh becomes "M's" [Ralph Fiennes] boss ("C") and makes a secret agreement with Quantum to close down the 007 program and MI-6 itself. M and Bond not only have to face off against Quantum but also the chief of British intelligence. The similarities between Denbigh and Blair may also be rooted in reality. The following is from WMR's 2010 report: "In 2007, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild hosted a swank and ritzy reception in London for outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie. Blair hob-nobbed with a select group of American and other billionaires hoping to land lucrative work after his success in steering Britain into a bloody occupation of Iraq as a favor for George W. Bush. Among the billionaires present were Blavatnik; Ron Burkle, the grocery chain magnate who gave Bill Clinton work after he left office; oilman Sid Bass, Lehman Brothers' manipulative CEO Richard Fuld -- who was busy setting up shadow Lehman business deals through Hudson Castle; fashion mogul Calvin Klein; billionaire cosmetic heirs Leonard and Ronald Lauder -- a few months later Ronald Lauder was elected president of the World Jewish Congress; and Mexican telecommunication billionaire Carlos Slim Helu." All would make excellent candidates for Blofeld's Quantum "round table" of international tycoons and brigands who periodically meet in secret to chart out the next catastrophes and financial mega-schemes.
The Bond script's lines about Quantum ultimately causing the world's destabilization could have very well been written by the actual head of MI-6.

More about Soros as the "Quantum of Chaos" can be read in WMR's new book by the same title: "Soros: Quantum of Chaos," available at the WMR bookstore.

Skyfall, starring David Petraeus By Pepe Escobar

ROVING EYE

Skyfall, starring David Petraeus

By Pepe Escobar 

My name is Petraeus. David Petraeus. Move over, Bond, with your Skyfall; this is the real deal, a certified political/national security blockbuster to end them all. 

This is how Hollywood would market it; "He had the nation's highest security clearance. But above all he was an embedded lady killer." 

Now for the casting. Daniel Craig could easily play The General, although The General would rather teleguide a Hellfire than an 

  
Aston Martin, and wear a "fruit salad" (as in myriad decorations) instead of a killer Tom Ford suit. Demi Moore - sultry as ever - could play "Paula". Assorted Iraqis and Afghans would play "collateral damage". 

Meanwhile, murky does not even begin to describe alleged reality - as in the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, retired Gen David Petraeus, resigning over a bedroom farce only two days after President Barack Obama is re-elected, amid crossfire accusations raging for weeks regarding what the CIA was exactly doing in Libya, that godforsaken land liberated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and now ruled by a bunch of militias. 

As whodunits go, this plot is going nowhere. Nobody knows why this blockbuster was leaked last Friday - by the way only one day after President Obama himself had learned about it (on the other hand attorney general Eric Holder of The Fast and the Furiousfame knew about it since "late summer", according to the proverbial anonymous, "US officials"). 

Nobody knows what the Federal Bureau of Investigation was planning to do before all hell broke loose - considering that its four-month investigation had unearthed that Petraeus and his lover, West Point graduate, fitness fanatic, adoring biographer Paula Broadwell, had not breached national security. 

Or maybe they had. For starters, The General - possessor of the nation's highest national security clearance - was using a mere G-mail account to talk dirty to Paula, using what The Washington Post gleefully described as "a tactic of terrorists who are rightly wary of espionage". And when it was leaked that the FBI found no "major security breaches", this means there WAS a security breach. 

My guy
The bedroom farce elements are enough to have Moliere rolling in his tombe. The whole thing started when Floridian Jill Kelley complained about receiving harassing emails from Paula, the adoring co-author (with Washington Post journalist Vernon Loeb) of the full-access biography All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, published in January. Paula and Petraeus had been getting down to the nitty-gritty since November 2011, two months after Obama appointed him as head of the CIA. Talk about an embedded biographer. 

So Paula must have thought she was in a sexy quadrangle, not triangle. She obviously didn't know much about Jill Kelley - the third woman in the farce - the other three sides being Paula and Petraeus' wife, the now "furious" Holly. The Tampa Bay Times described The General as a grandfather to Kelley's family. 

Kelley also happened to be a critical player; a "social liaison" to the Pentagon's supreme, shadowy, counterterrorism/killing machine, the Fort Bragg-based Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). It's crucial to know that it was the JSOC that allegedly led the CIA and the Pentagon into what had happened during the attack against the US consulate in Benghazi in which ambassador Chris Stevens was killed. 

None of this obviously mattered to Paula; in the harassing emails that culminated in this bombshell, she bluntly ordered Kelley to "stay away from my guy". 

As for "my guy", he has multiple questions to answer. First of all; why did the CIA tell the White House that the Benghazi drama was provoked by that stupid "Prophet Muhammad" YouTube video - and not an attack coordinated by previously NATO-enabled Salafi-jihadis? 

And then, no less important; why did The General not decide to commit his public seppuku over two weeks ago, when FBI agents talked to him in person about the investigation? Was it his paramount reason the desire not to bomb the Obama administration and practically hand the election over to the Republican Party? Or maybe he was hoping the whole thing would simply be covered up, like a Pashtun wedding party obliterated by a Hellfire missile? 

According to The New York Times, the whole thing blew over in late October after an "unidentified" FBI employee - now identified as sending photos of his shirtless torso to Jill Kelley - spilled the beans to Congress Republicans all the way to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Nobody knows what was this FBI's informer agenda. 

In a nutshell, the FBI didn't manage to keep the investigation secret. Cantor, according to the Times, had a serious meeting with FBI director Robert Mueller III on Halloween; then nobody knows what happened till Election Day, November 6, when the FBI went by the book and told James Clapper Jr, the Director of National Intelligence, about the bedroom farce. To say that Mueller and Cantor also have a few questions to answer is the understatement of the year. 

With US corporate media now totally berserk, the master narrative remains that The Samurai General did the honorable thing by resigning. It all goes back to good ol' American Puritanism. You can be a killing machine, responsible for the death of untold numbers of civilians. But don't you dare betraying your devoted wife. 

The General may be thinking he chose the wrong profession. What an unforgiving environment; James Bond gets to wear fabulous suits, drinks countless martinis, drives an Aston Martin, shoots every bad guy in sight and beds every foxy lady in the universe. 

The failed warrior 
David Petraeus was more of a PR genius than a samurai to begin with. His cinematic model would be Captain Willard as played by Martin Sheen in Coppola's Apocalypse Now; the warrior intellectual. Petraeus, who for quite a while actively positioned himself as a possible presidential candidate in 2012, was clever enough to sell to US public opinion - and gullible mainstream media - the notion that he was a winner in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These are two monumental fallacies. 

The revolving door ethos in Washington - in this case between the Pentagon and the CIA - reached new heights of absurdity when Petraeus, who adapted his counterinsurgency tactics from Iraq to Afghanistan, as in take, clear, hold and build, was put in charge, as CIA director, of analyzing ... the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. The Taliban must be laughing all across the Hind Kush about Petraeus's counterinsurgency "success" - which, by the way, he imposed, along with other Pentagon generals, on Obama in late 2009. 

Petraeus is a product of the Pentagon. He could never, by himself, get rid of the inbuilt logic of Endless War, established by Republican strategists of what French political scientist Alain Joxe has characterized as "war neoliberalism". 

Iraq and Afghanistan were pure manifestations of "war neoliberalism". Petraeus's "surge" in Iraq was a sham. When he arrived with his suitcases full of cash to convince Sunni guerrillas to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, and not American soldiers, the real surge was already being accomplished; this was the surge led by the Iraqi Interior Ministry and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, which had practically succeeded in the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad and surrounding areas, reverting the population balance to the benefit of Shi'ites. As for the Sunni guerrillas, at least they could pocket American money while biding their time to continue their fight against a Shi'ite-dominated government in Baghdad. 

Obama's foreign policy team certainly thought that Petraeus counterinsurgency mumbo-jumbo would allow Iraq - and later Afghanistan - at least some sort of what could be dubbed inter-communitarian democracy, saving American face in terms of a troop exit that would not replicate the last helicopter leaving a Saigon roof in 1975. 

But the fact is Petraeus did not win any hearts and minds in either Iraq or Afghanistan; his take, clear, hold and build tactics ultimately led to nowhere in both cases - and we're not even talking about serious instances of torture, extrajudicial killings, illegal detentions and widespread shadow war. His "mini-surge" could only have had a shot at succeeding in Afghanistan (and that's quite a stretch) if it was not mini; if he had had access to hundreds of thousands of troops - something politically unacceptable in the US. 

Then there's Benghazi. What may have really happened is that the US consulate in Benghazi was a sort of CIA safe house/spy house - thus under Petraeus responsibility, not the State Dept. This neatly dovetails with "Paula" casually saying, at the University of Denver on October 26, that "prisoners" were being held at the consulate (the CIA vehemently denied it, so there must be a degree of truth to it). 

That the consulate was attacked by Salafi-jihadis is out of the question. The State Department may have been the fall guys - while Petraeus/CIA got away with their incompetence. Well, until the bedroom farce exploded. 

It remains to be seen whether anyone in Washington will dare asking the pertinent questions. It remains to be seen whether Petraeus's relentless, hyper-counterproductive (not to mention collateral damage-laden) drone wars will be reevaluated. It remains to be seen whether Obama 2.0 will decide to practice diplomacy - and not shadow war - in the intersection between Central and South Asia. 

The inestimable Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, suggests Obama should stop listening to " faux experts - the neocon specialists at Brookings, AEI and elsewhere" and instead go for "genuine experts like former national intelligence officer for the Near East Paul Pillar, former State Department chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, and military historian and practitioner Andrew Bacevich (Lt Col, USA, ret). These are straight-shooters; they have no interest in 'long wars'; they will tell you the truth; all you need to do is listen." 

Forget about straight shooters. The Acting CIA Director is now Michael Morell, a puppet of counter-terrorism czar John Brennan. As for The General, what a sorry exit; he gets no fancy car, no martinis, no Tom Ford killer suit, he doesn't save the world. And in the end he doesn't even get the girl. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). 

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com