FTR #1008 Alfa Males, Part 5: Lee Harvey Manafort, The Russia-Gate Psy-Op, and the Underground Reich (Habsburg Redux, Part 2)

The title of the pro­gram ref­er­ences for­mer Trump cam­paign man­ag­er and for­mer Ukrain­ian pres­i­dent Vik­tor Yanukovich’s advi­sor Paul Man­afort as “Lee Har­vey Man­afort.”

Far from being a “Russian/Putin/Kremlin agent, Paul Man­afort is a U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cer, who was charged with the task of teas­ing Ukraine from the Russ­ian into the West­ern orbit. Heed­ing polls that found Ukraine’s cit­i­zens to oppose the coun­try’s inclu­sion into NATO and mid­wiv­ing a report that exon­er­at­ed then Ukrain­ian pres­i­dent Vik­tor Yanukovich of crim­i­nal excess in the jail­ing of his pre­de­ces­sor and rival Yulia Tim­o­shenko, Man­afort under­took polit­i­cal activism on behalf of both caus­es in order to effect his goal of West­ern­iz­ing Ukraine.

When the com­bi­na­tion of pop­u­lar dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the aus­ter­i­ty-laden EU asso­ci­a­tion pro­pos­al and Russ­ian pres­sure led to Yanukovy­ch’s can­cel­la­tion of the deep­en­ing of Ukrainian/EU rela­tions, the Euro­maid­an coup sealed the fate of the Yanukovych gov­ern­ment. “Plan B” for the inte­gra­tion of Ukraine into the West­ern camp was the Euro­maid­an coup, which cul­mi­nat­ed in the sniper killings of numer­ous civil­ians. As dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 982 and 993, those sniper attacks may well have been a provo­ca­tion, effect­ed by Ukrain­ian fas­cist and OUN/B suc­ces­sor Andriy Paru­biy chris­tened “The Cap­tain of the Maid­an” and–very possibly–Manafort him­self.

Plan B, for  the maneu­ver­ing of Ukraine into the West­ern camp might be termed “Plan OUN/B.”

Manafort–like Lee Har­vey Oswald and Edwin Wil­son before him–has been “left out in the cold” by his spy­mas­ters, left to take the fall for an oper­a­tion he under­took on their behalf. Hence, our chris­ten­ing of Trump’s for­mer, unfor­tu­nate cam­paign man­ag­er as “Lee Har­vey Man­afort.”

A major fac­tor in the events high­light­ed in our last pro­gram, this broad­cast and the forth­com­ing pro­gram is the Hab­s­burg (also spelled “Haps­burg”) dynasty and relat­ed ele­ments. The Hab­s­burgs are the roy­al fam­i­ly that presided over the Aus­tro-Hun­gar­i­an Empire, which ruled Cen­tral and much of East­ern Europe for 600 years.

In addi­tion to the Hab­s­burg pow­er polit­i­cal forces, our analy­sis focus­es on the tiny, Hab­s­burg-affil­i­at­ed Euro­pean prin­ci­pal­i­ty of Liecht­en­stein. With a pop­u­la­tion of just 32.000, Liecht­en­stein is a ver­ti­cal­ly-inte­grat­ed lean, mean mon­ey-laun­der­ing machine.

Over­lap­ping the Liecht­en­stein con­nec­tion is the Alfa Group–a Russ­ian con­glom­er­ate, the most impor­tant com­po­nent of which is the Alfa Bank.

For pur­pos­es of clar­i­ty, we present syn­op­tic analy­sis of key points of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis in FTR #‘s 1007 and relat­ed pro­grams.

1.–The Alfa con­glom­er­ate main­tains the Alfa Fel­low­ship pro­gram, a sub­sidiary of the Carl Duis­berg Soci­ety’s new umbrel­la the Cul­tur­al Vis­tas orga­ni­za­tion.
2.–The Carl Duis­berg Soci­ety was the vehi­cle that shep­herd­ed 9/11 hijack­er Mohamed Atta around Ger­many and the U.S.
3.–Alfa sub­sidiary Crown Alfa had deal­ings with com­modi­ties Marc Rich, whose par­don was inves­ti­gat­ed by James Comey.
4.–In FTR #930, we not­ed that anoth­er Alfa asso­ciate Mikhail Frid­man did pur­chase Marc Rich assets.
5.–Also in FTR #930, we not­ed an Alfa Bank serv­er com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the Trump orga­ni­za­tion.
6.–In 2001, Crown Alfa asso­ciate Nor­bert Seeger’s Pro­gres­sive Cit­i­zens Par­ty of Liecht­en­stein gave Prince Hans-Adam II of Liecht­en­stein unprece­dent­ed pow­er, mak­ing him, in effect, Europe’s only absolute monarch. Hans-Adam’s new pow­ers gave him con­trol over the courts and judi­cial sys­tem just as the 9/11 attacks and result­ing Oper­a­tion Green Quest inves­ti­ga­tions were mov­ing in the direc­tion of the Licht­en­stein-based Al-Taqwa nexus.
7.–An Al-Taqwa sub­sidiary, the Asat Trust had links to the House of Liechtenstein–the rul­ing fam­i­ly of Liecht­en­stein.
8.–Robert Mueller helped derail the Oper­a­tion Green Quest inves­ti­ga­tion while serv­ing as head of the FBI.
9.–The House of Liecht­en­stein is a sub­sidiary of the House of Hab­s­burg.

In this pro­gram, we set forth ele­ments over­lap­ping the dynam­ics pre­sent­ed above, includ­ing:

1.–Manafort’s net­work­ing with the “Hab­s­burg Group” of Euro­pean politi­cians to effect Ukraine’s inte­gra­tion into the EU orbit: ” . . . . . . . . A sec­ond Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ing firm hired by Mr. Man­afort, the Podes­ta Group, also said last year that it had ‘arranged meet­ings and media oppor­tu­ni­ties’ for vis­it­ing Euro­pean lead­ers regard­ing Ukraine, start­ing in 2012, includ­ing for Mr. Gusen­bauer, Mr. Pro­di and two for­mer pres­i­dents, Alek­sander Kwas­niews­ki of Poland and Vik­tor A. Yushchenko of Ukraine. . . . The group of senior for­mer politi­cians, accord­ing to the indict­ment, was infor­mal­ly called the Haps­burg Group, after the Aus­tro-Hun­gar­i­an dynasty, the Hab­s­burgs. . . .”
2.–Lee Har­vey Man­afort and the Hab­s­burg Group enlist­ed Alex van Der Zwaan, son-in-law of Ger­man Khan the (Kiev) Ukraine-born founder of Alfa Bank: ” . . . . Alex van der Zwaan was charged with lying to the FBI about his con­tacts with Rick Gates, who served as a top offi­cial on Pres­i­dent Trump’s cam­paign and a long­time busi­ness part­ner of for­mer cam­paign chair­man Paul Man­afort. Based in Lon­don, van der Zwaan worked for the law firm Skad­den, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which worked with Man­afort and Gates when they served as polit­i­cal con­sul­tants in Ukraine. Van der Zwaan is the son-in-law of Ger­man Khan, a bil­lion­aire and an own­er of Alfa Group, Russia’s largest finan­cial and indus­tri­al invest­ment group. . . . Like the Man­afort and Gates charges, van der Zwaan’s case is root­ed in Ukraine, where Man­afort worked as an inter­na­tion­al polit­i­cal con­sul­tant start­ing in 2005. . . .”
3.–Members of the Hab­s­burg dynasty have been involved in the con­text in which Lee Har­vey Man­afort and the Hab­s­burg Group were oper­at­ing, in order to ease Ukraine into the West­ern, rather than the Russ­ian orbit. ” . . . . Georg von Hab­s­burg, the 32-year-old-grand­son of Emper­or karl I, to the posi­tion of Hungary’s ambas­sador for Euro­pean Inte­gra­tion. In neigh­bour­ing Aus­tria, the tra­di­tional heart of Hab­s­burg pow­er, Georg’s broth­er, Karl, 35, was recent­ly elect­ed to rep­re­sent the coun­try in the Euro­pean par­lia­ment. In addi­tion to this, he serves as the pres­i­dent of the Aus­trian branch of the Pan-Euro­pean move­ment. . . . .”
Jump­ing for­ward some 14 years from our pre­vi­ous arti­cle, we see that a Hab­s­burg princess was anoint­ed as Geor­gia’s ambas­sador to Ger­many. Note that [now for­mer] Geor­gian pres­i­dent Mikheil Saakashvili endorsed her. Saakashvili became, for a time, the gov­er­nor of the Ukrain­ian province of Odessa! Note, also, the role of the Hab­s­burgs in the final phase of the Cold War: “. . . . The heirs to the Hab­s­burg emper­ors helped speed the down­fall of the Sovi­et empire, par­tic­u­larly by arrang­ing the cross-bor­der exo­dus from Hun­gary to Aus­tria in the sum­mer of 1989 that punched the first big hole in the iron cur­tain. . . .”
Karl von Hab­s­burg has been active in Ukraine for some years before estab­lish­ing a radio sta­tion. Karl von Hab­s­burg is the head of the UNPO. Note the Ukrain­ian ori­en­ta­tion and influ­ence of Wil­helm von Hab­s­burg, in World War I through the World War II eras, as well as his anti-Sovi­et activism: ” . . . . A mil­i­tary offi­cer by train­ing, Wil­helm sup­ported Ukraine’s inde­pen­dence strug­gle dur­ing World War I. He fought with Ukrain­ian troops against the Rus­sians, and had schemed and cajoled a myr­iad of politi­cians to sup­port his monar­chial aspi­ra­tions. Almost until his death at the hands of the Sovi­ets in 1948 – he was snatched off the streets of Vien­na and trans­ported to a prison in Kyiv for work­ing as an agent against the Sovi­et Union – Wil­helm believed this slice of the family’s empire could be his. . . .”
4.–Fast-forwarding again some five years from our pre­vi­ous two arti­cles and one year after the Euro­Maid­an coup we see that actions speak loud­er than words, and Karl’s new Ukrain­ian radio sta­tion says a lot: “Since 20 Jan­u­ary, a tru­ly Euro­pean radio sta­tion [Note this–D.E.] is broad­cast­ing in Ukraine, its main spon­sor, Karl-Hab­s­burg Lothrin­gen, told EurAc­tiv in an exclu­sive inter­view . . . . Karl Hab­s­burg-Lothrin­gen is an Aus­trian politi­cian and head of the House of Hab­s­burg. Since 1986, he has served as Pres­i­dent of the Aus­trian branch of the Paneu­ro­pean Union. . . .”

As we not­ed, “Plan B” for Ukraine might be termed “Plan OUN/B.” Otto von Hab­s­burg formed the Euro­pean Free­dom Coun­cil with Jaroslav Stet­zko, the wartime head of the Ukrain­ian Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tionist gov­ern­ment that imple­ment­ed Third Reich eth­nic cleans­ing pro­grams in Ukraine. The EFC was close­ly aligned with the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations, head­ed by Stet­zko. The ABN, as we have seen in the past, is a re-nam­ing of the Com­mit­tee of Sub­ju­gat­ed Nations, a con­sor­tium of East­ern Euro­pean fas­cist groups formed by Hitler in 1943.”. . . . The Haps­burg monar­chy helped guide the lead­er­ship in their for­mer pos­ses­sions. The Free­dom Coun­cil was formed by Otto von Haps­burg and Jaroslav Stet­zko at a con­fer­ence in Munich on June 30-July 2 1967, as a coor­di­nat­ing body for orga­ni­za­tions fight­ing com­mu­nism in Europe. EMP H.R.H. Otto von Haps­burg was hon­orary chair­man of the Euro­pean Free­dom Coun­cil, based in Munich, dur­ing the 1980s and allied to the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations (ABN). . . .”

An impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion in the con­text of his pro­gram is the career and posi­tion of Roman Zvarych. In addi­tion to being the spokesman for the Nazi Azov Bat­tal­ion, Zvarych was:

1.–Minister of Jus­tice under Vik­tor Yuschenko.
2.–Minister of Jus­tice under both Tymoshenko gov­ern­ments.
3.–An advis­er to Petro Poroshenko.
4.–In the 1980’s, the per­son­al sec­re­tary to Jaroslav Stet­zko, the wartime head of the Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tionist gov­ern­ment in Ukraine. Stet­zko imple­ment­ed Nazi eth­nic cleans­ing in Ukraine dur­ing World War II.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

1.–Ukraine’s sus­pen­sion of coop­er­a­tion with the Mueller probe, in order to avoid endan­ger­ing Trump’s arm­ing of Ukraine.
2.–Manafort and the Hab­s­burg Group’s net­work­ing with Andrei Arte­menko, a Pravy Sek­tor affil­i­ate whose oper­a­tions with Felix Sater and Michael Cohen were described as part of a Russ­ian con­spir­a­cy but were, in fact, part of an anti-Russ­ian con­spir­a­cy. This is dis­cussed at length in FTR #967.
3.–Review of Felix Sater’s intel­li­gence back­ground. Sater is the point man for Trump’s deal­ings with Rus­sia. ” . . . . Sater report­ed back to intel­li­gence agen­cies on the results of coali­tion bomb­ings, kills on the bat­tle­field, the finan­cial net­works behind the 9/11 bombers and oth­er al-Qae­da mem­bers world­wide, and even the iden­ti­ty of a New Mex­i­co com­pa­ny believed to be laun­der­ing ter­ror funds in the US. . . .”

FTR #1007 Alfa Males, Part 4: 9/11, the Underground Reich and the Russia-Gate Psy-Op

In this broad­cast, we present ele­ments fun­da­men­tal to an under­stand­ing of the Rus­sia-Gate psy-op–elements which heav­i­ly over­lap the 9/11 attacks in par­tic­u­lar.

In  sev­er­al pro­grams, we have not­ed Felix Sater’s work on behalf of both CIA and FBI.

Sater has been a very impor­tant U.S. intel­li­gence oper­a­tive, with many of his prin­ci­pal efforts involv­ing fields of endeav­or direct­ly relat­ed to Al-Qae­da, Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. The arti­cle below high­lights those efforts, espe­cial­ly some which place his work direct­ly in the milieu of the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids, which were effec­tive­ly cov­ered up by Robert Mueller when he head­ed the FBI.

” . . . . Sater report­ed back to intel­li­gence agen­cies on the results of coali­tion bomb­ings, kills on the bat­tle­field, the finan­cial net­works behind the 9/11 bombers and oth­er al-Qae­da mem­bers world­wide, and even the iden­ti­ty of a New Mex­i­co com­pa­ny believed to be laun­der­ing ter­ror funds in the US. . . .”

Next, we revis­it infor­ma­tion from FTR #530 con­cern­ing the rela­tion­ship between 9/11 hijack ring­leader Mohamed Atta and the Carl Duis­berg Gesellschaft, a joint U.S. Ger­man fel­low­ship pro­gram that spon­sored Atta’s entry to, and stay in, Ger­many. (For more about Atta and the CDS, see—among oth­er programs—FTR#’s 477, 523.)

It is inter­est­ing, and prob­a­bly sig­nif­i­cant that the mys­te­ri­ous Ger­man cou­ple who brought Atta into Ger­many under the aus­pices of the CDS came to meet him through their friend, Mohamed’s father. In FTR#523, we exam­ined the senior Atta’s appar­ent super­vi­sion of the hijack­ers in Flori­da. He was appar­ent­ly the leader of the group, a fact cov­ered up by the FBI. In FTR#519, we looked at the senior Atta’s endorse­ment of the Lon­don sub­way attacks.

Notice the strange cir­cum­stances under which the face­less Ger­man cou­ple came to spon­sor Atta. Does this make sense? Note, also, that the iden­ti­ty of the Ger­man cou­ple who spon­sored Atta was kept secret by the Chica­go Tri­bune. WHY?!

In 2011, the Carl Duis­berg Soci­ety merged with the Asso­ci­a­tion for Inter­na­tion­al Prac­ti­cal Train­ing (AIPT) and became Cul­tur­al Vis­tas. One of the CDS’s sub­sidiary ele­ments in the ear­ly years of this century–the Alfa Fel­low­ship Program–is now a sub­sidiary of Cul­tur­al Vis­tas.

In Jan­u­ary 2011, Cul­tur­al Vis­tas was formed after a non­prof­it merg­er between two long­stand­ing exchange orga­ni­za­tions: the Asso­ci­a­tion for Inter­na­tion­al Prac­ti­cal Train­ing (AIPT) and CDS Inter­na­tion­al.

Alfa Fel­low­ship Pro­gram
Robert Bosch Foun­da­tion Fel­low­ship Pro­gram
Con­gress-Bun­destag Youth Exchange

The Carl Duis­berg Soci­ety (CDS Inter­na­tion­al in the above Wikipedia entry), which shep­herd­ed Atta into the U.S. is described in an entry on a web­site that also fea­tured the Alfa Fel­low­ship, spon­sored by the Alfa con­glom­er­ate: ” . . . . In the 1920’s, Carl Duis­berg, Gen­er­al Direc­tor of Bay­er AG in Ger­many, envi­sioned send­ing Ger­man stu­dents to the Unit­ed States on work-study pro­grams. Duis­berg was con­vinced that inter­na­tion­al prac­ti­cal train­ing was crit­i­cal to the growth of Ger­man indus­try. Many of the return­ing trainees lat­er rose to promi­nent posi­tions at AEG, Bay­er, Bosch, Daim­ler Benz, and Siemens, bring­ing with them new meth­ods for mass pro­duc­tion, new ideas, and new busi­ness prac­tices. Fol­low­ing World War II, alum­ni from the first exchanges found­ed the Carl Duis­berg Gesellschaft (CDG) in 1949 to help engi­neers, busi­ness­men and farm­ers gain inter­na­tion­al work expe­ri­ence nec­es­sary for the rebuild­ing of Ger­many . . . .”

The Alfa Fel­low­ship was on the web­site of the CDS.  Now, it is a sub­sidiary of the Cul­tur­al Vis­tas non-prof­it, result­ing from the merged CDS enti­ty.

“ALFA FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM”; Page on the Carl Duis­berg Soci­ety web site (as of 2006).

“ALFA FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM: Near­ly fif­teen years after the fall of the Sovi­et Union, Cold War-era poli­cies and con­cepts con­tin­ue to affect U.S. rela­tions with Rus­sia. . . . The Alfa Fel­low­ship Pro­gram is designed to address this prob­lem . . . .”

Crown Resources and oth­er Crown enti­ties are part of the Alfa Group, one of whose out­growths is the CDS sub­sidiary pro­gram, the Alfa Fel­low­ship. Note that Marc Rich, whose par­don was inves­ti­gat­ed by for­mer FBI direc­tor James Comey, dealt with Crown Alfa, although an effort to sell his com­modi­ties deal to the  com­pa­ny failed. ” . . . . A deal to sell the Swiss-based com­modi­ties oper­a­tion of for­mer U.S. fugi­tive financier Marc Rich to Rus­sia-owned ener­gy trad­ing group Crown Resources is off. . . . Crown is owned by the Alfa Group con­glom­er­ate. . . .”

One of the prin­ci­pal fig­ures in the Crown/Alfa net­work is Dr. Nor­bert Seeger, about whom we will more below.

” . . . 30. Dr. Nor­bert Seeger; Rech­tan­swalt, Vaduz [Liechtenstein]—Information includes: Knowl­edge of facts per­tain­ing to role of Crown Finance Foun­da­tion and oth­er Crown enti­ties in mon­ey laun­der­ing and tax eva­sion activ­i­ties. . . .” (From the legal doc­u­ments in a lawsuit—“Rule 26 Ini­tial Dis­clo­sures; UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT; SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK; NOREX PETROLEUM LIMITED No. 02 Civ. 1499 (LTS)(KNF); Plain­tiff v. ACCESS INDUSTRIES, INC.; Et. Al. Defen­dants; PLAINTIFF’S RULE 26(a)(1) INITIAL DISCLOSURES; 1. INDIVIDUALS LIKELY TO HAVE DISCOVERABLE INFORMATION THAT MAY BE USED TO SUPPORT NOREX’S CLAIMS . . . . A. Indi­vid­u­als Asso­ci­at­ed With Plain­tiff”; p. 8. . . .”

A crit­i­cal ele­ment of dis­cus­sion here con­cerns the tiny prin­ci­pal­i­ty of Liechtenstein—a small Euro­pean coun­try of 32,000 peo­ple, whose prin­ci­pal indus­try is mon­ey laun­der­ing. As we will see, Liecht­en­stein fig­ures sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the events in and around 9/11. In 2001, Prince Hans Adam became (for all intents and pur­pos­es) the only absolute monarch in Europe. This gam­bit was accom­plished through a pop­u­lar ref­er­en­dum, effect­ed under the aus­pices of a front group—the Pro­gres­sive Cit­i­zens Par­ty.

The ref­er­en­dum ced­ed to the Prince vir­tu­al­ly all real pow­er. In par­tic­u­lar, he had the abil­i­ty to com­plete­ly con­trol the judi­cial sys­tem, there­by con­trol­ling all legal inves­ti­ga­tions in the country—a par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing and impor­tant pow­er in the very impor­tant year of 2001! This assump­tion of absolute pow­er put Hans Adam in the posi­tion of being able to block or neu­tral­ize any legal inves­ti­ga­tion into any of the finan­cial shenani­gans that tran­spired in Liecht­en­stein, includ­ing 9/11-relat­ed activ­i­ties!

The Bank Al-Taqwa was incor­po­rat­ed in Liecht­en­stein! 

The head of Liechtenstein’s Pro­gres­sive Cit­i­zens Par­ty is Nor­bert Seeger—a prin­ci­pal fig­ure in Alfa’s Crown Resources sub­sidiary!!

Infor­ma­tion about the Al Taqwa/Asat Trust links with the roy­al fam­i­ly of Liecht­en­stein is set forth as fol­lows: ” . . . . One com­pa­ny in the Al Taqwa galaxy that was des­ig­nat­ed by the Unit­ed States and the U.N. as a ter­ror­ist-relat­ed enti­ty is a Liecht­en­stein enti­ty called Asat Trust. . . . The records also shed light on the involve­ment of one mem­ber of the roy­al fam­i­ly of Liecht­en­stein in Asat Trust. Accord­ing to the doc­u­ments, deceased Prince Emanuel von und zu Liecht­en­stein became a board mem­ber of Asat Trust in May 1970 and stayed until Novem­ber 1990, when he was replaced by Mar­tin Wachter, the trust’s cur­rent direc­tor. Flo­ri­an Krenkel, a spokesman for the roy­al fam­i­ly, said Prince Emmanuel had died in 1987 and that he was a dis­tant cousin from rul­ing Prince Hans Adam II. . . .

“. . . There also appears to be some links between Asat Trust and a bank owned by the Liecht­en­stein roy­al fam­i­ly. Sev­er­al Asat Trust doc­u­ments fea­ture on their let­ter­heads ‘Bank in Liecht­en­stein AG’ beneath ‘Asat Trust.’ The roy­al fam­i­ly bank has changed its name and is now called LGT bank. . . .”

Delv­ing into the nature of the roy­al fam­i­ly of Liecht­en­stein, the pro­gram clos­es with dis­cus­sion of the close­ness between Hans-Adam II’s clan and the Haps­burg dynasty that ruled the Aus­tro-Hun­gar­i­an Empire until the end of World War I.

FTR #1006 Robert Mueller and the Subversion of Operation Green Quest

This pro­gram is a “pre­quel” to upcom­ing analy­sis of the fun­da­men­tal dynam­ics of the “Rus­sia-Gate” psy-op, which is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the Ukraine cri­sis, the deep pol­i­tics of U.S. “black-ops,” the Under­ground Reich, the 9/11 attacks and the House of Haps­burg [or Habsburg–one will find both spellings.]

As can be read­i­ly imag­ined, this will be quite a bicy­cle ride, and will take a cou­ple of pro­grams, plus some dili­gent fol­low­ing of linked infor­ma­tion, to absorb.

Robert Mueller is a very, very “spe­cial” pros­e­cu­tor indeed. In fact, he is not a “pros­e­cu­tor” at all–he is a fix­er. Charged with the legal untan­gling of numer­ous, over­lap­ping crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cies involv­ing pow­er­ful ele­ments of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty deal­ing drugs and engag­ing in, or enabling ter­ror­ism, Mueller has been “less than vig­or­ous” in his inves­ti­ga­tions.

Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly for our pur­pos­es, the inves­ti­ga­tions he has overseen–read “overlooked”–are pro­gres­sive­ly over­lapped. From Iran-Con­tra relat­ed inves­ti­ga­tions into the Bank of Com­merce and Cred­it Inter­na­tion­al, the crim­i­nal career of Manuel Nor­ie­ga and the bomb­ing of Pan Am 103, to indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions fig­ur­ing in the nascent ener­gy ven­tures of George W. Bush, to the financ­ing of Al-Qae­da, Mueller’s judi­cial provinces lead direct­ly to the Rus­sia-Gate psy-op, whose ele­ments fig­ure in the mosa­ic of the 9/11 attacks.

The pro­gres­sion of scan­dals obfus­cat­ed by Mueller include:

1.–BCCI–Dubbed by wags “The Bank of Crooks and Crim­i­nals,” BCCI was used by Oliv­er North and the Iran-Con­tra milieu for some of their oper­a­tions, in addi­tion to serv­ing as a finan­cial vehi­cle for the financ­ing of ter­ror­ism. Mueller did not pur­sue the U.S./Reagan admin­is­tra­tion ele­ments involved in the Bank’s oper­a­tions.
2.–Manuel Noriega–Another of the play­ers in the Iran-Con­tra drug deal­ing, Nor­ie­ga’s pros­e­cu­tion cir­cum­nav­i­gat­ed the Pana­man­ian dic­ta­tor’s oper­a­tions on behalf of the U.S. nation­al estab­lish­ment that orig­i­nal­ly placed him in pow­er.
3.–The bomb­ing of Pan Am 103–alleged by the insur­ance inves­ti­ga­tor’s report to have been exe­cut­ed by Monz­er Al-Kas­sar, the bomb­ing killed a team of mil­i­tary intel­li­gence offi­cers who had come across some of the Iran-Con­tra play­ers and their deal­ings with ter­ror­ists. Al-Kas­sar was report­ed by the DEA to bring 20% of the hero­in into the Unit­ed States. Al-Kas­sar was used by Oliv­er North for some of his ship­ments of weapons to the Con­tras.
4.–Operation Green Quest–The inves­ti­ga­tion into the financ­ing of Al-Qae­da, the inquest pro­duced the raids of 3/20/2002. These raids tar­get­ed indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions over­lap­ping both the Bank Al-Taqwa and the Islam­ic Free Mar­ket Insti­tute of Grover Norquist. The Bank Al-Taqwa held an account with an unlim­it­ed line of cred­it for Al-Qae­da. Incor­po­rat­ed in Liecht­en­stein, Al-Taqwa was head­ed by a for­mer Nazi intel­li­gence offi­cer named Youssef Nada. The dri­ving force behind the Bank Al-Taqwa was Fran­cois Genoud, the heir to the polit­i­cal last will and tes­ta­ment and col­lect­ed lit­er­ary works of Adolf Hitler, Mar­tin Bor­mann and Joseph Goebbels. Talat Oth­man, the oper­at­ing direc­tor of Norquist’s Islam­ic Free Mar­ket Insti­tute and pro­tege of BCCI king­pin Gaith Pharaon, inter­ced­ed with then Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Paul O’Neill on behalf of the indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions tar­get­ed by the 3/20/2002 raids. O’Neill was fired lat­er that year. The Oper­a­tion Green Quest inves­ti­ga­tion went nowhere and then FBI direc­tor Robert Mueller did not pur­sue any of the above leads.

This con­cate­na­tion is com­plex and, with­out research, opaque. For more about Oper­a­tion Green Quest, the role of Robert Mueller’s FBI in the sub­ver­sion of Oper­a­tion Green Quest, see FTR #‘s 356, 357, 415, 433, 454, 456, 462, 464, 467, 498, 499, 513, 569, 603.

In our next two pro­grams, we will be look­ing at the Al Taqwa com­plex and Liecht­en­stein, where it was incor­po­rat­ed. It was head­ed by Youssef Nada, whose CV we review for con­ve­nience. ” . . . . . . . . But Yussef Nada is even bet­ter-known to the Egypt­ian [intel­li­gence] ser­vices, who have evi­dence of his mem­ber­ship in the armed branch of the fra­ter­ni­ty of the Mus­lim Broth­ers in the 1940’s. At that time, accord­ing to the same sources, he was work­ing for the Abwehr under Admi­ral Canaris and took part in a plot against King Farouk. Mr. This was not the first time that the path of the Mus­lim Broth­ers crossed that of the ser­vants of the Third Reich. . . . ”

We will also be look­ing at the polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment of the Carl Duis­berg Soci­ety, which is allied with the Alfa Fel­low­ship, which appears to be some­thing of an MBA pro­gram for the Alfa Con­glom­er­ate and the Alfa Bank, major focal points of our upcom­ing inquiry.

The Carl Duis­berg Soci­ety, which shep­herd­ed Atta into the U.S. is now part of the Cul­tur­al Vis­tas orga­ni­za­tion, which includes the Alfa Fel­low­ship. ” . . . . In the 1920’s, Carl Duis­berg, Gen­er­al Direc­tor of Bay­er AG in Ger­many, envi­sioned send­ing Ger­man stu­dents to the Unit­ed States on work-study pro­grams. Duis­berg was con­vinced that inter­na­tion­al prac­ti­cal train­ing was crit­i­cal to the growth of Ger­man indus­try. Many of the return­ing trainees lat­er rose to promi­nent posi­tions at AEG, Bay­er, Bosch, Daim­ler Benz, and Siemens, bring­ing with them new meth­ods for mass pro­duc­tion, new ideas, and new busi­ness prac­tices. [This places them in the heart of Third Reich indus­try and war production–D.E.] Fol­low­ing World War II, alum­ni from the first exchanges found­ed the Carl Duis­berg Gesellschaft (CDG) in 1949 to help engi­neers, busi­ness­men and farm­ers gain inter­na­tion­al work expe­ri­ence nec­es­sary for the rebuild­ing of Ger­many . . . .”

Of the incor­po­ra­tion of CDS into cul­tur­al Vis­tas and the sub­se­quent devel­op­ment of the orga­ni­za­tion, we read: ” . . . . The orga­ni­za­tion was offi­cial­ly incor­po­rat­ed as a non­prof­it in 1963. In Jan­u­ary 2011, Cul­tur­al Vis­tas was formed after a non­prof­it merg­er between two long­stand­ing exchange orga­ni­za­tions: the Asso­ci­a­tion for Inter­na­tion­al Prac­ti­cal Train­ing (AIPT) and CDS Inter­na­tion­al. . . .”

. . . . In 1968, the Carl Duis­berg Soci­ety was found­ed in New York City as a non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion designed to rekin­dle Duisberg’s orig­i­nal exchanges and to facil­i­tate inter­na­tion­al career train­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for Amer­i­cans and Ger­mans. The name was offi­cial­ly changed to CDS Inter­na­tion­al in 1987 to reflect the organization’s increas­ing­ly inter­na­tion­al nature of its pro­grams beyond Ger­many to include part­ners in oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries, Asia and Latin Amer­i­ca. . . .’

It comes as no sur­prise that, accord­ing to the BKA, Mohamed Atta’s asso­ciates in South Flori­da includ­ed the chil­dren of promi­nent Ger­man indus­tri­al­ists.

Update on Alfa Bank and the “Russia-Gate” Psy-Op

In FTR #‘s 530, 930 (among oth­er pro­grams) we high­light­ed the Russ­ian Alfa Bank, not­ing that it appears to be an ele­ment of the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work, not a “tool of the Krem­lin” as it has been made out to be in the rhetor­i­cal firestorm of the “Rus­sia-Gate” psy-op. Last July, a typ­i­cal piece of “New York Times” pro­pa­gan­da sur­faced, fur­ther attempt­ing to link Alfa and peo­ple asso­ci­at­ed with it to attempts by Rus­sia to influ­ence the elec­tion. “Pres­i­dent Trump’s nom­i­nee to lead the Jus­tice Depart­men­t’s crim­i­nal divi­sion, Bri­an A. Benczkows­ki, has dis­closed to Con­gress that he pre­vi­ous­ly rep­re­sent­ed Alfa Bank, one of Rus­si­a’s largest finan­cial insti­tu­tions, whose whose own­ers have ties to Pres­i­dent Vladimir A. Putin. Mr. Trump nom­i­nat­ed Mr. Benczkows­ki, a part­ner at the Kirk­land & Ellis law firm and a for­mer Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial, in June, and he is sched­uled before the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee for a con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing on Tues­day. . . .” All of the con­tents of this web­site as of 12/19/2014–Dave Emory’s 37+ years of research and broadcasting–as well as hours of video­taped lec­tures are avail­able on a 32GB flash dri­ve. Dave offers his pro­grams and arti­cles for free–your sup­port is very much appre­ci­at­ed.

Game of Thrones: Saudis Funding Taliban as Trump Gives Nod to Increased Military Support for Afghans

As Trump plans increas­ing and pro­long­ing U.S. troop com­mit­ment to Afghanistan, it is worth not­ing that–surprise, surprise–the Saud­is are fund­ing the Tal­iban, much as they have done with Al-Qae­da.

Oh What Tangled Webs We “Weev”: Ukraine, Hacking, Nukes and Serpent’s Walk

With our media accept­ing the “Rus­sia did it” non­sense about the high-pro­file hacks, the alle­ga­tion that Rus­sia attempt­ed to hack U.S. nuclear pow­er plants should awak­en deep, deep fear. Recent­ly, a Nazi (and nation­al guards­man) named Bran­don Rus­sell was arrest­ed with radioac­tive mate­r­i­al and bomb-mak­ing com­po­nents. Rus­sell was appar­ent­ly plan­ning to sab­o­tage a nuclear pow­er plant: ” . . . Rus­sell stud­ied how to build nuclear weapons in school and is ‘some­body that lit­er­al­ly has knowl­edge of how to build a nuclear bomb.’ . . . . they had a plan to fire mor­tars loaded with nuclear mate­r­i­al into the cool­ing units of a nuclear pow­er plant near Mia­mi.” ” . . .The FBI said Rus­sell ‘admit­ted to his neo-Nazi beliefs’ and said he was a mem­ber of a group called Atom­waf­fen, which is Ger­man for ‘atom­ic weapon.’ Major Caitlin Brown, spokes­woman for the Flori­da Nation­al Guard, con­firmed Rus­sell was a cur­rent mem­ber of the Flori­da Nation­al Guard. . . .”

FTR #964 Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

As we have not­ed in many pre­vi­ous broad­casts and posts, cyber attacks are eas­i­ly dis­guised. Per­pe­trat­ing a “cyber false flag” oper­a­tion is dis­turbing­ly easy to do.

This is of para­mount sig­nif­i­cance in eval­u­at­ing the increas­ing­ly neo-McCarthyite New Cold War pro­pa­gan­da about “Russ­ian inter­fer­ence” in the U.S. elec­tion.

Com­pound­ing the sit­u­a­tion are some recent dis­clo­sures and devel­op­ments:

1.–We learn that the CIA’s hack­ing tools are specif­i­cal­ly craft­ed to mask CIA author­ship of the attacks. Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, for our pur­pos­es, is the fact that the Agen­cy’s hack­ing tools are engi­neered in such a way as to per­mit the authors of the event to rep­re­sent them­selves as Russ­ian.

2.–The NSA’s elite hack­ing tech­nol­o­gy has been made wide­ly avail­able to the hack­ing com­mu­ni­ty, cour­tesy of “The Shad­ow Bro­kers.”

3.–During the 2016 Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, Michael Fly­nn was pro­fes­sion­al­ly involved with numer­ous cyber-secu­ri­ty and cyber arms man­u­fac­tur­ing firms: “ . . . . The month before Fly­nn joined the advi­so­ry board of OSY Tech­nolo­gies, NSO Group opened up a new arm called West­Bridge Tech­nolo­gies, Inc., in the D.C. region. (The com­pa­ny was orig­i­nal­ly reg­is­tered in Delaware in 2014, but formed in Mary­land in April 2016.) Led by NSO Group co-founder Lavie, West­Bridge is vying for fed­er­al gov­ern­ment con­tracts for NSO Group’s prod­ucts. Hir­ing Fly­nn would pro­vide NSO Group with a well-con­nect­ed fig­ure in Wash­ing­ton, to help get its foot in the door of the noto­ri­ous­ly insu­lar world of secret intel­li­gence bud­get­ing. . . .When you’re try­ing to build up your busi­ness, you need some­one who has con­nec­tions, some­one who is seen as an author­i­ty and a legit­i­mate pres­ence,” John­son said. Hir­ing some­one with Flynn’s back­ground in intel­li­gence would ‘open up doors that they wouldn’t have had access to,’ John­son said.Throughout 2016, Fly­nn worked for a num­ber of cyber­se­cu­ri­ty firms per­son­al­ly and through his con­sult­ing firm, Fly­nn Intel Group. In addi­tion to his advi­so­ry board seat at OSY Tech­nolo­gies, he sat on the board of Adobe Sys­tems, a large soft­ware com­pa­ny with Pen­ta­gon con­tracts, and the boards of the cyber­se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­nies Green­Zone Sys­tems and HALO Pri­va­cy. (Though Fly­nn described him­self as an Adobe advi­so­ry board mem­ber in his finan­cial dis­clo­sure paper­work, the group said in a state­ment that he pro­vid­ed only “peri­od­ic coun­sel to Adobe’s pub­lic sec­tor team.”) . . .”

4.–NSO Group and OSY Tech­nolo­gies spe­cial­ize in spear-fish­ing attacks, one of the method­olo­gies used in the hacks of U.S. elec­tion com­put­ers. Is there any link between Fly­n­n’s cyber-secu­ri­ty/­cy­ber arms links and the high-pro­file hacks dur­ing the cam­paign?

5.–A GOP tech database–Deep Root–Exposed the data of almost two hun­dred mil­lion Amer­i­can vot­ers to wide­spread scruti­ny. Is there any con­nec­tion between Deep Root, the GOP and the alleged Russ­ian hack­ing of U.S. vot­ing com­put­ers?

Fol­low­ing a Bloomberg report about wide­spread Russ­ian hack­ing of Amer­i­can elec­tions sys­tems: “ . . . . Kay Stim­son, spokes­woman for the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Sec­re­taries of State, said the mem­bers of her group — which rep­re­sents the chief elec­tion offi­cials in 40 states — were tak­en aback by the alle­ga­tion that 39 states were hacked. ‘We can­not ver­i­fy any infor­ma­tion in that report,’ Stim­son told Ben­zin­ga. “It has some claims that have raised some red flags. I don’t know where they’re get­ting it. We’re not able to assess to the cred­i­bil­i­ty.’ She said that some cyber­se­cu­ri­ty firms were engag­ing in scare tac­tics at the state and local lev­els. ‘There are cyber­se­cu­ri­ty firms mak­ing some wild claims,’ she said. ‘It is a very aggres­sive indus­try.’ . . .”

With the high-pro­file hacks being attributed–almost cer­tain­ly falsely–to Rus­sia, there are omi­nous devel­op­ments tak­ing place that may well lead to a Third World War. Dur­ing the clos­ing days of his Pres­i­den­cy, Oba­ma autho­rized the plant­i­ng of cyber weapons on Russ­ian com­put­er net­works. Oba­ma did this after talk­ing with Putin on the Hot Line, estab­lished to pre­vent a Third World War. Putin denied inter­fer­ing in the U.S. elec­tion.

The con­clu­sion that Rus­sia hacked the U.S. elec­tion on Putin’s orders appears to have been based on a CIA source in the Krem­lin. Even when that intel­li­gence was deliv­ered, oth­er agen­cies weren’t ready to accept the CIA’s con­clu­sion and it took intel­li­gence from anoth­er nation (not named) to pro­vide the final intel­li­gence tip­ping point that led to a broad-based con­clu­sion the not only was the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment behind the cyber­at­tacks but that Vladimir Putin him­self ordered it.

That ally’s intel­li­gence is described as “the most crit­i­cal tech­ni­cal intel­li­gence on Rus­sia,” how­ev­er the NSA still wasn’t con­vinced based on what sounds like a lack of con­fi­dence in that source. Thus, it looks like a CIA Krem­lin source and an unnamed for­eign intel­li­gence agency with ques­tion­able cre­den­tials are the basis of what appears to be a like­ly future full-scale US/Russian cyber­war.

Of para­mount sig­nif­i­cance is the fact that IF, on Putin’s orders (and we are to believe such) Rus­sia con­tin­ued to hack U.S. com­put­er sys­tems to influ­ence the elec­tion, Putin would have to have gone utter­ly mad. Those hacks would have pre­clud­ed any rap­proche­ment between Rus­sia and the Unit­ed States under a Pres­i­dent Trump. There is not indi­ca­tion that Putin went off the deep end.

Also augur­ing a Third World War are two devel­op­ments in Syr­ia. Sey­mour Hersh pub­lished an arti­cle in Die Welt reveal­ing that, not only was the April 4 alleged Sarin attack NOT a chem­i­cal weapons attack but there was wide­spread knowl­edge of this in Amer­i­can mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence cir­cles.

Omi­nous­ly, the Trump White House is claim­ing they have advance knowl­edge of an impend­ing Syr­i­an chem­i­cal weapons strike and will pun­ish Syr­ia heav­i­ly, and hold Rus­sia account­able.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The fact that the bulk of activ­i­ty detect­ed by the DHS on U.S. elec­tion sys­tems was “scanning”–standard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure for hack­ing; a for­mer NSA hack­ing specialist–Jake Williams–said that spear-phish­ing oper­a­tion was of “medi­um sophis­ti­ca­tion” that “prac­ti­cal­ly any hack­er can pull off”; the ques­tion of whether or not GOP Sec­re­taries of State might have delib­er­ate­ly respond­ed to the spear-phish­ing e‑mails that per­mit­ted the “hit” on U.S. elec­tion sys­tems; the Russ­ian autho­riza­tion of the use by the Syr­i­an air force of a smart bomb to elim­i­nate Al-Qae­da-linked jihadists; the release of a chem­i­cal cloud as a result of that strike that was caused by sec­ondary explo­sions; Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca’s hir­ing of GOP online data-bas­ing king­pin Dar­ren Bold­ing.

FTR #955 Syrian Chemical Weapons Attack? Not So Fast, Part 2

Sup­ple­ment­ing FTR #954, this broad­cast con­tin­ues analy­sis of the alleged Assad gov­ern­ment chem­i­cal weapons attack. Key points of dis­cus­sion include:

1. Fur­ther analy­sis by MIT expert Theodore Pos­tol, who sees the pho­to­graph­ic evi­dence alleged to sup­port the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s alle­ga­tions as ques­tion­able. ” . . . ‘This adden­dum pro­vides data that unam­bigu­ous­ly shows that the assump­tion in the WHR that there was no tam­per­ing with the alleged site of the sarin release is not cor­rect. This egre­gious error rais­es ques­tions about every oth­er claim in the WHR. … The impli­ca­tion of this obser­va­tion is clear – the WHR was not reviewed and released by any com­pe­tent intel­li­gence expert unless they were moti­vat­ed by fac­tors oth­er than con­cerns about the accu­ra­cy of the report. . . .”

2. Par­tic­u­lar­ly sus­pi­cious (laugh­able?) is a pic­ture show­ing per­son­nel exam­in­ing the pur­port­ed sarin attack site with woe­ful­ly inad­e­quate pro­tec­tive cloth­ing. ” . . . . ‘If there were any sarin present at this loca­tion when this pho­to­graph was tak­en every­body in the pho­to­graph would have received a lethal or debil­i­tat­ing dose of sarin. The fact that these peo­ple were dressed so inad­e­quate­ly either sug­gests a com­plete igno­rance of the basic mea­sures need­ed to pro­tect an indi­vid­ual from sarin poi­son­ing, or that they knew that the site was not seri­ous­ly con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed. This is the crater that is the cen­ter­piece evi­dence pro­vid­ed in the WHR for a sarin attack deliv­ered by a Syr­i­an air­craft.’ . . . . ”

3. Ques­tion­able analy­sis in the alleged chlo­rine gas attacks also attrib­uted to the al-Assad regime. ” . . . In one of the chlo­rine cas­es, how­ev­er, Syr­i­an eye­wit­ness­es came for­ward to tes­ti­fy that the rebels had staged the alleged attack so it could be blamed on the gov­ern­ment. In that inci­dent, the U.N. team reached no con­clu­sion as to what had real­ly hap­pened, but nei­ther did the inves­ti­ga­tors – now alert­ed to the rebels’ tac­tic of stag­ing chem­i­cal attacks – apply any addi­tion­al skep­ti­cism to the oth­er cas­es. In one case, the rebels and their sup­port­ers also claimed to know that an alleged ‘bar­rel bomb’ con­tained a can­is­ter of chlo­rine because of the sound that it made while descend­ing. There was no expla­na­tion for how that sort of detec­tion was even pos­si­ble. . . .”

4. A British doc­tor who was a focal point of PR cov­er­age of the alleged sarin attack has a jihadist back­ground. ” . . . . A British doc­tor who doc­u­ment­ed a sus­pect­ed chem­i­cal weapons attack in Syr­ia was con­sid­ered a ‘com­mit­ted jihadist’ by MI6 and was struck off the Gen­er­al Med­ical Coun­cil in 2016. Sha­jul Islam, 31, post­ed sev­er­al videos on Twit­ter in the after­math of the Tues­day’s (4 April) attack where he appeared to be treat­ing patients in Khan Sheikhoun. He appeared on sev­er­al tele­vi­sion net­works such as NBC to dis­cuss what he saw, but it has now emerged Islam was pre­vi­ous­ly charged on ter­ror offences in the UK. . . .”

4. The under­ly­ing strate­gic rea­son for some of the Trump/Russian inter­face, one that dove­tails with the Syr­i­an provocation/escalation: ” . . . . The Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates arranged a secret meet­ing in Jan­u­ary between Black­wa­ter founder Erik Prince and a Russ­ian close to Pres­i­dent Vladi­mir Putin as part of an appar­ent effort to estab­lish a back-chan­nel line of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between Moscow and Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump, accord­ing to U.S., Euro­pean and Arab offi­cials. The meet­ing took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion — in the Sey­chelles islands in the Indi­an Ocean, offi­cials said. Though the full agen­da remains unclear, the UAE agreed to bro­ker the meet­ing in part to explore whether Rus­sia could be per­suad­ed to cur­tail its rela­tion­ship with Iran, includ­ing in Syr­ia, a Trump admin­is­tra­tion objec­tive . . . .”

5. George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials are con­fi­dent anoth­er ter­ror­ist attack is com­ing appear to be con­cerned that the Trump could use ter­ror to grab and abuse exec­u­tive pow­ers. We present some of their thoughts against the back­ground of our dis­cus­sion in FTR #953 about Bernie Sanders’ paving the way for Mus­lim Broth­er­hood-linked ele­ments: ” . . . . ‘We can assume there will be anoth­er ter­ror­ist attack in the U.S. If the exec­u­tive order is in place, he will point to the attack as sup­port for the exec­u­tive order and the need to expand it to oth­er coun­tries with bad dudes (Mus­lims). If the exec­u­tive order has been struck down, Trump will blame judges and Democ­rats for the attack. . . .‘We both whol­ly believe that Trump needs a bogey­man. But, more impor­tant­ly, he needs dis­trac­tion and a blame source. In ter­ror­ists, he has his bogey­man. In his con­trol of the pre­vail­ing press nar­ra­tive via tweet, he has dis­trac­tion. And, in the judi­cia­ry, he has a source of blame for why his way was right from the begin­ning.’ . . . . ‘I am ful­ly con­fi­dent that an attack is exact­ly what he wants and needs.’ . . . .”

Where­as the Syr­i­an alleged sarin inci­dent appears to have been effect­ed by some of the West­’s al-Qae­da sur­ro­gates in the con­flict, past provo­ca­tions have involved more direct involve­ment by ele­ments of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. In May of 1963, with then South Viet­namese pres­i­dent Diem push­ing for a reduc­tion in U.S. forces in Viet­nam (against Amer­i­can wish­es), a bomb­ing occurred at a Hue radio sta­tion that was the focal point of Bud­dhist protests of the gov­ern­men­t’s pol­i­cy toward Bud­dhists. The author­ship of that attack and a 1952 Saigon bomb­ing, was not the Viet­cong.

Key points of analy­sis:

1. The May, 1963 attack in Hue: “ . . . . As Dang Sy and his secu­ri­ty offi­cers were approach­ing the area in armored cars about fifty meters away, two pow­er­ful explo­sions blast­ed the peo­ple on the veran­da of the sta­tion, killing sev­en on the spot and fatal­ly wound­ing a child. At least fif­teen oth­ers were injured. . . .”

2. Foren­sic analy­sis of the wounds of the vic­tims: “ . . . Dr. Le Khac Quyen, the hos­pi­tal direc­tor at Hue, said after exam­in­ing the vic­tims’ bod­ies that he had nev­er seen such injuries. The bod­ies had been decap­i­tat­ed. He found no met­al in the corpses, only holes. There were no wounds below the chest. In his offi­cial find­ing, Dr. Quyen ruled that ‘the death of the peo­ple was caused by an explo­sion which took place in mid-air, blow­ing off their heads and muti­lat­ing their bod­ies.’ . . . ”

3. Dr. Quyen’s con­clu­sions about the source of the vic­tims’ wounds in the 1963 attack: “ . . . . The absence of any met­al in the bod­ies or on the radio sta­tion’s veran­da point­ed to pow­er­ful plas­tic bombs as the source of the explo­sions. . . .”

4. Analy­sis of the 1952 bomb­ing in Saigon: “ . . . . Who did pos­sess such pow­er­ful plas­tic bombs? An answer is pro­vid­ed by Gra­ham Greene’s prophet­ic nov­el The Qui­et Amer­i­can, based on his­tor­i­cal events that occurred in Saigon eleven years before the bomb­ing in Hue. Greene was in Saigon on Jan­u­ary 9, 1952, when two bombs explod­ed in the city’s cen­ter, killing ten and injur­ing many more. A pic­ture of the scene, show­ing a man with his legs blown off, appeared in Life mag­a­zine as the ‘Pic­ture of the Week.’ The Life cap­tion said the Saigon bombs had been ‘plant­ed by Viet Minh Com­mu­nists’ and ‘sig­naled gen­er­al inten­si­fi­ca­tion of the Viet Minh vio­lence.’ In like man­ner, the New York Times head­lined: ‘Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Cen­ter.’ . . .”

5. In the 1952 bomb­ing, the oper­a­tional coor­di­na­tion between U.S. media out­lets and the per­pe­tra­tors of the attack is note­wor­thy for our pur­pos­es: “ . . . . Gen­er­al The’s bomb­ing mate­r­i­al, a U.S. plas­tic, had been sup­plied to him by his spon­sor, the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency. Greene observed in his mem­oir, Ways of Escape, it was no coin­ci­dence that ‘the Life pho­tog­ra­ph­er at the moment of the explo­sion was so well placed that he was able to take an aston­ish­ing and hor­ri­fy­ing pho­to­graph which showed the body of a trishaw dri­ver still upright after his legs had been blown off.’ The CIA had set the scene, alert­ing the Life pho­tog­ra­ph­er and Times reporter so they could con­vey the ter­ror­ist bomb­ing as the work of ‘Viet Minh Com­mu­nists’ to a mass audi­ence. . . .”

6. South Viet­namese inves­ti­ga­tion of the May, 1963 attack, arrived at a con­clu­sion sim­i­lar to Gra­ham Greene’s dis­cov­ery in the 1952 attack: “ . . . . Accord­ing to an inves­ti­ga­tion car­ried by the Catholic news­pa­per Hoa Binh. . . . a Cap­tain Scott . . . . had come to Hue from Da Nang on May 7, 1963. He admit­ted he was the Amer­i­can agent respon­si­ble for the bomb­ing at the radio sta­tion the next day. He said he used ‘an explo­sive that was still secret and known only to cer­tain peo­ple in the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, a charge no larg­er than a match­box with a tim­ing device.’. . . .”

FTR #946 In Your Facebook: A Virtual Panopticon, Part 2

In FTR #718 (record­ed on Inde­pen­dence Day week­end of 2010), we not­ed that the new social medium–Facebook-might very well be the oppo­site of the lib­er­at­ing, empow­er­ing enti­ty many believed it to be.

On the con­trary, we said–it received finan­cial back­ing from the CIA, per­mits unprece­dent­ed gath­er­ing and data­bas­ing of users’ per­son­al infor­ma­tion, and might very well be a “panopticon”–a type of prison in which the interned can nev­er see his or her jail­ers, but their keep­ers can see the interned at all times.

In par­tic­u­lar, we not­ed the promi­nent posi­tion of major Face­book investor Peter Thiel in “Mon­do Zucker­berg.” Of Ger­man (and prob­a­ble I.G. Far­ben) ori­gins, we opined that Thiel was Under­ground Reich. Opposed to democ­ra­cy because he feels it is inim­i­cal to wealth cre­ation and does­n’t believe women should be allowed to vote, Thiel has now emerged as one of the most promi­nent of Don­ald Trump’s sup­port­ers, tran­si­tion team cre­ators and influ­en­tial pol­i­cy wonks.

Where­as we explored the “vir­tu­al panop­ti­con” con­cept of Face­book with a ques­tion mark in 2010, we now feel affir­ma­tive­ly on the issue.

A very impor­tant sto­ry from New York mag­a­zine sets forth Face­book’s role in the just-con­clud­ed elec­tion. ” . . . . Facebook’s size, reach, wealth, and pow­er make it effec­tive­ly the only one that mat­ters. And, boy, does it mat­ter. At the risk of being hyper­bol­ic, I think there are few events over the last decade more sig­nif­i­cant than the social network’s whole­sale acqui­si­tion of the tra­di­tion­al func­tions of news media (not to men­tion the polit­i­cal-par­ty appa­ra­tus). Trump’s ascen­dan­cy is far from the first mate­r­i­al con­se­quence of Facebook’s con­quer­ing inva­sion of our social, cul­tur­al, and polit­i­cal lives, but it’s still a brac­ing reminder of the extent to which the social net­work is able to upend exist­ing struc­ture and trans­form soci­ety — and often not for the bet­ter. . . .

” . . . . Facebook’s enor­mous audi­ence, and the mech­a­nisms of dis­tri­b­u­tion on which the site relies — i.e., the emo­tion­al­ly charged activ­i­ty of shar­ing, and the show-me-more-like-this feed­back loop of the news feed algo­rithm — makes it the only site to sup­port a gen­uine­ly lucra­tive mar­ket in which shady pub­lish­ers arbi­trage traf­fic by entic­ing peo­ple off of Face­book and onto ad-fes­tooned web­sites, using sto­ries that are alter­nate­ly made up, incor­rect, exag­ger­at­ed beyond all rela­tion­ship to truth, or all three. . . .

” . . . . And at the heart of the prob­lem, any­way, is not the moti­va­tions of the hoax­ers but the struc­ture of social media itself. Tens of mil­lions of peo­ple, invig­o­rat­ed by insur­gent out­sider can­di­dates and anger at per­ceived polit­i­cal ene­mies, were served up or shared emo­tion­al­ly charged news sto­ries about the can­di­dates, because Facebook’s sort­ing algo­rithm under­stood from expe­ri­ence that they were seek­ing such sto­ries. Many of those sto­ries were lies, or ‘par­o­dies,’ but their appear­ance and place­ment in a news feed were no dif­fer­ent from those of any pub­lish­er with a com­mit­ment to, you know, not lying. As those peo­ple and their fol­low­ers clicked on, shared, or oth­er­wise engaged with those sto­ries — which they did, because Trump dri­ves engage­ment extreme­ly bigly — they were served up even more of them. The engage­ment-dri­ving feed­back loop reached the heights of Face­book itself, which shared fake news to its front page on more than one occa­sion after fir­ing the small team of edi­to­r­i­al employ­ees tasked with pass­ing news judg­ment. . . .

” . . . . Some­thing like 170 mil­lion peo­ple in North Amer­i­ca use Face­book every day, a num­ber that’s not only sev­er­al orders of mag­ni­tude larg­er than even the most opti­mistic cir­cu­la­tion reck­on­ings of major news out­lets but also about one-and-a-half times as many peo­ple as vot­ed on Tues­day. Forty-four per­cent of all adults in the Unit­ed States say they get news from Face­book . . . ”

Symp­to­matic of Face­book’s fil­ter of what its users see con­cerns the social medi­um’s recent non-cov­er­age of the wom­en’s march:

” . . . . We don’t usu­al­ly post on Pan­do at the week­end, but this is too top­i­cal and too shame­ful to wait until Mon­day. As you cer­tain­ly know, today is the day of the Women’s March on Wash­ing­ton in protest of Don­ald Trump. The main event is in DC, where some­thing close to 500,000 pro­test­ers of all gen­ders and ages have packed the streets — but there are also major protests in Chica­go, New York and around the world. Includ­ing Antarc­ti­ca.

You cer­tain­ly know this because the protest march is the top sto­ry on every major news out­let, and because updates and pho­tos from the event are flood­ing your Twit­ter and Face­book feeds.

And yet, here’s what Facebook’s trend­ing news feed looked like at the height of the march…

And here’s its trend­ing pol­i­tics feed…

Notice any­thing miss­ing?

Like, say, a half mil­lion women? . . .

In case you think I’m see­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent from the rest of the world, be assured I’m not….”

Face­book has changed its algo­rithm, no longer fac­tor­ing in “likes” and oth­er per­son­al pref­er­ences in deter­min­ing its news feed.

This, how­ev­er, does not bode as well as Face­book would like us to believe. Face­book has pro­mot­ed, among oth­ers, Camp­bell Brown, to an impor­tant posi­tion in struc­tur­ing its news feed: ” . . . . Brown has long­stand­ing ties not just to the tra­di­tion­al news media, but also to con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics, although she describes her­self as a polit­i­cal inde­pen­dent. She is a close per­son­al friend of Bet­sy DeVos, the Repub­li­can megadonor who is Don­ald Trump’s nom­i­nee for Edu­ca­tion Sec­re­tary, and is mar­ried to Dan Senor, a for­mer top advi­sor to Mitt Rom­ney who also served as spokesper­son for the Coali­tion Pro­vi­sion­al Author­i­ty in the wake of the 2003 inva­sion of Iraq. . . .

. . . . And along­side her main­stream media expe­ri­ence, Brown is famil­iar with the world of non-tra­di­tion­al news out­lets spring­ing up online. In 2014, she found­ed a non­prof­it news site, The 74, which bills itself as non­par­ti­san but which crit­ics have said func­tions as advo­ca­cy jour­nal­ism, tilt­ed in favor of char­ter schools and against teach­ers’ unions. The site was launched with mon­ey from donors includ­ing the foun­da­tion run by DeVos, Trump’s pro­posed Edu­ca­tion Sec­re­tary. When the nom­i­na­tion was announced, Brown said she would recuse her­self from The 74’s cov­er­age of DeVos. . .”

Brown is joined by Tuck­er Bounds, a for­mer John McCain advis­er and spokesman for the McCain/Palin cam­paign.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the ter­ri­fy­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties of the vir­tu­al panop­ti­con, we exam­ine the nexus of Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, its prin­ci­pal investors, Robert and Rebekah Mer­cer and Steve Ban­non, a key mem­ber of the fir­m’s board of direc­tors and a polit­i­cal guru to Rebekah. ” . . . . For sev­er­al years, a data firm even­tu­al­ly hired by the Trump cam­paign, Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, has been using Face­book as a tool to build psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­files that rep­re­sent some 230 mil­lion adult Amer­i­cans. A spin­off of a British con­sult­ing com­pa­ny and some­time-defense con­trac­tor known for its coun­tert­er­ror­ism ‘psy ops’ work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seed­ing the social net­work with per­son­al­i­ty quizzes. Respon­dents — by now hun­dreds of thou­sands of us, most­ly female and most­ly young but enough male and old­er for the firm to make infer­ences about oth­ers with sim­i­lar behav­iors and demo­graph­ics — get a free look at their Ocean scores. Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca also gets a look at their scores and, thanks to Face­book, gains access to their pro­files and real names.

“Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca worked on the ‘Leave’ side of the Brex­it cam­paign. In the Unit­ed States it takes only Repub­li­cans as clients: Sen­a­tor Ted Cruz in the pri­maries, Mr. Trump in the gen­er­al elec­tion. Cam­bridge is report­ed­ly backed by Robert Mer­cer, a hedge fund bil­lion­aire and a major Repub­li­can donor; a key board mem­ber is Stephen K. Ban­non, the head of Bre­it­bart News who became Mr. Trump’s cam­paign chair­man and is set to be his chief strate­gist in the White House. . .

” . . . . Their [the Mer­cers] data firm, Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, was hired by the Cruz cam­paign. They switched to sup­port Trump short­ly after he clinched the nom­i­na­tion, and he even­tu­al­ly hired Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, as well. Their top polit­i­cal guru is Steve Ban­non, the for­mer Bre­it­bart News chair­man and White House chief strate­gist. They’re close, too, with Trump’s cam­paign man­ag­er Kellyanne Con­way, who also has a senior role in the White House. They nev­er speak to the press and hard­ly ever even release a pub­lic state­ment. Like Trump him­self, they’ve flout­ed the stan­dard play­book for how things are done in pol­i­tics. . . .”

Ban­non’s influ­ence on Rebekah Mer­cer is par­tic­u­lar­ly strong: ” . . . Anoth­er of the Repub­li­can oper­a­tives described Ban­non as the ‘Obi-Wan Keno­bi’ to Rebekah Mer­cer, and a third was even more point­ed: ‘Sven­gali.’ Ban­non is ‘real­ly, real­ly, real­ly influ­en­tial’ with Mer­cer, said the for­mer Bre­it­bart employ­ee. The Mer­cers, the for­mer employ­ee said, made their wish­es known through Ban­non, who would some­times cite the company’s finan­cial back­ers as a rea­son for Bre­it­bart not to do a sto­ry. Ban­non didn’t respond to a request for com­ment about this. . . .”

In turn, the influ­ence of Steve Ban­non with­in the Face­book vir­tu­al panop­ti­con is even more sin­is­ter con­sid­er­ing Ban­non’s polit­i­cal out­look: ” . . . . But, said the source, who request­ed anonymi­ty to speak can­did­ly about Ban­non, ‘There are some things he’s only going to share with peo­ple who he’s tight with and who he trusts.’

Bannon’s read­ings tend to have one thing in com­mon: the view that tech­nocrats have put West­ern civ­i­liza­tion on a down­ward tra­jec­to­ry and that only a shock to the sys­tem can reverse its decline. And they tend to have a dark, apoc­a­lyp­tic tone that at times echoes Bannon’s own pub­lic remarks over the years—a sense that human­i­ty is at a hinge point in his­to­ry. . . .”

One of the influ­ences on Ban­non is Cur­tis Yarvin, aka Men­cius Mold­bug, who has actu­al­ly opened a backchan­nel advi­so­ry con­nec­tion to the White House: ” . . . . Before he emerged on the polit­i­cal scene, an obscure Sil­i­con Val­ley com­put­er pro­gram­mer with ties to Trump backer and Pay­Pal co-founder Peter Thiel was explain­ing his behav­ior. Cur­tis Yarvin, the self-pro­claimed ‘neo­re­ac­tionary’ who blogs under the name ‘Men­cius Mold­bug,’ attract­ed a fol­low­ing in 2008 when he pub­lished a wordy trea­tise assert­ing, among oth­er things, that ‘non­sense is a more effec­tive orga­niz­ing tool than the truth.’ When the orga­niz­er of a com­put­er sci­ence con­fer­ence can­celed Yarvin’s appear­ance fol­low­ing an out­cry over his blog­ging under his nom de web, Ban­non took note: Bre­it­bart News decried the act of cen­sor­ship in an arti­cle about the programmer-blogger’s dis­missal.

Moldbug’s dense, dis­cur­sive mus­ings on history—‘What’s so bad about the Nazis?’ he asks in one 2008 post that con­demns the Holo­caust but ques­tions the moral supe­ri­or­i­ty of the Allies—include a belief in the util­i­ty of spread­ing mis­in­for­ma­tion that now looks like a tem­plate for Trump’s approach to truth. ‘To believe in non­sense is an unforge­able [sic] demon­stra­tion of loy­al­ty. It serves as a polit­i­cal uni­form. And if you have a uni­form, you have an army,’ he writes in a May 2008 post.‘It’s been a while since I post­ed any­thing real­ly con­tro­ver­sial and offen­sive here,’ he begins in a July 25, 2007, post explain­ing why he asso­ciates democ­ra­cy with ‘war, tyran­ny, destruc­tion and pover­ty.’

Mold­bug, who does not do inter­views and could not be reached for this sto­ry, has report­ed­ly opened up a line to the White House, com­mu­ni­cat­ing with Ban­non and his aides through an inter­me­di­ary, accord­ing to a source. Yarvin said he has nev­er spo­ken with Ban­non. . . .”

After dis­cussing Face­book’s new AI tech­nol­o­gy being employed to search users’ pho­tos, the pro­gram con­cludes with the shift of Sil­i­con Val­ley mon­ey to the GOP.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: review of Steve Ban­non’s role on the NSC; review of the mar­tial law con­tin­gency plans drawn up by Oliv­er North dur­ing the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, involv­ing the dep­u­tiz­ing of para­mil­i­tary right-wingers; review of Erik Prince’s rela­tion­ship to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and Bet­sy De Vos, Trump’s edu­ca­tion sec­re­tary.

FTR #930 The Trumpenkampfverbande, Part 9: Alfa Males, Part 3 (German Ostpolitik, Part 3)

With the (jus­ti­fi­able) out­rage swirling around FBI direc­tor (and Mitt Rom­ney backer) James Comey’s pub­lic dis­cus­sion of the dis­cov­ery of more of Hillary Clin­ton’s e‑mails hav­ing been dis­cov­ered, anoth­er elec­tion-relat­ed inves­ti­ga­tion has gone large­ly unex­am­ined. Indeed, the impor­tance of the inves­ti­ga­tion has been down­played.

Com­put­er experts dis­cov­ered a link between a serv­er reg­is­tered to the Trump orga­ni­za­tion and two servers reg­is­tered to the Alfa Bank in Moscow, a bank that is part of the Alfa con­glom­er­ate dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 530 and 573.

In the Foer piece, and in attempt­ed dis­cred­it­ing arti­cles of same, it is appar­ent that the inves­ti­ga­tors do not under­stand the nature of the enti­ty they are inves­ti­gat­ing. The jour­nal­is­tic “spin” put on Alfa in the cov­er­age is “Russia/Putin/Kremlin” new Cold War con­text. Alfa is very, very dif­fer­ent.

In FTR #‘s 530, 573 we examnined the nature of Alfa’s his­to­ry, oper­a­tions and insti­tu­tion­al and eco­nom­ic foun­da­tions. It is any­thing BUT “Kremlin/Putin/Russia.”

It appears to be Under­ground Reich, all the way, with evi­den­tiary trib­u­taries run­ning in the direc­tion of: the Iran-Con­tra scan­dal; the Iraq­gate scan­dal; the oil-for-food scam vis a vis Iraq; malfeasanace by a coterie of GOP big­wigs includ­ing Dick Cheney and oth­ers close to George W. Bush, and Haley Bar­bour; mon­ey-laun­der­ing by pow­er­ful inter­na­tion­al drug syn­di­cates; Chechen war­lords and drug-traf­fick­ing syn­di­cates; the Roy­al fam­i­ly of Liecht­en­stein; the Bank al-Taqwa (which helped finance al-Qae­da); the Marc Rich oper­a­tions; East­ern Euro­pean and Russ­ian asso­ciates of Wolf­gang Bohringer, one of Mohamed Atta’s close asso­ciates in South Flori­da; and the Carl Duis­berg Fel­low­ship, which brought Mohamed Atta to Ger­many from Egypt and may have helped him into the U.S.

The pro­gram high­lights major aspects of the inves­ti­ga­tion into the Alfa/Trump link:

The Trump/Alfa link was not a mal­ware attack, as some of the com­put­er sci­en­tists ini­tial­ly thought: ” . . . . The researchers quick­ly dis­missed their ini­tial fear that the logs rep­re­sent­ed a mal­ware attack. The com­mu­ni­ca­tion wasn’t the work of bots. The irreg­u­lar pat­tern of serv­er lookups actu­al­ly resem­bled the pat­tern of human conversation—conversations that began dur­ing office hours in New York and con­tin­ued dur­ing office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sus­tained rela­tion­ship between a serv­er reg­is­tered to the Trump Orga­ni­za­tion and two servers reg­is­tered to an enti­ty called Alfa Bank. . . .”

The set-up was high­ly unusu­al: ” . . . . The researchers had ini­tial­ly stum­bled in their diag­no­sis because of the odd con­fig­u­ra­tion of Trump’s serv­er. ‘I’ve nev­er seen a serv­er set up like that,’ says Christo­pher Davis, who runs the cyber­se­cu­ri­ty firm HYAS InfoS­ec Inc. and won a FBI Direc­tor Award for Excel­lence for his work track­ing down the authors of one of the world’s nas­ti­est bot­net attacks. ‘It looked weird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.’ The serv­er was first reg­is­tered to Trump’s busi­ness in 2009 and was set up to run con­sumer mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. It had a his­to­ry of send­ing mass emails on behalf of Trump-brand­ed prop­er­ties and prod­ucts. Researchers were ulti­mate­ly con­vinced that the serv­er indeed belonged to Trump. (Click here to see the server’s reg­is­tra­tion record.) But now this capa­cious serv­er han­dled a strange­ly small load of traf­fic, such a small load that it would be hard for a com­pa­ny to jus­ti­fy the expense and trou­ble it would take to main­tain it. ‘I get more mail in a day than the serv­er han­dled,’ Davis says. . . .”
The arti­cle details more unusu­al aspects of the link: ” . . . . That wasn’t the only odd­i­ty. When the researchers pinged the serv­er, they received error mes­sages. They con­clud­ed that the serv­er was set to accept only incom­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion from a very small hand­ful of IP address­es. . . . Eighty-sev­en per­cent of the DNS lookups involved the two Alfa Bank servers. ‘It’s pret­ty clear that it’s not an open mail serv­er,’ Camp told me. ‘These orga­ni­za­tions are com­mu­ni­cat­ing in a way designed to block oth­er peo­ple out.’ . . . .”

Paul Vixie–one of the pre­mier experts in the field–felt the con­nec­tion was high­ly unusu­al: ” . . . . Ear­li­er this month, the group of com­put­er sci­en­tists passed the logs to Paul Vix­ie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no high­er author­i­ty. Vix­ie wrote cen­tral strands of the DNS code that makes the inter­net work. After study­ing the logs, he con­clud­ed, ‘The par­ties were com­mu­ni­cat­ing in a secre­tive fash­ion. The oper­a­tive word is secre­tive. This is more akin to what crim­i­nal syn­di­cates do if they are putting togeth­er a project.’ Put dif­fer­ent­ly, the logs sug­gest­ed that Trump and Alfa had con­fig­ured some­thing like a dig­i­tal hot­line con­nect­ing the two enti­ties, shut­ting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own exis­tence. . . .”

The avail­able evi­dence indi­cates that the hookup indi­cat­ed “human-lev­el com­mu­ni­ca­tion”: ” . . . I put the ques­tion of what kind of activ­i­ty the logs record­ed to the Uni­ver­si­ty of California’s Nicholas Weaver, anoth­er com­put­er sci­en­tist not involved in com­pil­ing the logs. ‘I can’t attest to the logs them­selves,’ he told me, ‘but assum­ing they are legit­i­mate they do indi­cate effec­tive­ly human-lev­el com­mu­ni­ca­tion.’ . . . ”

More about the nature of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion, from the sci­en­tist using the code-name “Tea Leaves”: ” . . . . Tea Leaves and his col­leagues plot­ted the data from the logs on a time­line. What it illus­trat­ed was sug­ges­tive: The con­ver­sa­tion between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to fol­low the con­tours of polit­i­cal hap­pen­ings in the Unit­ed States. ‘At elec­tion-relat­ed moments, the traf­fic peaked,’ accord­ing to Camp. There were con­sid­er­ably more DNS lookups, for instance, dur­ing the two con­ven­tions. . . .”

The sci­en­tists attempt­ed to get the pub­lic to pay atten­tion to their inves­ti­ga­tion and New York Times writ­ers turned their atten­tion to the case: ” . . . In Sep­tem­ber, the sci­en­tists tried to get the pub­lic to pay atten­tion to their data. One of them post­ed a link to the logs in a Red­dit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Licht­blau and Steven Lee Myers began chas­ing the sto­ry.* (They are still pur­su­ing it.) Licht­blau met with a Wash­ing­ton rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied hav­ing any con­nec­tion to Trump. . . .”

Things got “inter­est­ing” after that. Accord­ing to the com­put­er sci­en­tists, the Trump Orga­ni­za­tion shut down the serv­er! As the bril­liant Berke­ley researcher Peter Dale Scott not­ed, in a dif­fer­ent con­text, “The cov­er-up obvi­ates the con­spir­a­cy. ” . . . . In Sep­tem­ber, the sci­en­tists tried to get the pub­lic to pay atten­tion to their data. One of them post­ed a link to the logs in a Red­dit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Licht­blau and Steven Lee Myers began chas­ing the sto­ry.* (They are still pur­su­ing it.) Licht­blau met with a Wash­ing­ton rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied hav­ing any con­nec­tion to Trump. . . . The com­put­er sci­en­tists believe there was one log­i­cal con­clu­sion to be drawn: The Trump Orga­ni­za­tion shut down the serv­er after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the con­nec­tion. Weaver told me the Trump domain was ‘very slop­pi­ly removed.’ Or as anoth­er of the researchers put it, it looked like ‘the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.’. . . . Four days lat­er, on Sept. 27, the Trump Orga­ni­za­tion cre­at­ed a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the very same serv­er via a dif­fer­ent route. When a new host name is cre­at­ed, the first com­mu­ni­ca­tion with it is nev­er ran­dom. To reach the serv­er after the reset­ting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name some­how. It’s sim­ply impos­si­ble to ran­dom­ly reach a renamed serv­er. ‘That par­ty had to have some kind of out­bound mes­sage through SMS, phone, or some non­in­ter­net chan­nel they used to com­mu­ni­cate [the new con­fig­u­ra­tion],’ Paul Vix­ie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. ‘If this was a pub­lic serv­er, we would have seen oth­er traces,’ Vix­ie says. ‘The only look-ups came from this par­tic­u­lar source.‘According to Vix­ie and oth­ers, the new host name may have rep­re­sent­ed an attempt to estab­lish a new chan­nel of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s rela­tion­ship with Alfa Bank, which sug­gest­ed that their com­mu­ni­ca­tions were being mon­i­tored, may have deterred the par­ties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask ques­tions, the traf­fic between the servers stopped cold. . . .”

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the FBI has dis­missed the rel­e­vance of the com­put­er link.

This dis­missal comes against the back­ground of sev­er­al late-break­ing devel­op­ments:

The unsuc­cess­ful attempt by Alfa sub­sidiary Crown Resources to buy Marc Rich’s com­modi­ties firm: ” . . . A deal to sell the Swiss-based com­modi­ties oper­a­tion of for­mer U.S. fugi­tive financier Marc Rich to Rus­sia-owned ener­gy trad­ing group Crown Resources is off. . . . Crown is owned by the Alfa Group con­glom­er­ate. . . . .”

The sub­se­quent suc­cess­ful attempt by Alfa play­er Mikhail Frid­man to pur­chase the Marc Rich firm: ” . . . Mikhail Frid­man: ‘Defen­dant Mikhail Frid­man cur­rent­ly serves as Chair­man of the Board of Direc­tors of co-con­spir­a­tor Alfa Bank and as Chair­man of the Board of Direc­tors of Defen­dant Con­sor­tium Alfa Group. Frid­man fur­ther served on the Board of Vim­pel­Com, a NYSE com­pa­ny, and has con­trol over Gold­en Tele­com, a NASDAQ com­pa­ny ... pur­chased the Unit­ed States trad­ing firm owned by Amer­i­can, Mark Rich, the one time com­modi­ties baron par­doned by Pres­i­dent Clin­ton with much con­tro­ver­sy. . . .”

The FBI’s long-dor­mant Twit­ter account began tweet­ing files about Bill Clin­ton’s par­don of Marc Rich, short­ly after the offi­cial dis­missal of inves­ti­ga­tions into the Alfa/Trump link: ” . . . . Now, a new inter­a­gency mys­tery is rais­ing ques­tions about whether the F.B.I. has become politi­cized, just days before the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. On Sun­day, a long-dor­mant F.B.I. Twit­ter account sud­den­ly sprung to life, blast­ing out a series of links to case files that cast the Clin­tons in a decid­ed­ly neg­a­tive light. . . . Then, on Tues­day, the “FBI Records Vault” account—which had not tweet­ed at all between Octo­ber 2015 and Sunday—published a link to records relat­ed to the 15-year-old, long-closed inves­ti­ga­tion into for­mer Pres­i­dent Bill Clinton’s par­don­ing of one­time com­modi­ties trad­er turned fugi­tive Marc Rich. The post, which was quick­ly retweet­ed thou­sands of times, links to a heav­i­ly redact­ed doc­u­ment that repeat­ed­ly ref­er­ences the agency’s “Pub­lic Cor­rup­tion” unit—less-than-ideal optics for Hillary Clin­ton, who has spent her entire cam­paign fight­ing her image as a cor­rupt politi­cian. . . .”

FBI Direc­tor James Comey was in charge of the orig­i­nal Marc Rich inves­ti­ga­tion and the par­don of Rich by Bill Clin­ton. Is there a con­nec­tion between the offi­cial dis­missal of the inves­ti­ga­tion into the Alfa/Trump link by the FBI, the tweet­ing by the FBI of the files on the Clin­ton par­don of Marc Rich and the fact that it was Comey who presided over the Marc Rich inves­ti­ga­tions? ” . . . . In 2002, Comey, then a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor, took over an inves­ti­ga­tion into Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton’s 2001 par­don of financier Marc Rich, who had been indict­ed on a laun­dry list of charges before flee­ing the coun­try. The deci­sion set off a polit­i­cal firestorm focused on accu­sa­tions that Rich’s ex-wife Denise made dona­tions to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, the Clin­ton Library and Hillary Clin­ton’s 2000 Sen­ate cam­paign as part of a plan to get Rich off the hook. Comey ulti­mate­ly decid­ed not to pur­sue the case. The kick­er: Comey him­self had over­seen Rich’s pros­e­cu­tion between 1987 and 1993. . . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: details of the Carl Duis­berg Soci­ety’s links to Atta and to major Ger­man cor­po­ra­tions; dis­cus­sion of the Alfa Fel­lowhip against the back­ground of Ger­man Ost­poli­tik dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 918 and 919; detailed analy­sis of Vik­tor Kozeny asso­ciates Frid­man and (Pyotr) Aven (Kozeny employed Bohringer as a pilot); a sum­ma­ry analy­sis of the major points in FTR #‘s 530 and 573.