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F. William Engdahl

Hello Dear Readers,

In this issue I would like to discuss the clear phobia of NATO and especially, Anglo-American powers, against Russia. If we go back to the days of President George H.W. Bush at the end of the 1980s, we find an agenda of lies and deception from the US against the Gorbachev Soviet Union, an agenda that deployed new techniques of regime change that destroyed the USSR. Here I share a chapter from my book, Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance, describing the hidden role of the CIA, and a new US Government NGO called NED, to create chaos and install a CIA puppet, Boris Yeltsin, to oversee the literal economic rape of Russia on behalf of Western corporate groups. The unbelievable plunder of Russia, termed “shock therapy,” was only halted in 1999 with the election of an unknown former KGB officer from St Petersburg named Vladimir Putin to replace a destroyed Yeltsin. To understand the intensity of hatred of Putin today by the western powers we must know this hidden history. 

support for my online voice. The relentless censorship of the Internet and social media by the private corporate social media companies since the 2020 covid fake pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine, is alarming and damaging and can only be compared with book burnings in the Germany of the 1930s, or the Medieval Inquisitions with torture of heretics. 

I thank you again for your interest and support, 

William Engdahl
www.williamengdahl.com

Manifest Destiny © F. William Engdahl
Chapter Three: The Rape of Russia: The CIA’s Yeltsin Coup d’État 

The corrupt Yeltsin atop a tank used in the CIA coup

“The largest giveaway of a nation’s wealth in history. . .”

—Mortimer Zuckerman, member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, owner of US News & World Report, describing what took place in the looting of Russia under Yeltsin

Russia’s Yeltsin Catastrophe

Boris Yeltsin and his “free market reformers” were part of one of the most hidden and most criminal looting operations in CIA history. It was the rape of Russia by a corrupt circle of treasonous Soviet KGB generals, together with their select young KGB protégés, who were transformed through the operation into billionaire oligarchs. It was an economic rape only made possible through Western banks and the so-called “democracy machinery” of Washington under three successive presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. 

Few people in the West could grasp the anger of Russian President Vladimir Putin when he told a select audience of Russian politicians from the Duma in the Kremlin in September 2016, “You know how I feel about the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was unnecessary. We could have introduced reforms, including those of a more democratic nature, without allowing this.”^[i]

Putin did not need to describe “this.” Everyone present knew he meant the savage destruction of life, feeling of worth, and pride for most Russians after 1990. If anyone in the US or the EU thought about Putin’s comments—coming amid an unprecedented US and NATO vilification and demonization campaign against the Russian Federation and Putin personally, including economic sanctions—they most likely saw it as confirmation of Washington claims that Putin’s Russia was out to rebuild the Soviet Union. 

What was unknown to most in the West was the true background of the destruction of life in Russia and the former member states of the USSR. The CIA operation began near the end of the 1980s with a network of CIA actors and their corrupted, bought-and-paid-for Soviet KGB generals. 

It was called the Yeltsin Era, and it lasted the entire decade of the 1990s until Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999. His resignation had been finally forced by a group of nationalist Russians led by a forty-seven-year-old former KGB officer who briefly headed the successor organization to the KGB known as the SVR, or Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The SVR man was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, by then Yeltsin’s Prime Minister.

The destruction of the Soviet Union was one of the darkest criminal operations ever undertaken by the US government or, more precisely, by a dark, deep state network buried inside that Washington bureaucracy, sometimes referring to themselves as “the Vulcans,” often simply called neoconservatives. 

The key roles in the rape of Russia were played by US President George H.W. Bush and later by Bush’s close friend and protégé, William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton. The venom directed from Washington towards Putin personally since his reelection as president in 2012 and even beginning his revitalization of Russia after his ascendency to the presidency on December 31, 1999, the day Yeltsin was forced to abdicate his imagined throne, would become clear. Slowly details emerged of what crimes Bush, Clinton, and their covert intelligence circles committed against Russia after 1989.

Bush’s CIA “Old Boys”

George H.W. Bush, former director of the CIA, ran the entire foreign and national security operations of President Ronald Reagan from the Office of the Vice President. Through Executive Order 12333, a national security directive drafted by then vice president Bush and signed by Reagan, Bush had made sure he was in charge of all Reagan-era US foreign and national security operations after 1981. 

People close to CIA Chief Bill Casey said that as President, Reagan had little interest in foreign policy. The true role of Bush in the Reagan years was well hidden, however. 

When Bush’s son George W. Bush took office as President in 2001, one of his first acts was to sign Executive Order 13233, an extraordinary act that cited “national security” as grounds to conceal records of past presidents, especially his father’s activities during the 1990 and 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist Eastern Europe states. Consequently, those records are no longer accessible to the public.^[ii] The truth can be gathered by evidence of participants in Russia, Eastern Europe, and in the USA, deep research, and congressional and other testimonies of those with direct knowledge. The picture of the destruction that resulted is staggering.

George H.W. Bush ran things covertly through his “old boy” CIA networks, often using various private companies they had set up during the Bush’s illegal Iran–Contra operation of the mid-1980s. 

The Iran–Contra affair was an illegal, top-secret Bush–Colonel Oliver North scheme to sell US weapons to Iran in violation of an official US arms embargo to Iran, then to divert a part of the Iran arms profits to illegally finance the CIA-backed Contras of Nicaragua, who paid for the weapons with cocaine dollars, hence the name Iran–Contra affair. 

All was done without the required US congressional approval, in violation of US law. When President Jimmy Carter forced the early retirement of 800 CIA agents, many of them loyal to former CIA Director Bush, they regrouped as a private intelligence and business network, a kind of covert “deep state,” informally calling itself “the Enterprise.” This network, active for Vice President George H.W. Bush in the Iran–Contra affair, was used by Bush, now as US president, to loot and deform all of communist Eastern Europe and, ultimately, Russia under their asset, Boris Yeltsin.

George HW Bush and his banker daddy: Nazi sympathies ran deep in the Bush clan. It was and is a class question.

The companies George H.W. Bush sanctioned under the code name “the Enterprise” were soon to be responsible for the CIA-financed coup that brought down Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union in 1991. But the machinery and organization of the Enterprise was also responsible for bribing or corrupting key KGB generals and creating what came to be called the “Russian oligarchs” to loot the crown jewels of the former Soviet State, now legally known as the Russian Federation. Their looting included the entire gold reserves of the Russian National Bank in the early 1990s. That loot was funneled into the vaults of handpicked CIA-controlled banks in Switzerland, offshore bank havens, and New York.^[iii]

The CIA’s Yeltsin “Democracy” Coup

The rape of Russia—the Russian nation, the Russian state, the Russian people—which began at the end of the 1980s, was a coup d’état engineered by the American CIA’s rogue and not so rogue networks directed by former CIA Director, now President, George H.W. Bush. Western accounts of what took place inside the Russian Federation during the Yeltsin years of the 1990s speak of “Russian mafia” or “Russian organized crime.” Never do they mention or even hint that those Russians who plundered their own country were organized and paid, or made rich, by the West or, to be more precise, by the old boy CIA networks loyal to former CIA director and then US president George H.W. Bush. 

^[iv] 

Washington, covertly working with a circle of very select US and European banks, made it possible for the Yeltsin clan to loot the Russian Treasury of its gold reserves. They then offered desperately needed US money to a privatization scheme that created and installed a kleptocracy regime, and created a cabal of hyper-rich oligarchs under Yeltsin, referred to by some in the Russian media as the “Yeltsin Family,” as in the Mafia. Washington and US mainstream media cynically called it “bringing democracy and free market capitalism” to post-communist Russia. 

In 1989, soon after his election, US President George H.W. Bush initiated the operation to loot the Soviet Union. 

Lech Walesa: Unwitting patsy or CIA asset? Walesa was the uber lionised leader of Solidarnosc, the union he founded in 1980 in the Lenin shipyards, with the assist of the CIA and other western agencies. The struggles of Solidarnosc against the supposedly brutal communist regime [just imagine what would have happened to these guys in Chile, Argentina, or El Salvador, or any other US  "client state") fueled a huge demonisation campaign across "the Free World"against the Soviet Union and energised the "liberation struggle of Poland."

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and covert US government money to Poland’s Solidarność  had severely weakened Moscow’s control over Poland during the decade of the 1980s and ignited anti-communist protest movements all over communist Eastern Europe. 

That Polish success—notably, that it was not suppressed by Soviet Red Army tanks as in 1956 in Hungary or during the Prague Spring of 1968—had given major encouragement to similar underground, anti-regime movements across Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, from Hungary to Czechoslovakia to East Germany. 

In Afghanistan, after ten bloody years, Soviet Red Army troops finally gave up and left the country in 1989, humiliated in defeat from CIA-trained and armed Islamist Mujahideen terrorists. In Dresden in East Germany--the German Democratic Republic as it was formally called--from the mid-1980s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, a young KGB officer named Vladimir Putin was stationed, watching as the power of Moscow evaporated everywhere.

Moscow itself was financially in dire straits, dramatically so ever since a US State Department–Saudi oil price collapse operation was deliberately launched by Washington in 1986.^[v] That oil price collapse hit at the heart of the Soviet primary hard currency sources: its oil export. That oil price collapse severely hurt Soviet earnings of badly needed dollars for Western technology purchases, as well as for countering CIA operations in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe. 

The decade-long covert CIA campaign in Afghanistan, using fanatical Mujahideen terrorists mostly recruited by a Saudi CIA asset named Osama bin Laden, had given the Soviet Union what President Carter’s national security director, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later called “Russia’s Vietnam.”^[vi] 

Then in 1989, President George H.W. Bush gave the order to launch an all-out takeover and looting of the crown jewels of the largest and most strategic part of the USSR, the formerly communist Russian Federation. The dissolution of the Soviet Union itself rapidly followed the August 1991 Ukrainian declaration of independence from the USSR. State-owned oil and gas companies, key raw materials, such as nickel and aluminum, and high-tech Soviet military companies were the prime looting targets of select Western interests trading with insider connections.

Now finally as president, George H.W. Bush decided to go for the kill against a severely weakened Russian Federation. Bush and a CIA network of Western bankers, US government officials, and the International Monetary Fund, together with a cabal of young Harvard University economists—they were dubbed the Harvard Boys, brought into Russia by George Soros — in league with a corrupted network of KGB traitors, unleashed one of the greatest criminal looting operations in history.

Confused Russian citizens, fed up with the years of Soviet control and lack of improvement in their daily lives from Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika attempts at reforming the Soviet system, naively and with great hope turned to the West, most especially to Wall Street and Washington. 

In 1987, in a desperate attempt to calm growing social unrest over the deteriorating Soviet economy, Gorbachev permitted Soviet citizens to own dollars. It was a disaster of untold dimension. Overnight, a huge black market for dollars grew and the ruble became de facto worthless inside the Soviet Union. Russians, forbidden to travel to the West, were fed the illusion that everything in America was “bigger and better.” Secret, prohibited shortwave broadcasts from the US State Department’s Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty out of Munich fed those illusions of an American capitalist paradise. 

The majority of Russians believed, for the most part, nothing could be worse than life under Soviet communism with the chronic shortages in the shops, endless queues, and lack of basic goods, let alone of luxury goods. They were soon to realize they were dreadfully wrong. It could be worse. 

The bottom fell out in the daily life for most Russians as Yeltsin’s clan and their Western collaborators proceeded to loot the country following the abolition of a communist state during the 1990s. Pensions went unpaid and medical insurance ended abruptly, as did daycare for working mothers and most state support.

“Operation Hammer”

Gaidar worked in league with Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs and other friends of billionaire hedge fund speculator George Soros.^[vii]

Bush’s Operation Hammer used estimated tens of billions of dollars of illegal funds—funds not authorized by the US Congress—to bring down the Soviet Union. The funds reportedly came from a secret CIA war chest of undisclosed gold seized from Japan after World War II. That Japanese looted war booty was buried between 1942–1945 in Japanese-occupied Philippines for security. The gold was buried there on orders of the Emperor Hirohito in the event of Japan’s losing the war.^[viii]

At some point during the 1970s, Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, nominally a Washington asset who ruled as an iron-fisted dictator from 1972 until 1986, had discovered some of the secret sites where Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s soldiers had buried gold stolen during the war. It was gold stolen from China, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries occupied by imperial Japan.^[ix] Greed overwhelmed Marcos’s sense of caution as he dug out the hidden gold. 

The Japanese military had stashed tons of stolen gold in caves and deep underground sites on the islands. Marcos had discovered part of that and was taking it for himself and depositing it, or the cash from selling the gold onto the market, in select secretive Swiss banks. His mistake was that he used a CIA asset, Saudi billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, to help him sell the gold onto the market.^[x]

In 1986, aware of what Marcos was doing through their asset, Khashoggi, among others, the CIA decided they had another use for the Marcos gold—namely, as collateral for issuing tens of billions of Western dollar securities that would be offered in the buyout of Russia’s state economic crown jewels. 

Marcos, no longer of use to Washington, was driven from office in a CIA putsch that used the newly created NED as a cover to funnel millions of dollars to Marcos’s opponent, Corazon Aquino, for organizing mass street demonstrations. Washington also used a local CIA-created organization, the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections, and co-opted genuine trade union democratic opposition to the Marcos dictatorship. Aquino, far from a peoples’ candidate, was scion of one of the wealthiest Filipino oligarch families, owning vast sugarcane plantations, insuring that Aquino would look to Washington for support.^[xi]

Murky Origins of Barrick Gold

In 1986, under orders from Vice President George H.W. Bush, a CIA operation was led by close Bush associates to get rid of Marcos. The operation included Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, and Adnan Khashoggi, the mysterious CIA-linked Saudi arms dealer who had been helping Marcos secretly sell the stolen Japanese gold. After forcing the exile of a defeated Marcos to Hawaii, Bush arranged for the Marcos gold to be deposited in special accounts at several select international banks—Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), UBS of Zurich, and Banker’s Trust, later to become part of Deutsche Bank. The Marcos gold was held in a deep underground, high-security depository in Kloten, Switzerland, beneath the Zurich International Airport.^[xii]

At that same time, a murky Canadian businessman named Peter Munk, a business partner with the CIA-linked arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, cofounded a Canadian gold-mining company, Barrick Gold. Some years later Barrick Gold went on to become the world’s largest gold-mining company.

CIA-linked Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi played a key role in the CIA taking the Marcos gold that was collateral for the rape of Russia.

Barrick Gold was established in 1986 as American Barrick Resources and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.^[xiii] Khashoggi, Marcos’s intermediary in offloading the Japanese gold onto the market, was, in fact, the majority owner of Barrick Gold. Munk, a Canadian citizen, was said to be merely the frontman for the controversial CIA-tied Saudi arms dealer.^[xiv] 

The operations of taking the Marcos gold from the Philippines and the founding of Barrick Gold by Khashoggi and Hungarian-born Munk were reportedly connected with the planned bankrupting and looting of the Russian Federation in the early 1990s by the clandestine network of George H.W. Bush, former CIA head and now US president.^[xv] 

The Marcos gold, laundered through Barrick, was to serve as collateral for the creation of billions of dollars of financial securities used to buy up priceless assets of the former Soviet state at pennies on the dollar. 

Notably, although the Canadian Barrick Gold held no mines in Europe, Barrick refined its gold at two Swiss gold refineries—MKS Finance S.A. and Argor-Heraeus S.A.—both on the Italian border and just hours away from the gold depository beneath the Zurich International Airport in Kloten, Switzerland. It led to a question that Barrick never answered: what gold was Barrick refining in Switzerland, as they had no mines in that region? Some were convinced it was the Marcos gold being readied as collateral for Operation Hammer, the CIA’s rape of Russia.

E.P. Heidner, a former employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Office of Naval Intelligence, suggested that the Barrick Gold company had been set up by Khashoggi and Bush’s Enterprise old boys’ ex-CIA network to melt down the stolen Marcos gold and use it as collateral for billions of dollars in gold derivatives, so-called paper gold, that would stand as collateral for bank loans used in the looting of Russian state assets under Yeltsin and his notoriously corrupt economic advisers, Yegor Gaidar, and privatization head Anatoly Chubais.^[xvi]

In 1992, in one of Bush’s parting acts as president, he arranged for the US government to give Barrick the mining rights for Nevada gold deposits on US government lands, independently valued at $10 billion, for the nominal sum of $63 million. President George H.W. Bush had “arranged for an exception” that would allow Barrick to use its own assessors to determine the value of the deposits. Soon after leaving office, Bush himself was named to head the International Advisory Board of Barrick Gold.^[xvii]Barrick Gold had “spook,” as in CIA front company, written all over it.

The details of how much money the CIA spent buying key KGB generals, who would commit essentially treason against their Russian Federation, have not been published. However, the key KGB actors recruited by Washington to carry out the looting, players whom the CIA turned into Russian oligarchs, were gradually discovered. In the course of the Yeltsin years, as opposition grew inside Russia, more than 300 senior KGB officers, including generals, were smuggled into the US, where they were given life pensions by the US government. Others fled to Israel on Israeli passports they were given.^[xviii] 

Corrupt KGB Generals and Their “Kids”

In the late 1980s, well before they staged a fake coup d’état that pushed Yeltsin to the top in 1991 as the leading opposition figure to Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev, Philipp Bobkov and Alexei Kondaurov, two corrupt KGB generals secretly working with Bush CIA networks in the West, sponsored several clever, ruthless and ambitious young Russian entrepreneurs and arranged for them to work with a group of US financial “consultants” out of Switzerland who would teach them the fine arts and secrets of international money laundering. 

Bobkov and Kondaurov handpicked four ambitious young Russians who would become the first Russian “oligarchs” in Yeltsin’s “wild west” free market Russia in the 1990s. Their names were Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Alex Konanykhin, Boris Berezovsky, and Roman Abramovich.^[xix] Boris Berezovsky, forty-two years old at the time, was the senior member of the young entrepreneurs. Khodorkovsky was twenty-four, Konanykhin was twenty-two, and Abramovich was also twenty-two. They thus became known within the Bush CIA circles as the “kids.” 

Philipp Bobkov

General Philipp Bobkov was known within the Soviet intelligence community as the “KGB brain.” He headed the notorious KGB political police department responsible for controlling internal dissent, the infamous KGB Fifth Chief Directorate. His position enabled him to travel abroad and cultivate contacts in the West, and also with Western intelligence, without arousing undue suspicion.^[xx] Alexei Kondaurov, another KGB general working with Bobkov, later joined Khodorkovsky’s Yukos Oil and remained, as of 2016, a Communist Party member of the Russian Federation State Duma—immune from state prosecution.^[xxi] 

Kondaurov and Alexander Konanykhin^[xxii] had also played a key role in bringing an unknown regional politician and construction foreman named Boris Yeltsin from the hinterlands of Sverdlovsk to the forefront of Soviet Russian, and later post-Soviet Russian Federation, politics, making him known to Mikhail Gorbachev as a fresh, younger voice.^[xxiii]

KGB turncoat General Alexei Kondaurov, key Yeltsin backer, went on to a top role in Khodorkovsky’s Yukos Oil, becoming very wealthy in the process. Today, he has immunity as a State Duma Communist Party member.

A third KGB general involved intimately with the Yeltsin operation was Alexander Korzhakov, Yeltsin’s personal bodyguard since 1985 and the man who stood beside Yeltsin in August 1991 when he climbed on the tank outside the Russian White House, then housing the Supreme Soviet of Russia.^[xxiv] That tank stunt with Yeltsin was the turning point during the fake KGB coup attempt on Gorbachev that would propel Yeltsin to the forefront as Russia’s “democracy” opposition leader, with the help of CNN and other mainstream US and Western media. It was all carefully orchestrated.^[xxv] 

Two months earlier, the corrupt CIA-tied KGB generals had arranged 50 percent of Yeltsin’s campaign funding for his successful June 1991 presidential elections for the newly declared Russian Federation, defeating Gorbachev’s preferred candidate, Nikolai Ryzhkov. That gave Yeltsin invaluable credibility as opposition to Gorbachev. Yeltsin rewarded Konanykhin by granting him a banking license to found the first Russian bank with an international currency-trading license, the Russian Exchange Bank. By 1992, Konanykhin would accompany Yeltsin to Washington to meet with President George H. W. Bush.^[xxvi]

Khodorkovsky’s Menatep Bank was another front operation for the money-laundering operations run by rogue KGB Generals Philipp Bobkov and Alexei Kondaurov, operations sanctioned personally by President Boris Yeltsin. 

Beginning in 1987, Gorbachev, who had desperately sought ways of reforming the Soviet economy, had been convinced by his KGB generals to allow a touch of Western market economy for KGB-selected young communist “entrepreneurs” chosen from the Communist Party’s Komsomol youth organization. The young entrepreneurs began small companies in the USSR that were allowed to establish partnerships with Western businessmen. KGB officers usually headed the small companies, typically trading computers and such items bought from the West. Importantly, in terms of what was to happen after 1991, those enterprises had the rare privilege of getting hard currency cash, US dollars, from the Soviet State Bank.^[xxvii]

The relevant point was who those Western financial or business partners committing crimes for the rogue KGB generals were. In the beginning of the Yeltsin operations in the early 1990s, two banks played a major role. One was Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. The second was the Republic Bank of New York of Edmond Safra, which joined the looting and money-laundering Russian operations some months later.^[xxviii]

Shadowy Figures of Riggs Bank

The key figures in setting up the financial structure to move Yeltsin “Family” funds out of Russia included a former Reagan–Bush administration deputy director of the National Security Council and former US Ambassador to NATO named Alton J. Keel Jr. In 1989, just as the corrupt Soviet KGB generals and their youthful protégés were setting up Menatep Bank and organizing the looting of Communist Party and Soviet assets, Keel began his term with Riggs Bank in Washington, a known CIA-tied bank since the 1960s’ Cuba Bay of Pigs CIA operations.^[xxix]

Former National Security Council deputy head Alton J. Keel was Riggs Bank’s deputy chairman, responsible for Riggs’s newly created International Banking Group, which was to include a new entity, Riggs Valmet S.A. Jonathan J. Bush, a “private banker” and brother of the US President, worked with Keel to set up the Riggs–Valmet money-laundering apparatus in Geneva, aiding Riggs in buying a major share of the Geneva Valmet S.A. to create Riggs Valmet S.A.^[xxx]

^xxxi]

^[xxxii]

When Alex. Brown was bought by the New York Bankers Trust, Beese then became vice chairman of Bankers Trust, another bank that was deeply involved in Yeltsin’s Russian financial scandals. Notably, Bankers Trust, beginning in 1982 through its Bankers Trust Zurich subsidiary, was also said to be the repository of large quantities of stolen Marcos gold.^[xxxiii] 

Together with Beese at Alex. Brown was a CIA consultant named Alvin Bernard “Buzzy” Krongard. When Bankers Trust acquired Alex. Brown, Krongard became vice chairman of Bankers Trust alongside Carter Beese. In 1998, as the Russian ruble collapsed, Buzzy Krongard “formally” joined the CIA, where he soon became the Executive Director, third most influential post at the CIA.^[xxxiv]

Those four Riggs Bank CIA-linked shadowy figures—Beese, Krongard, Jonathan Bush, and Keel—would join with a secretive Geneva financial operation called Valmet S.A. to form a Riggs joint venture called Riggs Valmet S.A.

Riggs Valmet SA 

In 1988, George H.W. Bush and his old boys, the “retired” CIA network, with the aid of Bush’s brother Jonathan, set up the Switzerland financial entity Riggs Valmet S.A., headquartered at 14 Chemin Rieu in Geneva. Riggs Valmet S.A., legally incorporated in the offshore Isle of Man, was established to set up shell companies and accounts to hide and launder money, initially for companies controlled by Bank Menatep’s Khodorkovsky, Roman Abramovich, Boris Berezovsky, and other select “kids” of the corrupt Soviet KGB generals. The Geneva arm used the offshore bank’s secrecy on the Isle of Man to further hide the paper trail.^[xxxv]

Without access to large Western banks, the new Yeltsin oligarchs could never have succeeded in moving tens of billions of dollars out of Russia and other newly independent former parts of the Soviet Union into Western offshore havens. For the Bush CIA network, the aim was to permanently drain the funds out of Russia into accounts in the West at their prechosen banks.

Valmet S.A., the Geneva predecessor of the Riggs joint enterprise, was a Gibraltar-registered, Geneva-based global trust business founded in 1975 by Christian Michel, who once described himself as a “self-made man.”^[xxxvi] 

Menatep, Runicom, and RKB

By 1994, the closest partners, or “clients,” of Riggs Valmet were Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Menatep Bank and Runicom S.A., a Swiss-registered arm of the giant Russian Sibneft Oil which, in turn, was then under the control of Roman Abramovich and his then partner, Boris Berezovsky, as well as the Moscow-based RKB bank.^[xxxvii] 

Conveniently, the large scandal-plagued US accounting firm Arthur Andersen was made the accountant for Runicom. Arthur Andersen itself later dissolved in a wave of corrupt accounting scandals involving companies such as the Enron Corporation of Ken Lay, another close Bush-family corporation, which was used to launder Russian energy assets.^[xxxviii] The third major Russian client in 1994 of Riggs Valmet was the Moscow Rossiysky Kredit Bank, RKB. 

Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Group Menatep Limited, with its Menatep Bank by the mid-1990s had ballooned into a $29 billion holding company involved in numerous money-laundering scandals. From 1989 to 1991, Leonid Nevzlin was president of Bank Menatep and, until 1996, vice chairman of the board. In November 1995, Bank Menatep took part in a crooked mortgage auction that resulted in its takeover of the oil company Yukos, part of the Bush Operation Hammer plan to grab control of major Russian energy assets. In 1996, Nevzlin became vice president of Yukos, which was then 78 percent owned by Menatep.^[xxxix] 

Another partner of Khodorkovsky’s money-laundering Bank Menatep was Konstantin Kagalovsky, who was named deputy chairman of Bank Menatep in November 1994. 

Conveniently, Kagalovsky was also Russia’s representative to the International Monetary Fund between 1992 and 1995 and was married to Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky, a former senior vice president of Edmond Safra’s money-laundering Bank of New York. At the time, Safra’s Bank of New York was being prosecuted in the US for a tax evasion scandal dealing with $7 billion dollars channeled out of Russia from 1996 to 1999.^[xl]

During the kleptocratic presidency of Boris Yeltsin, the Runicom S.A. company enjoyed an advantage that few rivals had. Along with Abramovich and Berezovsky, a third partner in Runicom S.A. was Leonid Dyachenko,^[xli] son-in-law to President Yeltsin.^[xlii]

Toward the end of the 1990s, when billions of dollars of IMF funds sent to Russia—allegedly to avert a Ruble state default—disappeared, a Swiss judge revealed he had evidence that Berezovsky’s Runicom and his Sibneft Oil were implicated in diverting billions of IMF emergency loans prior to the 1998 Russia state default.^[xliii]

Stealing the Soviet Gold

One of the crucial operations of the Bush looting of the Soviet Union, as part of their four-part plan, was to grab the state gold reserves. This took place early in the looting process, in March 1991, just weeks before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The theft would be critical in order to prevent a monetary defense of the ruble and, thus, to allow Washington’s financiers—such as George Soros and friends—to destabilize and severely devalue the currency, making Russian ruble assets vastly cheaper for Soros and other dollar investors. 

In November 1991, just three months after the fake August 1991 KGB generals’ coup against Gorbachev was used to propel little-known Soviet official Boris Yeltsin to the fore as “champion of democracy” and of a new Russia, Viktor V. Gerashchenko, Chairman of the Presidium of Gosbank, the state bank of the USSR, made a shocking brief announcement to the Russian Duma, or parliament. Of an estimated 2,000 to perhaps 3,000 tons of Gosbank state gold reserves then worth $35 billion at the market price, less than 400 tons could be accounted for. He told the shocked members of parliament that he had “no idea” what happened to the missing gold.^[xliv]That, of course, was a lie. 

After 1989, as head of Gosbank, Gerashchenko had created an offshore entity, Financial Management Co., known as FIMACO, based on the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands, situated in the English Channel near Normandy, to handle Russia’s foreign currency reserves. Jersey had a curious legal standing as not a part of the United Kingdom, nor of the Commonwealth of Nations or of the European Union, but instead are part of the British Empire. This made it exempt from European supervision, an ideal place to hide money dealings. 

By one estimate, the FIMACO offshore fund managed $37 billion between 1993 and 1998. The firm was a subsidiary of the Eurobank of Paris or Banque Commerciale pour l’Europe du Nord, which was 78 percent owned by Gerashchenko’s Russian Central Bank. Gerashchenko’s FIMACO funneled billions of dollars of Russian hard currency (mainly dollar) reserves out of Russia during the Yeltsin era as the first chairman of the post-Soviet, independent Central Bank of Russia.^[xlv]

Not missing a trick, the well-advised Yeltsin, following the fake KGB coup attempt of August 1991, along with the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), claimed authority over the Ministry of Finance of the entire USSR, the USSR State Bank, and the Bank of Foreign Economic Activity. This meant that the Soviet institutions could not carry out any orders without the consent of the RSFSR government, where Yeltsin was president. His finance minister was Vladimir Yefimovich Orlov. As of August 1991, Yeltsin and Orlov had control over the entire billions of dollars of Soviet gold.^[xlvi] (In the next chapter, we will learn the mysterious fate of that gold.) 

To cover the trail of the missing gold and give his government the pretense of innocence, Yeltsin, on the advice of two former KGB generals, announced that he had hired the New York financial detective firm Jules Kroll Associates to track the whereabouts of the Soviet gold, as well as an estimated $14 billion in Soviet Communist Party and other assets. Kroll Associates, which was tied with the CIA-created AIG insurance group of Hank Greenberg and known in the US as a “private CIA,” was linked to the CIA, Mossad, and MI-6. Not surprisingly, a few months later, Yeltsin’s finance minister and shock therapy advocate, Yegor Gaidar, announced that Kroll was being discharged as there had been “no results” in the attempt to find the billions of dollars of missing Soviet Gosbank gold.^[xlvii] 

Enter Safra, Soros, and Rothschild

As the scale of the looting operation in Yeltsin’s Russian Federation became so mammoth, Riggs and Bush’s CIA old boys decided to bring in another trusted group to help move the funds out of Russia.

Riggs Bank was quickly solidifying banking relations with a couple of the old CIA hands from the Iran–Contra arms-for-drugs operation, Swiss bankers Baruch “Bruce” Rappaport, a shady financier born in Haifa to Russian émigré parents, and Alfred Hartmann, his partner. Through this group, George Soros was also enlisted to open a new front against the ruble. In turn, Rappaport and Hartmann included the Bank of New York and, from Israel, the Eisenberg Group, tied to the Israeli Mossad.^[xlviii]

Rappaport, a business associate of Reagan’s CIA director, Bill Casey—the man who created the idea of the private National Endowment for Democracy as a front for dirty CIA operations—also owned a major share of Edmond Safra’s Bank of New York. Further, Rappaport created a joint Swiss venture with Safra called the Bank of New York–Inter Maritime Bank. That Bank of New York–Inter Maritime Bank operation was named in 1999 by US federal investigators as being “possibly one of the biggest money-laundering schemes in the United States.”^[xlix]

President George H.W. Bush knew Rappaport quite well from Rappaport’s role in helping set up the notorious CIA money-laundering Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), registered in Luxembourg with head offices in Karachi and London.

ABOVE: Funeral (Dec 2018) for a hyper-mafia kingpin. It is said that thousands attended the funeral of George HW Bush, whose send-off, with full military honors and pomp reserved for royalty, provided the first judgment of history. 

In 1987, when Bush was still Reagan’s Vice President, Rappaport was under investigation by the US Independent Counsel for alleged activities on behalf of CIA Director William Casey, including the purchase of an Antiguan farm in the West Indies for Israeli arms dealers who were significant customers of BCCI in Miami. The US investigation was also looking at the circumstances behind placing Alfred Hartmann, then a BCCI employee, on the board of directors of the Inter Maritime Bank of Geneva and New York. BCCI was a major offshore private bank operating from the 1970s until it was forced shut down in 1991 by UK and other financial regulators. It was known as the bank of CIA “black operations,” of the Medellin drug cartel, and even of the US National Security Council.^[l]

Edmond Safra’s Bank of New York took a 20 percent ownership of Rappaport’s Bank of New York–Inter Maritime Bank in Geneva. Beginning in 1992 with the CIA’s looting of Russia via handpicked oligarchs such as Khodorkovsky and Berezovsky, Safra’s Bank of New York–Inter Maritime Bank was deep into money laundering billions for the select Yeltsin circle of oligarchs. In 1997, Rappaport was also conveniently named as Ambassador to Yeltsin’s Russia by the government of Antigua, the scenic Caribbean Island where his Swiss American Bank, Ltd., had a banking license. Antigua became a major destination for Russian oligarchs’ looted money.^[li]

As with most all of the illegal plunder operations to rob billions from the chaotic Russian Federation during the Yeltsin years, President George H.W. Bush, a former CIA head, used old cronies from past illegal CIA operations, such as Rappaport, in the dark world where CIA, Mossad, and organized crime crossed paths as congenial colleagues in crime and intelligence intrigues. 

George Soros, who had sponsored Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, architect of Poland’s shock therapy, got on the inside track of obscenely profitable Russian privatization deals together with key Russian oligarchs who had opted to work with Bush and the CIA to loot their native Russia. 

Soros was a major backer in the takeover of Russia’s Svyazinvest telecommunications giant. In 1994, the London Guardian would comment, “Soros’s extraordinary role, not only as the world’s most successful investor but now possibly, fantastically, as the single most powerful foreign influence in the whole of the former Soviet empire, attracts more suspicion than curiosity.”^[lii]

It was at this stage that Jacob Lord Rothschild, scion of the famous banking family, joined Soros, Rappaport, and the Menatep’s Khodorkovsky as silent backers for major Russian privatization deals. In 2003, when the Russian state arrested Khodorkovsky for money laundering and tax evasion in the Menatep buyout of Yukos Oil, sending him to prison, Khodorkovsky revealed that he had signed over his shares in Yukos to Lord Rothschild just before going to prison. Rothschild, along with Henry Kissinger, sat on the international advisory board of Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia, a “charitable” foundation used to fund anti-Putin, “human rights” NGOs in Russia.^[liii]

The Riggs Valmet and Bank of New York–Inter Maritime Bank looting nexus for Russian assets also involved a fugitive Swiss oil and aluminum trader named Marc Rich. Rich, reportedly a Mossad asset,^[liv] had developed business ties with certain circles of the KGB involved in Western business beginning 1983, when he fled from the US to Zug, Switzerland, to avoid prosecution on an Iran oil embargo violation. When the US imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union that year because of their role in Afghanistan, Rich offered his high-level Soviet contacts to get grain for them from other sources. He gained top contacts in the KGB and Soviet hierarchy as a result, friends that he now would help in the great scheme to loot Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union.^[lv]

International Foundation for Privatization and Private Investment

The rogue KGB generals and their CIA-linked cronies left nothing to chance in their plunder schemes. In September 1991, Vladimir Scherbakov, the last First Deputy Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, was told to form something called the International Foundation for Privatization and Private Investment with two other partners. In 1990, just before the dissolution of the USSR, Scherbakov, a mere forty years old, was also head of the Soviet economic planning agency, Gosplan, a strategic post to put it mildly.^[lvi]

The second partner of Scherbakov’s International Foundation for Privatization and Private Investment has never been revealed. The third partner was the now notorious Austrian firm Nordex Energy GmbH, connected to Yeltsin’s “favorite banker,” Oleg Boyko. Boyko and his OLBI Group had dealings with, among others, the Colombian cocaine cartel—who financed the “Democratic” Party organization of Yegor Gaidar, the Yeltsin shock therapy czar whom we meet in the following chapter.^[lvii]

Scherbakov’s International Foundation for Privatization and Private Investment would become identified as one of the major organizations involved in the Bank of New York’s money-laundering scandal. Interpol reported that Marc Rich was one of the founders of Nordex Energy GmbH. Notably, in one of his final acts as president, Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, some believe for Rich’s services to the US in arranging for the collapse of the Soviet Union, although Clinton’s reasons were never made public.^[lviii]

This network of CIA-linked Western bankers, corrupt KGB generals, and their protégé, Boris Yeltsin, set the stage for the wholesale theft of what were now Russian Federation state assets under President Boris Yeltsin and his infamous finance minister, Yegor Gaidar. It was called shock therapy, and it was brought to Russia by George Soros and Soros’s hired hand, Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs.

Endnotes: 

^[i] Vladimir Putin, Putin: The USSR did not need to collapse, September 23, 2016, Gazeta.ru, translated in http://rbth.com/politics_and_society/2016/09/23/putin-the-ussr-did-not-need-to-collapse_632695.

^[ii] E.P. Heidner,* Collateral Damage US Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11 2001, https://wikispooks.com/w/images/d/db/Collateral_Damage_-_part_1.pdf. (*Heidner is believed to be the pen name of a former employee of the US’ DIA Office of Naval Intelligence), pp. 4-5.

^[iii] Ibid.

^[iv] Mort Zuckerman, cited in private email from Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the author, 14 August, 2011.

^[v] F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics, edition.engdahl, 2012, pp. 202-203.

^[vi] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan, Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, reprinted in http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

^[viii] Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave, Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold, Verso Press, 2005

^[ix] Ibid.

^[x] Ibid., p.196.

^[xi] Michael Barker, The American Hijacking Of The Philippines People Power Struggle, Swans.com, May 23, 2011, http://www.swans.com/library/art17/barker79.html

^[xii] Sterling Seagrave, op. cit.

^[xiii] Wikipedia, Barrick Gold, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrick_Gold#Founding_and_early_years

^[xiv] Wikipedia, Peter Munk, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Munk.

^[xv] E.P. Heidner, op. cit.

^[xvi] Ibid.

^[xvii] Ibid.

^[xviii] Ibid.

^[xix] E.P. Heidner, op. cit.

^[xx] Wikipedia, Phillip Bobkov, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Bobkov

^[xxi] Wikipedia, Alexei Kondaurov, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Kondaurov

^[xxiii] E.P. Heidner, op. cit.

^[xxiv] Gordon Logan, Understanding The Moscow Coup of August 1991, 24 August 2001, https://cryptome.org/moscow-91.htm

^[xxv] Wikipedia, Alexander Korzhakov, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Korzhakov.

^[xxvi] E.P. Heidner, op. cit.

^[xxvii] Vladimir Ivanidze, RUSSIAN SECRET SERVICES AND THE MAFIA, The Independent Information Centre Glasnost - Caucasus, The Eurasian Politician - Issue 4 (August 2001) http://users.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/issue4/kgbmafia.htm

^[xxviii] Karon von Gerhke-Thompson, Khodorkovsky’s War Chest: I Was First to Penetrate Menatep Bank’s Money-Laundering Operation, private e-mail from former CIA financial consultant, Karon von Gerhke-Thompson, to the author, 14 August, 2011.

^[xxix] Catherine Belton, Khodorkovsky’s High Stakes Gamble, Moscow Times, 16 May, 2005, http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2005/05/16/001.html

^[xxx] Alan A. Block, Constance A. Weaver, All Is Clouded..., Op. Cit., p. 119

^[xxxi] Wikipedia, Jonathan Bush, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Bush

^[xxxii] Alan A. Block, Constance A. Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money Laundering, and International Organized Crime, Praeger, 2004, p. 125 ff.

^[xxxiii] David G. Guyatt, Project Hammer Reloaded, Part 2 of 2, Nexus Magazine, Volume 10, Number 6 (October-November 2003), http://cruinthe.tripod.com/nexus/articles/projecthammer2.html

^[xxxiv] Wikipedia, A.B. Krongard, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._B._Krongard.

^[xxxv] Fax from Christian Michel, Valmet S.A. to Peter Bond, Isle of Man regarding Isle of Man registered Khodorkovsky company, Jamblick Ltd. May 22, 1991, http://www.pravdambk.org/pdf/Tom010+/-312-315.pdf.

^[xxxvi] Wikiliberal, Christian Michel, http://www.wikiberal.org/wiki/Christian_Michel

^[xxxvii] Alan A. Block, op. cit., pp. 140-142.

^[xxxviii] Ken Brown and Ianthe Jeanne Dugan, Arthur Andersen’s Fall From Grace Is a Sad Tale of Greed and Miscues, The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2002, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1023409436545200

^[xxxix] Wikipedia, Bank Menatep, http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bank_Menatep

^[xl] Ibid.

^[xli] Michael Wines, Runicom and Yeltsin Son in Law at Center Of Rich Network of Influence, October 7, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/07/world/yeltsin-son-in-law-at-center-of-rich-network-of-influence.html

^[xlii] Alan A. Block, op. cit., p. 140-142.

^[xliii] Ibid., p. 142.

^[xliv] Blog post, Organized crime and the former Soviet Union,

http://www.marxmail.org/archives/February99/crime_ussr.htm

^[xlv] David Hoffman, Russian Central Bank Accused of Scheme, Washington Post, February 27, 1999, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/inatl/longterm/russiagov/stories/bank022799.htm.

^[xlvi] Wikipedia, Ministry of Finance (Soviet Union), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Finance_(Soviet_Union)#CITEREFLCitSU1992

^[xlvii] Yegor Gaidar, Days of Defeat and Victory, University of Washington Press, 1996, forward by Michael McFaul, later to be US Ambassador to Russia, p. 117.

^[xlviii] Edward Hendrie, 9/11: Enemies Foreign and Domestic, 2011, Great Mountain Publishing, p.125. See also, E.P. Heidner, op. cit. 

^[xlix] Timothy L. O’Brien, Raymond Bonner, Russian Money Laundering Investigation Finds a Familiar Swiss Banker in the Middle, August 22, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/22/world/russian-money-laundering-investigation-finds-familiar-swiss-banker-middle.html.

^[l] Wikipedia, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Credit_and_Commerce_International

^[li] Juliet Benjamin, Rappaport Dies, The Antigua Daily Observer, January 9, 2010, http://antiguaobserver.com/rappaport-dies/

^[lii] London Guardian, 1994, cited in http://theunhivedmind.com/UHM/jewish-dominance-in-the-capitalist-takeover-of-todays-russia/

^[liv] Edward Hendrie, op. cit.

^[lv] Newsmax, Mark Rich Helped KGB Create Hidden Government, March 31, 2001

^[lvi] Forbes, Billionaire Profile: Vladimir Shcherbakov, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/profile/vladimir-scherbakov/

^[lviii] E.P. Heidner, op. cit.

Tucker Carlson
with
JEFFREY SACHS

Premiered May 28, 2024 #JeffreySachs #TuckerCarlson #CIA

Jeffrey Sachs: The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID's Origin

Tucker Carlson

https://watchtcn.co/49CDF2t

Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
0:20:17 Why did America push for Ukraine to Join NATO?
0:58:34 What is a Neocon?
1:25:28 Regime Change Never Works
1:36:27 Who Blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline?
2:01:45 COVID Origins

Garland Nixon

COVID CHANGED THE WEST - THE MYSTERIOUS TIMELINE OF COVID

Garland Nixon
Streamed live Jun 12, 2024
The main lesson of Covid, says Garland, is never trust the Government. Do your own research, do your thinking before adopting any position. Why should we trust a government, a ruling elite, that has committed enormous crimes in practically all continents and continues to do so, while lying through their teeth? Why should the American people think that a depraved ruling class that has engaged in many wars of choice, regime changes and so on, and is even now actively plotting more, causing incalculable suffering around the globe, all for self-enrichment, not the highfalutin ideals like "freedom" or "democracy" or "human rights" they always told the people, is going to suddenly become good and virtuous in their behaviour toward the American people? Why should a plutocracy, a bunch of billionaires with no real national attachment to any country, who follow nothing but the pursuit of wealth, be trusted with most of the major decisions in our lives? The Covid timeline alone should have alerted us, adds, Garland. But apparently it didn't.

---

https://www.rokfin.com/garlandnixon
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/garlandnh
paypal - garlandn@gmail.com
https://www.patreon.com/garlandnixon

 

Thomas Fazi
CAPTIONS BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHOR

The Jeffrey Sachs-Tucker Carlson interview: the most important interview ever?

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Jeffrey Sachs—Once an evangelist for savage capitalism in Russia. Now a tireless advocate for world peace. A welcome change, indeed. Is he in search of redemption? As a lifelong establishmentarian, he is shocked by the Neocons ruhthlessly enforcing the iron rules of American imperialism. He shouldn't be.

---

This is what I did with the Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Jeffrey Sachs — which, I was told, was not to be missed. It’s true: it’s a real banger. Thus, in the hope of providing a useful service for those of you who are video/audio-averse like me, here’s a written selection of the interview’s highlights, edited by me for clarity.—TF

---

The Jeffrey Sachs interview

---

Why the war in Ukraine was definitely not “unprovoked”

The end of the Cold War and the beginning of NATO expansion

[Saying that Russia’s invasions of Ukraine was unprovoked is] very dangerous because it’s wrong. It gets the whole story completely wrong, and it misunderstands the trap that we set for ourselves as the United states to push Ukraine deeper and deeper and deeper into this hopeless mess that they’re in right now.

Basically, it started very simply, which is that the United States government — let’s not call it the US people, they had nothing to do with this — but the US government said: “We’re going to put Ukraine on our side and we’re going to go right up to that 2,100 kilometre border with Russian. We’re going to put our troops and NATO and maybe missiles, whatever we want, because we are the sole superpower of the world and we do what we want”.

And it goes back, actually a long way. It goes back 170 years. The Brits had this idea, first surround Russia in the Black Sea region, and Russia’s not a great power anymore. And that was Lord Palmerston’s idea in the Crimean War, 1853 to 1856. And the Brits taught us what we know about empire, and they basically taught us the idea. Russia, it needs an outlet. It needs an outlet to the Middle east. It needs an outlet to the Mediterranean. You surround Russia and the Black Sea, you have rendered Russia a second or third rate country. And [Zbigniew] Brzezinski, one of our lead geostrategists of the current era, wrote in 1997: “Let’s do this. Let’s make sure that we basically surround Russia in the Black Sea region”. They got this idea that will expand NATO so that every country in the Black Sea around Russia is a NATO country right now. Well, back then, Turkey was a NATO country, but we said: “Okay, we’ll get Romania and Bulgaria and we’ll get Ukraine and we’ll get Georgia”.

[Georgia is] way out there on the eastern edge of the Black Sea region. People can look at a map. But we said: “Yeah, we’ll make Georgia part of NATO, too”. And the reason was very clear, and [Brzezinski] was very explicit about it, that this is our way to basically dominate Eurasia. If we can dominate the Black Sea region, then Russia’s nothing. If we make Russia nothing, then we can basically control Eurasia, meaning all the way from Europe to Central Asia and through our influence in East Asia, do the same thing. And that’s American unipolarity. We run the world. We are the hegemon. We are the sole superpower. We are unchallenged. So that’s the idea.

The Russians said: “Please don’t do that. Don’t bring your troops, your weapons, your missiles right up to our border. It’s not a good idea”. And the US — I was around in those years, involved in Russia and in central Europe — was [like]: “We don’t hear you. We do what we want”. They kept pushing inside the US government in the 1990s when this debate was going, should NATO expand? Some people said “Yeah”, but we told Gorbachev and we told Yeltsin we weren’t going to expand at all. “Now, come on, the Soviet Union’s done. We can do what we want. We’re the sole superpower”. Clinton bought into that. That was Madeleine Albright’s line. NATO enlargement started. And our most sophisticated diplomats — we used to have diplomats at the time, we don’t have them anymore, but we used to have diplomats like George Kennan — said: “This is the greatest mistake we could possibly make”. We had a defense secretary, Bill Perry, who was Clinton’s defense secretary, who agonised: “God, I should resign over this. This is terrible, what’s going on?”.

But he was outmanoeuvred diplomatically by Richard Holbrook and by Madeleine Albright. And Clinton never thought through anything systematically, in my opinion. And so they decided: “Okay, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, first round”. And then Brzezinski, in a 1997 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, which is kind of the bellwether of foreign policy, wrote “A Geostrategy for Eurasia”, where he laid out exactly the timeline for this US expansion of power. And he said: “Late 1990s will take in Central Europe, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic. By the early 2000s, we’ll take in the Baltic states. Now, that’s get close to Russia. By 2005 to 2010, we’ll invite Ukraine to become part of NATO”. So this wasn’t some flippant thing. This was a long-term plan, and it was based on a long term geostrategy. Now the Russians are saying: “Are you kidding? We wanted peace. We ended the Cold War, too. You didn’t just defeat us, said no more. We disbanded the Warsaw Pact. We wanted peace. We wanted cooperation. You call it victory? We just wanted to cooperate”. I know that for a fact because I was there in those years: what Gorbachev wanted, what Yeltsin wanted. They didn’t want war with the United States, nor were they saying: “We’re defeated”.

They were saying: “We just want to cooperate. We want to stop the Cold War. We want to become part of a world economy. We want to be a normal economy. We want to be normal society connected with you, connected with Europe, connected with Asia”. And the US said: “We get it, we get it. We won. You do everything we say and we determine how the pieces are going to go”. So in the early 2000s, Putin comes in first. Business for Putin was good cooperation with Europe. You go back to the early 2000s again. I know the people. I was a participant in some of it. Putin was completely pro-Europe. Yes, and pro-US, by the way, and we don’t want to talk about this. We don’t want to admit it, because we don’t want anything other than “unprovoked”. So everything is phony. What we say, everything is a lie. But just to say, the US kept doing unilateral things that were really outrageous. In 2000, in 1999, we bombed Belgrade for 78 days. Bad move. Absolutely. We bombed a capital of Europe for 78 days.

The point of that was to break Serbia in two, create a new state, Kosovo, where we have the largest NATO military base in southeast Europe. We put Bondsteel base there because we wanted a base in southeastern Europe. And again, you look at the neocons. They actually describe all of this in various documents. You have to make the links. But in a document called Rebuilding Americas Defenses in the year 2000, they say the Balkans is a new strategic area for the US. So we have to move large troops to the Balkans because their idea is literally the game of risk, not just you need good relations or peace. We need our pieces on the board. We need military bases with the advanced positioning of our military everywhere in the world. So they wanted a big base in southeastern Europe. They didn’t like Serbia. Serbia was close to Russia anyway. We’re the sole superpower. We do what we want. So they divided the country, which they now claim you never do. You know, you never change borders. We broke apart Serbia, established by our declaration, a new country, Kosovo. We put a huge NATO base there, and that was the goal. [The goal] wasn’t to save the oppressed Muslim population. It was very much to save the military-industrial complex, to have a nice location in southeastern Europe.

[Then] in 2002, the US unilaterally pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Unilaterally. Well, that was one of the stabilisers of the relationship with Russia, and it was one of the stabilisers of the global nuclear situation, which is absolutely dangerous. And the US unilaterally started putting Aegis missiles into first Poland, then Romania. And the Russians are saying: “Wait a minute, what do we know? You’re putting in this? You’re a few minutes from Moscow. This is completely destabilising. Do you think you might want to talk to us?”. So then comes 2004, seven more countries in NATO: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia now starting filling in the Black Sea. Romania and Bulgaria. Suddenly they’re now North Atlantic countries. But it’s all part of this design, all spelled out, all quite explicit. We’re surrounding Russia. In 2007, President Putin gave a very clear speech at the Munich security conference, very powerful, very correct, very frustrated, where he said: “Gentlemen, you told us in 1990 NATO would never enlarge. That was the promise made to President Gorbachev, and it was the promise made to President Yeltsin. And you cheated, and you repeatedly cheated, and you don’t even admit that you said this, but it’s all plainly documented, by the way, and as you know, in a thousand archival sites, so it’s easy to verify all of this”.

James Baker III, our Secretary of State, said that NATO would not move one inch eastward. And it wasn’t a flippant statement. It was a statement repeated and repeated and repeated. Hans-Dietrich Gensher, the foreign minister of Germany, same story. The Germans wanted reunification. Gorbachev said: “We’ll support that. But we don’t want that to come at our expense”. “No, no, it won’t come at your expense”, [we said]. “NATO won’t move one inch eastward, mister president”. Repeated so many times in many documents, many statements by the NATO Secretary General, by the US Secretary of State, by the German Chancellor. Now, of course, all denied by our foreign policy blob because we’re not supposed to remember anything. Remember, this was all unprovoked. So back to 2007, Putin gives the speech and he says: “Stop. Don’t even think about Ukraine. This is our 2100 kilometer border. This is absolutely part of the integrated economy of this region. Don’t even think about it”. Now, I know from insiders, from all the diplomatic work that I do, that Europe was saying to the US: “Don’t think about Ukraine. Please, this is not a good idea. Just stop”. We know from our current CIA director, Bill Burns, that he wrote a very eloquent, impassioned, articulate, clear, secret as usual memo, which we only got to see because WikiLeaks showed [it] to the American people.

[But we’re not supposed to know what our government is doing], how they’re putting us at nuclear risk and other things. Okay, this one did get out. And it’s called “Nyet means nyet”, no means no. And what Bill Burns very perceptively, articulately conveys to Condoleezza Rice and back to the White House in 2008 is [that] Ukraine is really a red line. Don’t do it. It’s not just Putin. It’s not just Putin’s government. It’s the entire political class of Russia. And just to help all of us, as we think about it, it is exactly as if Mexico said: “We think it would be great to have Chinese military bases on the Rio Grande”. We can’t see why the US would have any problem with that. Of course, we would go completely insane. And we should, of course. The whole idea is so absurdly dangerous and reckless that you can’t even imagine grown ups doing this. So what happens is — for what I'm told by European leaders and by long, detailed discussions — Bush Junior says to them: “No, no, no, it’s okay. Don’t worry. I hear you about Ukraine”. And then he goes off for the Christmas holidays and comes back, whether it’s Cheney, whether it’s Bush, whatever it is, says: “Yeah, NATO’s going to enlarge to Ukraine”. And the Europeans are shocked, pissed. They said: “What are you doing?”.

And then they had the NATO summit in Bucharest, and this was 2008. And the Europeans, Chancellor Merkel, the French president, all of them, said: “George, don’t do this. Don’t do this. This is extraordinarily dangerous. This is really provocative. We don’t really need or want NATO right up to the Russian border”. Bush pushed, pushed, pushed. This is a US alliance fundamentally, and they made the commitment. Ukraine will become a member of NATO. The dodge was: “Okay, we won’t give them exactly the roadmap right now, but Ukraine will become a member of NATO”. Because in those days, the US and Russia met in a NATO partnership. Even then, Putin was there the next day in Bucharest saying: “Don’t do this. This is completely reckless. Essentially, this is our fundamental red line. Do not do this”.

The US can’t hear any of this. This is our biggest problem of all, because the neocons who have run the show for thirty years believe the US can do whatever it wants. This is the most fundamental point to understand about US foreign policy. They’re wrong. They keep screwing up. They keep getting us into trillion-dollar-plus wars. They keep killing a lot of people. But their basic belief is the US is the only superpower. It’s the unipolar power, and we can do what we want. So they could not hear Putin even at that moment. They couldn’t hear the rest of the Europeans. And by the way, they said: “Georgia would become part of NATO” again. The only way to understand that is in this longstanding Palmerston-Brzezinski theory. This isn’t just haphazard: “Oh, why don't we take Georgia?”. This is a plan, okay? The Russians understand every single step of this.

This has been just about the most disastrous foreign policy imaginable. How can you go from peace in 1991 when you have a chance for creating a peaceful, cooperative world that could actually be prosperous and do good things together to this mess that we’re in? It took a strategy so stupid, so reckless, so blind. And that’s what the neocons gave us. They gave us a strategy which said: “We now run the world, and explicitly, we will be the world’s policemen. We will fight the wars that we need to fight whenever and wherever we need to fight them. We will make sure that there’s never a rival”. Well, you do that long enough, you end up in lots of absolutely destructive, stupid wars. And the rest of the world doesn’t just sit back and say: “Oh, thank you, US. We’re so grateful you’re the leader”. They say: “Come on, you’re 4.1% of the world population. There’s another 95.9% of the world population that actually would just like peace and some cooperation and not you to be telling us what to do”. So this strategy was explicit, clear, adopted in the last years of basically a 1991.

The 2014 US-engineered coup in Ukraine and the beginning of the Ukrainian civil war

So another thing goes awry. What goes awry? The Ukrainians don’t want NATO enlargement. The Ukrainians don’t want it. They’re against it. The public opinion said: “No, this is very dangerous. Neutrality, it’s safer. We’re in between east and west. We don’t want this”. So they elect Viktor Yanukovych, a president who says: “We’ll just be neutral”. The US is [like]: “Oh, what the hell is this? Ukraine, they don’t have any choice either”. Yanukovych becomes the enemy of the neocons, obviously. So they start working, of course, the way that the US does. We got to get rid of this guy. Maybe we’ll elect his opponent afterwards. Maybe we’ll catch him in a crisis and so forth. And indeed, at the end of 2013, the US absolutely stokes a crisis that becomes an insurrection and then becomes a coup. And I know again, from firsthand experience, that the US was profoundly implicated in that. But you can see our senators standing up in the crowd. Like, if Chinese officials came to January 6 and said: “Yes, yes, go”, you know, how would we like it if Chinese leaders came and said: “Yeah, we were with you 100 percent”. American senators standing up in Kiev saying to the demonstrators: “We’re with you 100 percent”. Victoria Nuland famously passing around the cookies. But it was much, much more than the cookies, I can tell you. And so the US conspired with the Ukrainian right to overthrow Yanukovych, and there was a violent overthrow in the third week of February of 2014.

That’s when this war started. This war didn’t even start in 2022. It started in 2014. That was the outbreak of the war, when a violent coup overthrew a Ukrainian president that wanted neutrality. And his security people told him: “You’re going to get killed”. And so he flew to Kharkiv and then flew onward to Russia. That day, the US immediately, in a nanosecond, recognised the new government. This is a coup. This is how the CIA does its regime change operations. So this is when the war starts. Putin’s understanding, completely correct in this moment, was: “I’m not letting NATO take my naval fleet and my naval base in Crimea. Are you kidding?”. The Russian naval base in the Black Sea, which was the object of the Crimean War, and in its way is the object of this war in Sevastopol, has been there since 1783. And now Putin’s saying: “Oh, NATO’s going to walk in. No”. And so they organised this referendum. This is a Russian region and there's an overwhelming support: “We’ll stay with Russia, thank you. Not with this new post-coup government”. An outbreak breaks out in the eastern provinces, which are the ethnic Russian provinces, in the Donbas, in Luhansk and Donetsk, and there’s a lot of violence.

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Premiered May 28, 2024 #JeffreySachs #TuckerCarlson #CIA

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Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many best selling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization. Here he is with probably the smartest and most accurate assessment of the Ukraine war, and American foreign policy more broadly, ever caught on tape. Watch more here: https://watchtcn.co/49CDF2t

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So the war starts in 2014. So saying something’s unprovoked in 2022 is a little bizarre for anyone that actually reads a normal newspaper to begin with. But in any event, the war starts then, and within a year, the Russians are saying very wisely: “We actually don’t want this war, we don’t want to own Ukraine, we don’t want problems on our border. We would like peace based on respect for the ethnic Russians in the east and political autonomy, because you, the coup government, tried to close down all Russian language, culture and rights of these people after having made a violent coup. So we don’t accept that”.  So what came out of that was two agreements called the Minsk 1 and the Minsk 2 agreements. The Minsk 2 agreement was backed by the UN Security Council and it said that will make peace based on autonomy of the Donbas region. Now, very interesting. The Russians were not saying: “That’s ours, we want that”, all the things that are claimed every day, that Putin just wants to recreate the Russian empire, wants to grab territory.

Nothing like that, the opposite. [He was saying:] “We don’t want the territory. We actually just want autonomy based on an agreement reached with the Ukrainian government”. So what was the US attitude towards that? It was to say to the Ukrainians: “Don’t worry about it. Come on, don’t worry about it. You keep your central state. We don’t want to see Ukraine weakened. We just want NATO in a unified Ukraine. Don’t go for decentralisation”. We tell them to blow off the very treaty that they’ve signed. Then we accuse Russia of not having diplomacy. We blow off every single agreement. We blow off not moving one inch eastward. We blow off the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. We have so many NATO-led wars of choice in between. I didn’t even mention Syria, the CIA’s attempt to overthrow Assad in Libya and so forth. And we blow off the Minsk agreements. And actually, Angela Merkel explained in a rather shockingly frank interview that she gave last year when asked why Germany didn’t help to enforce the Minsk agreement, because Germany and France were the guarantors of the Minsk agreement under something called the Normandy process, she said: “Well, we just thought this was to give some time to the Ukrainians to build up their strength”.

The run-up to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine

So the war continued. The US pumped in arms, built up armaments, was building up what would be the biggest army of Europe, actually a huge army that Russia was watching [and saying:] “What are you doing? You’re not honouring Minsk. You’re building up this huge Ukrainian army”. [An army] paid for by the United States. And in 2021, Putin met with Biden. And then after the meeting, he put on the table a draft Russia-US security agreement. He put it on the table on December 15, 2021. It’s worth reading. Very plausible document. I don’t agree with some of it. It’s a negotiable document, something you would negotiate. I thought the core of it was: “Stop the NATO enlargement”. And I called the White House myself at that point and said: “Don’t have a war over this. We don’t need NATO enlargement for US security. In fact, its counter to US security. The US should not be right up against the Russian border. That’s how we trip ourselves into World War III. We’re not threatened by Russia. We are not threatened by Russia and Ukraine being neutral is not a threat to US security. It builds US security, period. It’s not even a concession It’s a benefit for us. Leave some space between you and them. That’s what we want, some space so we don’t have an accidental tripwire. That’s the real logic of this world. Give a little space, we don’t have to be everywhere. We’re not playing risk. We’re trying to run our lives. We’re trying to keep our children safe. We’re not trying to own every part of the world”.

The formal response of the United States was that issues about NATO are non-negotiable. They’re only between NATO countries and NATO candidates. No third party has any stake or interest or say in this. Again, to use the analogy, [it’s as if] Mexico and China want to put Chinese military bases on the Rio Grande [and saying] the United States has no right to interfere and no interest in it. And this was the formal US response in January 2022. So unprovoked? Not exactly. Thirty years of provocation where we could not take peace for an answer. All we could take is: “We’ll do whatever we want, wherever we want, and no one has any say in this at all”.

The vassalisation of Europe (and the Nord Stream bombing)

Before Europe completely became a kind of vassal province of the United States government, they wanted what they called collective security, which was, we want security arrangements in which one country’s security doesn’t ruin the security of another country. There were basically three paths. One path was what the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. A really good idea. It’s Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. And the idea was: let’s bring us all together under one kind of charter and we’ll work out a collective security arrangement. I liked it. This is what Gorbachev was saying: “We don’t want war with you, we don’t want conflict with you, we want collective security”. Second arrangement, that actually makes a lot of sense: Gorbachev disbanded the Warsaw Pact, we should have disbanded NATO, [we should have] said: “NATO was there to defend against a Soviet invasion. There’s not going to be any Soviet invasion. In fact, after December 1991, there’s not even a Soviet Union”. Why is there NATO? NATO was established to defend against the Soviet Union. So why did it continue after Gorbachev and Yeltsin? The neocons. They say it explicitly in their documents: this is our way of keeping our hegemony in Europe. In other words, this is our way of keeping our say in Europe. Not protecting Europe, not even protecting us. This is hegemony. We need our pieces on the board. NATO’s our pieces on the board.

Why would Germany allow foreign troops garrisoned on its soil for eighty years? I don’t understand. Why would European countries allow that? There are basic mechanisms that I don’t understand. Truly, after being around more than forty years in this and knowing all the leaders, and I know Schulz and I know others, I don’t understand it. But when the US has a military base in your country, it really pulls a lot of the political strings in your country. It really influences the political parties. It really pays. In other words, the Germans are not free actors in this. That’s the point.

The question is: why would the Germans want this? After the US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, why wouldn’t the Germans have said: “Why did you do that? This is our economy. You just blew it up”. But they don’t. They’re so subservient to the US interests. It’s a little hard to understand because it makes no sense for Europe. It’s really sad. And it’s doing a lot of damage to Europe. It’s destroying Ukraine, by the way. That’s the first point. It’s destroying Ukraine. It’s doing a lot of damage to Europe, wasting a hell of a lot of lives and money in the United States, which the neocons don’t count. And almost nobody stands up and talks about it. [The story about this war being unprovoked is] complete bull. It’s complete nonsense. It’s for people who don’t want to remember anything before February 24, 2022. But there's a whole long history to this that’s absolutely kind of absurd and tragic. I mean, it’s absurd. It’s utterly tragic. 500,000 Ukrainians dead for nothing.

America’s perpetual war machine

This has nothing to do with morality. It has nothing to do with Western values. It has nothing to do with American values. It doesn’t even have to do with American interests from what I can see, although they say that American interests are at stake. Well, we’ve spent maybe $7 trillion on these reckless perpetual wars since 2001. The debt’s gone from about 30% of national income to more than 100% of national income. We’ve had these disastrous wars. Is this America’s interest? No. I mean, maybe we could have actually rebuilt a bridge or a road along the way or no, a mile of faster rail in our country or something. But no, we had to spend trillions and trillions on wars. So to my mind it’s all completely perverse. But what I find amazing is that once in a while you have, you’ll actually find the truth expressed in such a vulgar way. No, they don’t count the Ukrainian lives. They don’t care at all. And sometimes they say they don’t care. Mitt Romney said: “It’s the greatest bargain, no American lives [lost]”. Dick Blumenthal said the same thing. Basically, this is a great bargain, no American lives.

The risk of nuclear war

One thing everyone should understand [is that] Ukraine will never join NATO short of a nuclear war because Russia will never allow it, period. So every time we say it, all we mean is the war continues and more Ukrainians are destroyed and we’re willing to risk nuclear conflict for that. [US leaders say:] “We’re not going to be blackmailed by this nuclear threat and so forth”. Well, God damn it, you better be worried. We’re talking about a counterpart that has 6,000 nuclear warheads. We have 6,000 nuclear warheads. We have a lot of crazy people in our government. I know it. I’m adult enough to know over 44 years of professional life that there are a lot of intemperate people in our country. We have a lot of allies that say: “Oh, we can do this”. We have a president of Latvia tweeting or Xing or whatever the verb is these days: “Russia delenda est”. In other words, “Russia must be destroyed”. Playing off of the old Cato, Carthago delenda est. Delenda est. Carthage must be destroyed. Honestly, a president of a Baltic state tweeting that Russia must be destroyed? This is prudent? This is safe? This is going to keep your family and my family safe? Are we out of our minds? And all through this, Biden hasn’t called Putin one time.

I speak to very senior Russian officials. They say: “We want to negotiate. Of course we’ll talk”. Zelensky, quote unquote, made it illegal. And the United States says: “Well, we won’t do anything that the Ukrainians don’t want. This is insane, by the way, as if this is really between Ukraine and Russia. This is about the United States and Russia. This everybody should understand. This isn’t even about Ukraine and Russia. This is about the US being in Ukraine and Russia. So the ones that need to talk are Biden and Putin, period. And I keep saying to Biden: “If you want to use my Zoom account, please use it. I’ll lend you my phone. You make the call, start negotiations. I don’t like my family being at risk of nuclear war”.

[But they won’t negotiate because, I think] they believed up until now that they would get their way through bluff or superiority of force or superiority of finance. They gambled because they were gambling with someone else’s lives, someone else’s country, and someone else’s money, our money, the taxpayer money. But they were gambling. Not with their own stakes, but they were gambling. They’re not very clever. They gambled wrong all along. Putin said: “No. For us, this is existential. For you, it’s a game, apparently, the game of risk. You need your piece on that board”. As if American NATO forces in Ukraine is somehow existential for the United States, as opposed to a neutral Ukraine. They thought that they would get their way. And I spoke with senior officials all along who just thought Russia won’t object or can’t object or will be pushed aside or will fall to its knees with US financial sanctions or will succumb to the US HIMARS and attack them. Just one absolutely naive idea after another.

And my absolute core bottom line is, until Biden speaks directly with Putin and starts talking, our lives are deeply at risk. And it’s unimaginable to me that we are in open war, as we are, and we’re not even trying to find the path to peace right now.

The failure of the anti-Russian sanctions

When the US put on sanctions on Russia in March 2022, just after the beginning of this latest phase of the war that started in 2014. I know senior US financial officials and they [were going]: “Oh, we’ve got them. This is going to crush them”. I said: “I don’t think so. I was in Latin America last week. They’re not going to do this. I was in India the week before that. It’s not going to go like that”. So what happened was the only ones that applied the sanctions are the Europeans, the United States, and a few allies in East Asia. Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore. The rest of the world said: “We’re not part of that. We don’t sign up to this. We don’t like this, we don’t agree with the NATO enlargement, we don’t like this narrative”. And the sanctions have proven to be pretty useless compared to what this grandiosity of the US strategists thought. So it comes to this question: what does the rest of the world think? The rest of the world doesn’t think much of the United States. What it’s doing, it seems to them, is a bizarre country.

Why are you pushing NATO enlargement? Why are you bringing us into your war? We don’t really want this. Interestingly, most of the rest of the world is not against the United States, by the way. They said: “Just don't make us choose all these things. This isn’t our battle, and we don’t even like what you're doing. Just make peace, calm things down. We don’t want bad relations”. So it’s not as if the world’s antagonistic, but Washington does not get this at all. I speak to a lot of world leaders in developing countries all the time. It’s my job as a development economist. So I’m talking to world leaders, foreign ministers, heads of state and so on. And I know their understanding and position very clearly. I don’t know whether the White House or Blinken or anyone else in the administration understands even these basic points, but it was obvious to me.

The national security apparatus as the real driving force in the US

I think there’s a big, deep project of the security apparatus that goes back thirty years. I think the CIA continues to be a driving force. The National Security Council is obviously a driving force. The Pentagon’s obviously a driving force. The Armed Services Committees. It’s not one individual, but it’s a project that is long dated and it doesn’t turn. And we don’t have a president that’s very flexible of mind. We don’t have a president that is on top of any of this. It seems to me, not a nimble president. Not nimble, not effective, not necessarily in charge, not necessarily making decisions. I don’t really know. But what I do know is that it’s not improv, it’s a rudder that stuck, I would say. In other words, they can’t do something different. And each improv is that the last thing they tried didn’t work. So now they need to quickly improvise something else as the rudder is stuck. So we continue on the same destructive path and it’s not working. So, oh, my God, we’ve got to do something else. That’s the improv part. But what is not changing is goals, direction, strategy.

The CIA is the instrument of regime change. The US is the only country in the world that relies on regime change. As, I would say, the lead foreign policy instrument. In other words, most countries, virtually any small country, any middle power country, when it doesn’t like another country, it either has to deal with it or it comes begging to the United States to take out that country. And we are the country that makes a living by overthrowing other governments. And that’s not a good vocation for us. It almost always ends in disaster, in bloodshed, in continued instability. But that’s half the job of the CIA. The CIA is also an intelligence agency. It collects information and makes analysis, and it gives intelligence findings. And I have no problem with that role at all, although I don’t want them to spy on us. But I think that making intelligence findings for the US government is necessary. But being a private army or a hidden force that overthrows governments, stokes unrest, that puts people in power, that runs covert operations, I’m against that.

The US’s attempted regime change in Syria

In 2011, Obama does the absolute neocon play of saying, almost out of the blue: “By the way, why don’t we overthrow Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president?”. Well, that’s a little damn weird. But suddenly you start hearing: “Assad must go”. I was on Morning Joe when that statement by Hillary was made. And Joe Scarborough looked at me and said: “Jeff, what do you think?”. I said: “Well, how are they going to do that? That sounds like another pretty stupid idea”. That was 2011. Since then, we’ve had 13 years of war in Syria. Hundreds of thousands dead. Destroyed the country, of course. And who’s president? Bashar al-Assad. And yes, in 2012 there were things that were going on in Syria. But the president said: “Okay, we’ll send in the CIA to overthrow the government in Syria”. And if anyone is wondering, we do this dozens of times. So don’t have any illusion that this is unusual. It is the job, the terms of reference, of the CIA to overthrow governments in other countries.

Okay, so we start arming the jihadists in Syria. Crazy thing. And the US says: “Assad must go”. So the UN starts a diplomatic process to try to find peace, which is the job of the UN. It’s not to implement US regime change, it’s to try to find peace. So the UN succeeds in getting all of the parties to agree to a peace agreement — except one, the US. Yes. So the idea that you couldn’t find peace, you couldn’t find all these different factions in Syria, [is false]. There was an agreement reached, but there was one obstacle to the agreement. And the obstacle was that the US said, on the first day of this agreement: “Assad must go”. And the response was: “Why don’t you have a process? There’ll be an election in two or three years. Don’t overthrow the government”. The first day we have all this in place. And Obama, well, I don’t know if it was Obama, probably Hillary, but whatever, said no. So that’s why there was no agreement. But the downstream effects of that were horrifying. We probably created ISIS pretty directly because we funded jihadists all along the way.

The destruction of Libya

They did exactly the same thing in Libya. And you look at Libya, they decided to take out Gaddafi. Why? No one really knows. No one knows because some people say Sarkozy knew that Gaddafi had contributed to Sarkozy’s campaign, that it was personal vendetta. There are a hundred theories. The fact that there are a hundred theories shows that the whole thing was bullshit, to use a technical, diplomatic term. You cannot even know right now why. What you know is that they misused a UN Security Council resolution to protect the people of Benghazi, to launch a months-long NATO aerial bombardment of Libya until they brought down the government, unleashed war in Africa for the next 13 years, until today, which is still roiling all of the countries of the region. They do these things because they can, because it doesn’t count. Maybe another theory which is even maybe true. What difference? It’s money, it’s a business. We’re running a business, we’re trying weapons, we’re doing this. Maybe it’s all a success from somebody’s point of view that you have all these wars going with this big military machine. I don’t know. That is a theory which is not completely dismissible, because what you can’t do, is look and say: “My God, we had a geopolitical reason to do this”.

Regime change at home: the Kennedy assassination

Probably 61 years ago [the CIA] had their first run at [regime change in the US] with President Kennedy from, I think — best guess — at least maybe a rogue CIA or maybe official CIA or maybe compartmentalised CIA operation. It was clearly someone’s operation, not Lee Harvey Oswald. All we know and all of the evidence points in that direction. It used to be said, why is the United States the only country in the world that’s never had a coup? And the answer was, well, we’re the only country that doesn’t have a US embassy. But we probably did have a coup in broad daylight on November 22, 1963, and we never quite got over it, and we never looked into it. On the contrary, we covered it up from the beginning. And drip by drip evidence comes out, including the most recent evidence, that that magic bullet, which was one of the justifications of the absurd account of a lone gunman, was also debunked by the, I think, now 88-year-old secret service agent who said: “I actually put that bullet from the back of Kennedy’s seat in the limousine on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital”. So there’s so many things wrong with the official [narrative]. I mean, it’s preposterous. Almost nobody believes it or should believe it. But it’s also interesting for all that we’re discussing, most likely it was a government coup in broad daylight, with the tremendous amount of evidence that it was a conspiracy at a high level. And yet it passed for the last 61 years without any official practical note of that fact.

The US coup in Haiti

I was asked to help [president] Aristide in Haiti. Yes, okay, Haiti’s so poor, so unstable, so desperate. And Aristide asked me for economic help. That’s what I do, that’s my expertise. So I flew down to Port au Prince and I had a very good meeting with him. And at the end of the meeting he said: “Mister Sachs, they’re going to take me out. They’re going to take me out”. And [I said]: “What do you mean?”. “They’re going to overthrow me”. Okay, sorry to be so naive as I am. I said: “No, we’re going to make this work. We’re going to make this work”. “No, no, no, they're going to take me out”. I said: “No, no, I’m going back to Washington. We're going to help with the Inter-American Development bank and World Bank and IMF and… oh, I’m so naive. So of course, then they decide to take them out. And the way they do it is destabilise the country. So the first thing is to close down the IMF, close down the World Bank, close down the Inter-American Development bank: squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. The next thing is you send in some mercenaries who are going to create trouble, come over the border from Dominican Republic. The last thing was rather remarkable, which was the US ambassador showed up at his door literally one day and said: “Mister president, you have to flee. We have a plane waiting for you, otherwise your life is in danger”. And they led him to a plane with an unmarked tail, and 23 hours later he was in Central Africa Republic. So this is what’s called a coup. A coup in broad daylight.

The US bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline

The US blew up Nord stream as it [had] promised to on probably dozens of occasions, but the most recent of those occasions was [when] President Biden said [in February 2022] in a statement to the press: “If the Russians invade Ukraine, Nord Stream is finished”. And a reporter who asked him the question: “Well, mister president, how can you say that? How could you do that?”. And he looks and he says very gravely: “Believe me, we have our ways”. And then you can go back and find 1,000 clips of Victoria Nuland and [Ted] Cruz and everyone saying: “This must stop, this must stop. We’ll never let it happen. It will be destroyed, it will be ended”. Okay, so then it’s blown up, and I was on Bloomberg soon afterwards. I don’t remember whether it was the next day or the day after. And I said: “You know, I think the US did this”. “Mister Sachs, how can you say that?!”.

And I said: “Well, first the president said it was going to be over, and then there’s actually some readings of planes in the vicinity and so forth. And there was the tweet by the former and now current foreign minister of Poland, Radosław Sikorski, Anne Applebaum’s husband, saying ‘Thank you, USA’, with a picture of the water bubbling over the blown up pipeline. Yes, there was a bit of evidence that, well, yes, the United States had done this, thank you very much. They said they would and they did it”. I was yanked off the air within 30 seconds. [The anchorman] was was listening to something in the earplug, which I could only imagine: “Get that son of a bitch off the air”. And they just. This interview was over. And he stopped. And then another anchor berated me for a few minutes after that. That was the last time I had a word on mainstream media, I have to tell you. [But Nord Stream] is a big deal. It’s an act of war. It helps to understand what this Ukraine war is all about. It helps us to understand that this is a war between the United States and Russia, fought with many means. It’s important to understand it. It also has a deeper economic significance because it’s part of a longstanding US idea of not letting Germany and Russia ever get too close together economically. So there’s a lot to that story.

The origins of Covid

The question with Covid is which lab and in which way? It almost surely did not come out of nature. It almost surely came out of a deliberate research project that had a core idea, which was to take a natural virus and make it more infectious. And we have one major blueprint of that, which is a research proposal called DEFUSE, which was submitted to the Department of Defense to the unit called DARPA in 2018. And it is a kind of cookbook for how to make the virus that causes Covid-19 and the virus is called SARS-CoV-2. And what’s distinctive about SARS-CoV-2 is that it has something called a proteolytic cleavage site, and specifically something called a furin cleavage site. And it’s just some pieces of the genome that make this thing damn infectious. And what’s interesting about it is that for this class of bat viruses, which are called betacoronaviruses, which is what SARS comes from, and what Covid-19 comes from, for that class of viruses, and there are several hundred known, none of them in nature ever had that particular piece of the genome. None other than SARS-CoV-2.

And that piece of the genome, the furin cleavage site, was an object of research attention from 2005, because it was understood that if a virus were to have that, it would make the entry of the virus into human cells easier, and it would make the virus, therefore, infectious for humans. SARS-1, which was the first outbreak of a virus like this in 2003 in Hong Kong, was most likely a natural virus that came from a farm animal, and it was not so infectious. It killed some thousands of people. But with SARS-1, you got very, very sick for weeks before you were infectious to someone else. And that meant that it was not so hard to stop it by isolating people who had the symptoms. With SARS-CoV-2, you are infectious even without any symptoms. Sometimes you’re completely asymptomatic. So what’s the difference of SARS-1 and SARS-CoV-2? The furin cleavage site. And in 2005, already, so almost 20 years ago, that experiment was done that, where they said: “Oh, take SARS-1, add in a furin cleavage site, this thing becomes really infectious”. And there are a series of experiments [were undertaken] that are called gain of function experiments, where you deliberately manipulate the virus to make it more infectious.

By 2015, we had a full blown research program funded by NIH, by Tony Fauci’s unit, on betacoronaviruses, with the lead scientists focusing on this furin cleavage site, so they’re starting to do more and more targeted experiments. The answer [to why they would do this] is called biodefense. And then the real question, which I don’t know the answer to, is: “Is that biowarfare or true defense?”. The NIH, starting in 2001, became the Defense Department’s research unit. So, remember the anthrax attack that came after 911? It was probably a us, you know, some US scientists either for sure provoking or doing some crazy things or disgruntled or boosting up the DoD budget. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. I know that after that, the DoD put its budget through Tony Fauci’s unit, which suddenly became the largest unit of NIH, and Fauci became the head of what is politely called biodefense. But one only suspects that it is. We’re not supposed to do biowarfare.

And they say: “Well, it’s for vaccines against biowarfare. It’s to defend against it. It’s to defend against natural outbreaks”. But what it is, is a tremendously dangerous research program that involves a lot of manipulation of very dangerous pathogens. And by 2015, the ability of scientists to manipulate these viruses was reaching astounding proportions. And we’ve got a real genius who was part of this group named Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who is a genius. And what he could do was if you gave him 30,000 letters of the DNA code — A, G, C, and so on — he'll turn that into a live virus. I think that’s pretty damn remarkable. In other words, you give him the designer virus, he’ll give you the live virus, and he created what’s called a reverse genetic system to make these viruses and to put in pieces into the viruses with a technique which he also called no-see, meaning you suture in a part, but you do it in a way that you can’t identify that it was put in. In the lab. So it’s without the fingerprints, as it were.

And it’s clear that this area of research picked up a tremendous amount of steam because a lot of American scientists were shouting that this is so damn dangerous. Stop it. And Fauci was saying: “No, this is important. This is really crucial. We’re going to continue to do this”. There was a brief moratorium at the end of the Obama period, and then the moratorium was lifted during the Trump administration. And even during the moratorium period, we know that the research continued on many grants. It’s clear when you look closely at this that they were getting closer and closer to this insertion of the furin cleavage site into SARS-like viruses. Now, in 2018 came this proposal. As always, this was a highly classified proposal. We only learned about it after the fact by a whistleblower. We never even would have learned about it, even in all of the commotion of the pandemic. But for a whistleblower, a brave whistleblower in the Department of Defense, who said, the public needs to see this.

And when you look at the DEFUSE proposal, really, you say, holy shit. Because on page ten, it says, we have collected more than 180 previously unreported betacoronaviruses. And on page eleven, it says: “We’re going to test them for whether they have a proteolytic cleavage site, which is a furin cleavage site. And if they don’t, we're going to insert a furin cleavage site into them”. It’s the goddamn cookbook for how to make this virus. The Defense department turned it down, supposedly. I mean, it probably did. And then comes the question: “Well, so what happened?”. Well, the people that wrote that little cookbook said: “Ee didn’t do anything like that. It got turned down. Nothing to look at here”. But people have told me: “Jeff, it’s not just that it got turned down. They had done the work even before they submitted the grant proposal”. That’s not uncommon in science, which is you do a lot of the work beforehand. So I’ve heard that on good authority, I can’t verify it personally. And there are so many strands now that say, yeah, something really screwy was going on. For example, there’s a very weird paper, weird to me, by Baric and the head of what’s called Rocky Mountain Laboratory, which is an NIH laboratory under Fauci’s authority, that reports this completely bizarre finding.

And the finding sounds very technical, but it says that the Wuhan Institute of Virology type 1 virus does not infect Egyptian fruit bats. Okay. That’s the title. So you say. So what the hell is that? What it means is that in 2019 and 2018 they were doing experiments using viruses from Wuhan in the Rocky Mountain labs with their collection of bats. Okay, so one theory. The bat in the Rocky Mountain labs is called an Egyptian fruit bat. It’s not. Not the kind of bat that carries this virus in China, which is in Yunnan, which is a different kind of bat. But they tried it in the Rocky Mountain lab. I scratched my head and said, what the hell? We have Rocky Mountain Lab doing experiments with Wuhan viruses in Montana, in NIH labs with Ralph Baric, who was one of the principal investigators for inserting the furin cleavage site into the virus. I’d like to know more about that. So one theory is that it was concocted in the US and sent over to Wuhan, to this Wuhan Institute of virology for testing in their bats, in their bat collection, which is the Chinese bats rather than the Egyptian fruit bats. That’s plausible. That’s one person’s theory.

There are other theories that even a related research group, German and Dutch, may have played a role because they have research in Wuhan. But when the virus broke out in that period at the end of 2019, early 2020, there’s commotion among the scientists. What the hell is this? Where’d this come from? Oh my God. Did we do this? How’d this escape? Or whatever? Nobody knows, of course. So they start having secret calls. And one of the most important of these calls was on February 1, 2020. That was then memorialised by one of the participants in a long memoir, all of which became public through a Freedom of Information Act. Subsequently, because our government has lied to us about every single moment of this from the start, hasn’t told us anything about any of this. It’s all whistleblowers or Freedom of Information Act. That’s the only way we know any of what I’m describing to you right now. No one has told the truth at all. So on the February 1 call, the scientists say: “Oh God, this looks like a lab stuff”. One of them says: “I can’t figure out how this could have ever come out of nature”. And they’re all looking at the furin cleavage site because they know. This group of scientists knows. That’s the object of research. That’s the goal. It’s never been seen before in a virus like this. It’s the signature right there. But four days later, that group authors the first draft of a paper called The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 that says it’s a natural virus, then published in Nature magazine. The same people who privately said it’s out of a lab. That’s a cover up. This paper is a fraud. It has not been retracted until today. And it’s a fraud.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

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THOMAS FAZI

JUN 05, 2024

See the author's bioblurb at the bottom of this page