State-Sponsored Commercial Espionage: The Global Theft of Ideas — Larry Romanoff

After digesting its massive theft of ideas, things and people from Operation Paperclip following the end of World War Two, the US wasted no time in designing and implementing the world’s largest network of commercial espionage that has ever existed, and one which still exists in vastly expanded form today – as we saw from the revelations by Edward Snowden....

Today, Echelon attempts to intercept and monitor every communications transaction transmitted by satellite, undersea cables, fiber optic, telephone lines, microwave and more, spying on every nation and, if possible, on every person, on earth. Moreover, it sorts and stores all this information in perpetuity, in the world’s largest database located in the American desert, in Bluffdale, Utah. This is state-sponsored commercial espionage on a global scale, intended primarily to benefit US multinational corporations in their quest for global dominance....

But look over there — China, Huawei. (snark)

Actually, "everyone" (that can) does it."

The US is not the only nation engaging in this activity. According to Robert Gates, a former CIA Director, there are about 20 countries that engage in state-sponsored economic espionage in the US. The worst offender is Israel, followed by France, Russia, and Britain. China is not high on this list....

Bill Totten's Weblog
State-Sponsored Commercial Espionage: The Global Theft of Ideas

Larry Romanoff

Ray McGovern — CIA: Mission Accomplished; Americans Believe What We Tell Them

At his first White House performance with other senior officials of the incoming Reagan administration, freshly appointed (but veteran covert action operative) intelligence chief William Casey told President Reagan and the others assembled:“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

Hard to believe? Read below what an eye-witness has attested to:

“I am the source for this quote, which was indeed said by CIA Director William Casey at an early February 1981 meeting of the newly elected President Reagan with his new cabinet secretaries to report to him on what they had learned about their agencies in the first couple of weeks of the administration. The meeting was in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House, not far from the Cabinet Room. I was present at the meeting as Assistant to the Chief Domestic Policy Adviser to the President.

As he did to all the other secretaries of their departments and agencies, Reagan asked Casey what he saw as his goal as director for the CIA, to which he replied with this quote, which I recorded in my notes of the meeting as he said it. Shortly thereafter I told Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who was a close friend and colleague, who in turn made it public.” Barbara Honegger

There are hundreds of examples that could be adduced to show that the major corporate-owned media — whether by intimidation, misguided “patriotism,” or self-censorship — have made Casey’s dream come true....

Ray McGovern
CIA: Mission Accomplished; Americans Believe What We Tell Them

NPR — How The CIA Overthrew Iran's Democracy In 4 Days

On Aug. 19, 2013, the CIA publicly admitted for the first time its involvement in the 1953 coup against Iran's elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

1952: Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.Keystone/Getty Images
The documents provided details of the CIA's plan at the time, which was led by senior officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the grandson of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Over the course of four days in August 1953, Roosevelt would orchestrate not one, but two attempts to destabilize the government of Iran, forever changing the relationship between the country and the U.S. In this episode, we go back to retrace what happened in the inaugural episode of NPR's new history podcast, Throughline....

NPR
How The CIA Overthrew Iran's Democracy In 4 Days

Lawrence Wu and Michelle Lanz

Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effect on the Cold War — Alan Fong interviews Christopher Simpson

Alan Fong interviews Christopher Simpson, author of Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects On the Cold War. Video and summary transcript.

While many people are aware of some aspects of this, Christopher Simpson elaborates some of the details. US policymakers never gave peace a chance after the defeat of Nazi Germany, nor do they do so after the collapse of the USSR.

This is still relevant to US policy of using collaborators and proxies, including neo-Nazis in Ukraine and jihadists in MENA and Central Asia. 

This is a long-standing policy that dates from WWII.

"Blowback" is CIA jargon for unintended, harmful consequences. If this were an isolated occurrence, it would not have generated a special term to refer to it. It's the result of sleeping with the devil. This article reveals how the CIA has been the devil's bitch since the end of WWII. Truman later admitted, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, that his creating the CIA as an intelligence agency that included operations in addition to espionage was "a mistake." Here is the CIA's own historical report; refer to the end for the citation of mistake. Moreover, it was inevitable that the agency would becomes politicized, Christopher Simpson sets forth.

The takeaway? Present policy is an extension of longstanding policy, using the same modus operandi and with the same objectives.

This is a must-read to understand what is going on today behind the scenes. This is not new information. The interview is from 1988. But it could have been written with respect to what is happening in the world today. It takes the wrappers off operational realities that are hidden from public view.

The interview suggests that Blowback is a gripping book. Here is a teaser that cuts to the point.

The question is, well, we really hated Nazis, didn't we? What we hiring these guys for? Didn't we know who they were? This is how it worked. Nazis didn't kinda come into the room with a swastika on, I'm talking about after the war now, with a swastika on their sleeve; and you have some government officials saying, "Oh gee, let's hire us a bunch of Nazis [00:40:00] and go to war against the Russians." Didn't work like that. Here's how it worked: in mid 1948, there was a decision of the National Security Council, and it's known by the code number and NSC 10/2; it's just a code number. And in it, this was a secret declaration of war against the USSR, and it says, quite explicitly, that the United States will undertake guerrilla war against the Soviet Union, sabotage, covert [00:40:30] operations, economic sabotage of various types.

This was unknown to the public at the time, and in fact, the very existence of this decision would be unknown to this day, except for some of the scandals that came out of Watergate were so profound that the existence of this decision was finally pushed into the public domain. That's point number one. There was this declaration of covert warfare. Point number two is, there was a second [00:41:00] decision that happened shortly thereafter, and the code number of that is NSC 20. What that was, it's known as the Containment Doctrine; it's a description of what was the basic strategy of the Americans for dealing with the Soviets during that period.

It says a couple interesting things. First of all, it says that they wanted to avoid an all out war. They wanted to avoid a military type shooting war. What they wanted to do instead, was to contain [00:41:30] the Soviet Union, to ring it around with hostile states, and to restrict the Soviets to the maximum degree possible, and to contribute to the internal stresses and strains inside the Soviet Union; and most particularly to the ethnic stresses and strains inside the Soviet Union, which at times are quite profound. And to boil them in this pot, so to speak until, the Soviets either agreed to cooperate [00:42:00] with the American agenda for international affairs, or collapsed into an internal civil war inside their own country.

And in that context, there's a very interesting passage. It says there's a number of different émigré groups, émigré political groups who wish to return to power in the Soviet Union, any one of which, we, in other words: the Americans, would prefer to be in power than the present government; "But," they continued, " [00:42:30] We're not going to favor one of these groups over the other. We're going to support all of these groups that seek to overthrow Stalin, and support them, more or less, equally with money, political influence, contacts, guns if necessary, so forth."

That decision, in the world of 1948, had a very clear meaning. It meant that these same collaborators that had worked with Berlin during the war, the same people who had been mayors, and police chiefs, and newspaper publishers, as quislings to [00:43:00] the Nazis during the war, who had fled back to Germany with the retreating German Army at the end of the war. That's who these people were who wanted to return to power in the Soviet Union. That's who they were talking about. The names of some of these organizations are the Ukrainian OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Among the people of the Russian ethnic heritage, there's an extremist organization called the NTS, which is roughly translated as the [00:43:30] National Union of Solidarists. This is the way they like to translate it today. During the Nazi period, the translation was much closer to National Socialist Union. Also, among these groups are SS squadrons, particularly from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. These are Baltic countries, to the northern part of the Soviet Union.

[00:44:00] In our decision-making process, we didn't sit down, particularly at the high levels, we didn't sit down and frankly say what was underway. What we did is, developed a series of rationales and a kind of verbal smokescreens, really, that permitted us to sponsor these people without admitting who exactly they were....

Same old, same old today.

KPFK Archives

Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effect on the Cold War

Alan Fong interviews Christopher Simpson

See also

Eagle and Swastika: CIA and Nazi War Criminals and Collaborators
Kevin Conely Ruffner
History Staff, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, April 2003

CIA's Support to Nazi War Criminal Investigations

Kevin C. Rufner

CIA.gov

Related

Sputnik International
Spy Mania: MI5 Reportedly Makes Secret List of MPs With 'Links' to Russia, China

Jeffrey Kaye — REVEALED: There Were Two CIA Torture Programs

A major aspect of the CIA’s detention and interrogation operations has been purposefully hidden from view, primarily due to secrecy guidelines that make it illegal for anyone “read into” the program to reveal even its very existence.

Recent declassified documents make clear that there was not one, but two CIA torture programs. These programs used different interrogation techniques, responded to different bureaucracies within the CIA, and had very different levels of oversight.

This article reveals for the first time a crucial untold aspect of the story behind the construction and development of the CIA’s torture programs, such as we can understand them today (December 2018).…

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse, it does. But look over there — Putin, Russia, Putin, Russia — be afraid, they are coming to take your freedoms.

At the risk of triggering Godwin's law, this is looking more and more like Nazism, especially when coupled with other US government "experiments," such as Project MKUltra.

If CIA was not conducting such medical experiments, why was it afraid it would be charged with doing so? OMS officials seem to have been keenly aware at how close their operations were to breaking federal laws on illegal experimentation on prisoners. They also were worried about a longtime ban on the interrogational use of “mind-altering” drugs which “profoundly altered the senses.”...

Medium
REVEALED: There Were Two CIA Torture Programs

Jeffrey Kaye

Darius Shahtamasebi — The Real Reason Western Media & CIA Turned Against Saudi's MbS

Kashoggi? Human right? Forget about it. 

Wandering off the reservation.

Zero Hedge
The Real Reason Western Media & CIA Turned Against Saudi's MbS
Darius Shahtamasebi

Zero Hedge — How To Explain The Cause Of The Syrian War In 2 Minutes

Good on Jeff Sachs. He has redeemed himself (in two minutes) in my book.

Zero Hedge

How To Explain The Cause Of The Syrian War In 2 Minutes

Tyler Durden

Publius Tacitus — Ditto Colonel Lang

About John Brennan.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Ditto Colonel Lang

Publius Tacitus

See also

US Information classification and clearances

Col. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.)

At the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lang was the Defense Intelligence Officer (DIO) for the Middle East, South Asia and counter-terrorism, and later, the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. At the DIA, he was a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service. He participated in the drafting of National Intelligence Estimates. From 1992 to 1994, all the U.S. military attachés worldwide reported to him. During that period, he also briefed President George H. W. Bush at the White House, as he had during Operation Desert Storm.

He was also the head of intelligence analysis for the Middle East for seven or eight years at that institution. He was the head of all the Middle East and South Asia analysis in DIA for counter-terrorism for seven years. For his service in the DIA, Lang received the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive. — Wikipedia

See also at SST

Munich, Israel’s “Hit Team”, and the Crusade to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn
Decameron

See also

Intel Today

The True Story of the CIA Debacle in China

L

See also

Zero Hedge
FBI Dealt Blow By DC Judge; Must Address Measures Taken To Verify Steele Dossier

Tyler Durden

William Craddick — CIA Teams Up With Defense Industry To Undermine Korea Negotiations

In a new development that will shock no one, factions within the CIA attempted for the second time in just over a month to undermine President Donald Trump’s peace overtures towards North Korea by leaking information calculated to decrease confidence in Kim Jong Un’s willingness to earnestly negotiate.

On June 29, 2018, NBC News released a report quoting anonymous CIA officials who claimed that North Korea was increasing nuclear production at “secret sites” without providing any actual evidence for such claims. The report’s credibility is further weakened by the fact that it also cited reports from a think tank which has strong connections to the defense industry and other private special interests.

In disseminating their report, the CIA used NBC reporter Ken Dilanian as an outlet for leaks. As Disobedient Mediapreviously reported, Dilanian was outed by the Intercept in 2014 as a CIA asset. In the aftermath of the disclosure, Dilanian’s previous employers at the Tribune Washington and Los Angeles Times disavowed the disgraced journalist. In at least one instance, the CIA’s instructions to Dilanian appears to have led to significant changes in a story that was eventually published in the Los Angeles Times.

Since that time, Dilanian has persisted in pushing articles written by former CIA officials who continue to perpetuate the “Trump-Russia” collusion narrative without any regard to facts, such as Steven Hall’s Washington Post article titled: “I was in the CIA. We wouldn’t trust a country whose leader did what Trump did.”…

Are people still falling for this stuff?

Disobedient Media
CIA Teams Up With Defense Industry To Undermine Korea Negotiations

William Craddick

More on Wikipedia, Philip Cross and Wikispooks — 22 May 2018

Intel Today
Wikipedia & the Spooks — The Remake? [The Philip Cross Affair]
L (Ludwig De Braeckeleer)

Craig Murray Blog
Philip Cross Madness Part IV
Craig Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee

John Feffer — The Banality of Haspel

Gina Haspel is just the type of status-quo choice that Donald Trump promised not to make. She’s not a swamp-drainer.

She’s a swamp thing.

Trump doesn't have what it takes to confront the US siloviki.

LobeLog
The Banality* of Haspel

John Feffer

* "Banality" is an allusion to Hannah Arendt's The Banality of Evil.

Gilbert Doctorow — The CIA Got Macron Elected - It Looks Like They Wrote His Big US Speech Too

In this essay, I offer a detailed textual analysis of the speech which French President Emmanuel Macron delivered before the Joint Session of Congress, Washington, D.C. on 25 April 2018, in line with the kind of textual analysis which I performed on major political documents signed by heroic East European freedom fighters in 2007 and 2009, which were in fact authored by US intelligence operatives....

Russia Insider
The CIA Got Macron Elected - It Looks Like They Wrote His Big US Speech Too
Gilbert Doctorow | European Coordinator of The American Committee for East West Accord Ltd.

Joseph Thomas — Vietnam Locks Up US-Funded Agitators

There is a growing understanding of US regime change strategies and tactics. It used to be that the CIA would work covertly to build opposition movements that would remove governments that did not cooperate with the United States and its corporate interests. This still occurs but many of those functions have been buttressed by the US Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. Countries are catching on to this. The article below describes how Vietnam is responding to US funded and trained regime change activists.

Popular Resistance
Vietnam Locks Up US-Funded Agitators

Joseph Thomas, Asia-pacificresearch.com

Kevin Gosztola — Who’s Who Of American War Criminals And Torture Apologists Endorse Gina Haspel For CIA Director

The narrative now is "Assad cannot be allowed to normalize use of chemical weapons."

The US has already normalized the use of torture and illegal aggression.

Firedoglake
Who’s Who Of American War Criminals And Torture Apologists Endorse Gina Haspel For CIA Director

Kevin Gosztola | managing editor of Shadowproof Press and producer and co-host of the weekly podcast, "Unauthorized Disclosure"

Ted Galen Carpenter — The Real Problem with Gina Haspel's CIA Nomination

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed the cautionaryadmonition: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” Too often, we have ignored that warning. Gina Haspel’s defenders assert that her behavior conformed to procedures that senior CIA officials (and presumably the Bush White House) had approved. The international community rejected the “just following orders” defense that defendants invoked at the Nuremberg trials. Haspel’s defense is no more valid or persuasive. We should not accept a female version of the Marquis de Sade to lead the CIA. A refusal to do so would be a modest, but important, first step in reclaiming America’s soul.

The foundation of liberalism is the rule of law regarding human rights and constitutional liberties. I would say that the real problem with respect to liberalism is failure to observe the rule of law, along with failure to hold those violating the law to account.

Liberalism is idealistic, whereas politics and economics are realistic. This leads to paradoxes of liberalism that affect liberal democracy.

Good article. Worth reading the whole thing.

The National Interest
The Real Problem with Gina Haspel's CIA Nomination

Ted Galen Carpenter | senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at the National Interest

Also

A Chilean reports on women torturers under Pinochet.

Counterpunch
It’s Time the United States Accounts for Its History of Torture

Ariel Dorfman

Article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times

Ann Wright — The New CIA Director Nominee and the Massacre at My Lai

The protection of those who commit heinous crimes in the name of the U.S. government (by the government in whose name the crimes are committed) provides a dangerous precedent and could lead to the conclusion by many in the military and CIA that they can “get away with murder.” 

The sad history of our country is that murders and executions (remember the extrajudicial drone assassinations ordered by Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump) are acts that continue to be the policy of our country. These acts are known throughout the world, but seldom spoken about in the United States. That President Trump would nominate a known torturer to be the director of the CIA is horrific. Her confirmation by the U.S. Congress would be a tragedy....

Consortium News

The New CIA Director Nominee and the Massacre at My Lai

Ann Wright, Colonel (ret.), U.S. Army/Army Reserves, and a U.S. diplomat for 16 years serving in U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia

See also

Ralph Drollinger, a 7’1” former professional basketball player who established Capitol Ministries in 1997, has drawn attention for his role as the organizer of a weekly prayer group in the White House. Attendees include Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, and cabinet secretaries Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, Rick Perry, Sonny Perdue, and Jeff Sessions.

Do a search on this character and see what the US cabinet is exposing itself to. It would be bad enough if it were just nuttiness. But it's toxic to liberalism, you know, freedom and democracy.

LobeLog
Is Mike Pompeo as Islamophobic as His Spiritual Adviser?
Eli Clifton

Moon of Alabama — Cambridge Analytica And The Manipulation Of People

MoA-ites correctly distrust every word emanating from the mealy mouthed Guardian because it has been used in a vicious campaign to advance the interests of Zionists to the point where the well being of Guardian readers has been relegated below the interests of apartheid Israel.

Nevertheless having a bit of a shufti at the loudly trumpeted Facebook-Cambridge Analytica expose is an essential act for anyone who wants to try to get a grip on how populations are being deliberately manipulated.

There is a relatively easy to digest video here where Christopher Wyllie, a computer scientist, outlines the birth of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, the CEO and the method used to sell the development of the corporation to Steve Bannon, CA's first customer and Robert Mercer, the Wall Street financier who underwrote the cost of setting up the corporation.

I recommend spending the 13 minutes required to watch the video because Wyllie's summation of what they did and why is horrifying. Lines such as "If you want to change the way a person votes you have to change the culture the person lives within." and "to change a culture, first you have to smash the existing one then grab the pieces and mold it into the shape you want the culture to be"....

Moon of Alabama
Cambridge Analytica And The Manipulation Of People

b

See also

Reuters
Cambridge Analytica CEO claims influence on U.S. election, Facebook questioned
Eric Auchard and David Ingram

Torture Watch

More denial that international law and the Nuremberg precedent apply to US officials "just carrying out orders."

International law only applies to "them" and not to US. (pun intended)

It's clear that the US intelligence services need to be purged of this rot.

Intel Today
Former CIA Robert Baer : “Gina Haspel Used To Work For Me. She’s A Great Choice For CIA Director.”
L

See also at Intel Today

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy Arrested Over Gaddafi Campaign Financing

Peter Van Buren — Gina Haspel: As If Nuremberg Never Happened

Nothing will say more about who we've become as a nation than if a torturer is allowed to head the CIA.

Sums it up. It's bad now, and her nomination makes it worse. But her confirmation and occupying office would be the icing on the cake.

Kills US soft power. It's a gift to enemies of America, too.

The American Conservative
Gina Haspel: As If Nuremberg Never Happened
Peter Van Buren, 24-year State Department veteran

Ray McGovern — Former CIA Chief Brennan Running Scared

In the crosshairs? Not just Brennan either.

None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, or other activities directed against the Trump campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind that it was considered a sure thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which point illegal and extralegal activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not prison.

But she lost.

The "perfect crime" that wasn't. Now "the gang that couldn't shoot straight" is running scared.

The lame street media is doing all it can to create the impression that it's Trump that is at fault.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is dutifully playing its part in the deep-state game of intimidation. The following excerpt from Sunday’s lead article conveys the intended message: “Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting the FBI. ‘This is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI’s going to win,’ said one ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. ‘You can’t fight the FBI. They’re going to torch him.’” [sic]

The Post, incidentally, waited until paragraph 41 of 44 to inform readers that it was the FBI’s own Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General of the Department of Justice that found McCabe guilty, and that the charge was against McCabe, not the FBI. A quite different impression was conveyed by the large headline “Trump escalates attacks on FBI” as well as the first 40 paragraphs of Sunday’s lead article....

Most people don't realize it yet, but the US is in the midst of a constitutional crisis as the result of an attempted soft coup.

Consortium News
Former CIA Chief Brennan Running Scared

Ray McGovern, CIA analyst under seven Presidents and nine CIA directors and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)