As Above, Revolt Below

After posting some initial thoughts about Russiagate last week, especially in relation to Trump's ambiguous relationship with the FBI, I wanted to follow up this week with a more in-depth analysis. Here I would like to explore the potential reasons for this disastrous hoax, while also considering the motives behind those involved. So grab the popcorn, as this particular exploration is quite the comedy of errors.

One of the most interesting developments in the wake of the Mueller report are revived allegations that various Western intelligence agencies, including those in these United States, attempted to entrap various officials working for the Trump campaign. While these allegations have been floating around for well over a year now, the disastrous fallout from the Mueller report has added additional credence to such charges. Several days after the report was delivered to US Attorney General William Barr, Senator Rand Paul(R-Ky) charged: "So they sent spies into the Trump campaign, they tried to entrap Trump officials to admit they were working with Russia."

Paul alleged to have insider sources feeding him this information, but having direct access to the US intelligence community isn't necessary to gauge the validity of these claims. Indeed, after a precursory examination, it is not difficult to see how sketchy several of the "smoking gun" meetings linked to Russian collusion truly are.

A Few Lowlights

Take, for instance, the much-hyped June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr. and Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya. Also present were Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and lobbyist Paul Manafort, a long time associate of the Orange One. Initially, this meeting was portrayed as a bid by the Trump campaign to receive damaging information on Hillary Clinton from a Russian national who, presumably, had acquired it from Russian intelligence. Veselnitskaya has long insisted, however, that all that was discussed at the meeting were sanctions.

At the time, Veselnitskaya was working for a Russian company known as Prevezon. As part of her efforts on behalf this client, Veselnitskaya had hired Fusion GPS to conduct investigations. That would be the same Fusion GPS, a private intelligence company, that produced the infamous Steele dossier. Indeed, Fusion had just been retained at the time to conduct opposition research into the Trump campaign and Veselnitskaya had even met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson on the same morning as the Trump Tower meeting. Both parties have insisted this meeting was unrelated to the later Trump Tower meeting, which would make the meeting highly coincidental and fortuitous at best. At worst, it has a strong whiff of skulduggery about it.

Veselnitskaya

And what of the ominous Trump Tower Moscow project that was initiated in 2015 and continued throughout the 2016 presidential elections? Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, worked closely on this project and later lied to Congress about how long Trump was involved in it. Financing for the project was to be provided by the VTB Bank, an institution owned by the Russia government and under sanctions at the time. What's more, the loan had been procured by a former GRU (Russian military intelligence) officer.

Sounds pretty serious, right? But here's the catch: the former Russian military intelligence officer has also worked with US intelligence, including passing on information related to Russian military technology, the satellite phone numbers of Osama bin Laden, and photographs of a North Korean official purchasing nuclear materials. Further, the long time backer of a Trump Tower in Moscow is a mysterious figure known as Felix Sater, the former managing director of Bayrock Group LLC who is reputed to have extensive ties to organized crime. Sater had been a senior adviser to Trump and The Trump Organization since the early '00s and had been working on developing a Trump Tower in Moscow since at least 2005.

It was Sater who brought the former GRU officer into the project. And like this former GRU officer, Sater has worked with US intelligence community for years, beginning as an FBI informant during the late '90s. In other words, the alleged links to the sanctioned VTB Bank were facilitated by a GRU officer and a gangster with links to the US intelligence community, the latter having maintained ties for nearly two decades.

Mr. Sater, whom we shall encounter again before this piece is finished

Easily the most pathetic effort are the allegations that Roger Stone met with a purported Russian agent to acquire dirt on Hillary during May of 2016. The individual in question, who used the alias "Henry Greenberg," is a Russian national with a criminal history in the these United States. Stone alleges that Greenberg asked for two million dollars in exchange for the information he possessed on Hillary. Stone promptly dismissed Greenberg as a crackpot and that was the end of that.

Later, Stone would allege that Greenberg had in actuality been an FBI informant, a claim of some merit. "Greenberg" did in fact make regular trips between Russia and the United States on behest of the FBI between 2008-2012 and would continue working with the Bureau officially until 2013. The three year gap between Greenberg's work with Bureau and his meeting with Stone has been used as evidence that Greenberg had gone back to work with the Russians. The Atlantic even dredged up a former FBI special agent, one Frank Montoya Jr., to proclaim: "My read on Greenberg is that he was either working at the behest of the Russians or he was freelancing (which means it was at the behest of the Russians)."

Ah yes, because the famed Russian intelligence services would task a man who had just worked with the American FBI three year prior with contacting the Trump campaign in a bid to steal the 2016 election. Its not like this would have been a sensitive operation or anything, so why not enlist a man with a criminal background who had recently collaborated with the US intelligence community?

The International Man of Mystery

But as sketchy as the Trump Tower meeting and Stone's May 2016 face-to-face with Greenberg are, nothing can quite surpass the curious fortunes of George Papadopoulos, the man who allegedly spurred the FBI's investigation after drunkenly boasting to an Australian diplomat that the Russians were in possession of material that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton (emails were never discussed in this meeting, as is often claimed). As with Stone's curious meeting with Mr. Greenberg, this occurred in May of 2016. The diplomat in question later reported this conversation to the FBI, setting in motion the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

Papadopoulos

Papadopoulos had officially joined Trump's campaign as a foreign policy adviser on March 21, 2016. Earlier that month, Papadopoulos had visited Link Campus University in Rome, a university that has been used to train Western intelligence agents, including those from the FBI and CIA. It was during this time that he first met a highly mysterious figure known as Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese national who allegedly helped set up the Link Campus. Mifsud is an absolutely crucial figure to the Russiagate narrative --arguably the linchpin. Mifsud has been widely described as a Russian intelligence agent by the Western media.

During their time together in Rome, Mifsud alleged to Papadopoulos that he had high level contacts within the Russian government. Three days after officially joining Trump's campaign, Papadopoulos met again with Mifsud, this time in London. Mifsud was accompanied by a woman whom he allegedly introduced as a relative of Vladimir Putin (Mifsud himself later denied this claim). Papadopoulos would again meet with Mifsud in London a little over a month later (April 26, 2016, to be exact). This time, Mifsud allegedly boasted to Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary in the form of thousands of emails. Apparently, it was this particular claim that spurred Papadopoulos' ill conceived boasts to the Australian ambassador.

The question then becomes, how plausible is it that Mifsud was an agent of the Russian government?

Mifsud

 The answer: Not very likely.

While there is no question that Mifsud had dealings with Russian officials at times, and was a regular participant in the Valdai Discussion Club and the Russian International Affairs Council, Russia-based think tanks with ties to the government there, the bulk of his contacts were with fellow academics (Mifsud himself is a professor). Mifsud's highest level contact in the Russian government appears to have been academic Ivan Timofeev, who is involved with both of the above-mentioned think tanks. While Timofeev is highly respected in academic circles in Russia and linked to the nation's Foreign Affairs Ministry, he appears to be a minor official at best.

Conversely, Mifsud appears to have longstanding ties to Western intelligence services. One of his principal patrons at the Link Campus was Vincenzo Scotti, a former Italian Interior Minister and intelligence asset. He also had a longstanding relationship with British diplomat Claire Smith, a former member of the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The JIC oversees the UK's entire intelligence community, including GCHQ (the UK's NSA), MI5, and MI6. It is the senior intelligence assessment body in the UK and a part of the Cabinet Office. As such, Smith would have access to much of the intelligence being generated by the UK's secret services.

Another curious link of Mifsud's is to an Riyadh-based think tank, likely the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies. The think tank was run by Prince Turki al Faisal, who headed Saudi intelligence for nearly a quarter of a century before becoming an ambassador to the UK and US in the wake of 9/11. Prince Turki has long maintained close ties to the Bush family and especially the US intelligence community.

"Prince Turki had been a subject of CIA interest ever since his father had sent him to prep school at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. Agency talent spotters on the faculty at Georgetown University kept close track of Turki until he dropped out of Georgetown to return home at the outbreak of the 1967 war with Israel. After later completing his education in England, Turki again returned home to prepare himself to eventually succeed his uncle Kamal Adham as director of Saudi Intelligence...

"Both Prince Turki and Sheikh Kamal Adham would play enormous roles in servicing a spy network designed to replace the official CIA while it was under congressional scrutiny between the time of Watergate and the end of the Carter administration. The idea of using the Saudi royal family to bypass the American Constitution did not originate in the Kingdom. Adham was initially approached by one of the most respected and powerful men in Washington, Clark Clifford, who rose to power under Harry Truman and had enjoyed a relationship with the intelligence community for years...

"Prince Turki himself acknowledge the private network for the first time in an uncharacteristically candid speech given to Georgetown University alumni in February 2002: 'And now I will go back to the secret that I promised to tell you. In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. The principal aim of this club was that we would share information with each other and help each other in countering Soviet influence worldwide, and especially in Africa. In the 1970s, there were still some countries in Africa that were coming out of colonialism, among them Mozambique, Angola, and I think Djibouti. The main concern of everybody was that the spread of Communism was taking place while the main country that would oppose Communism was tied up. Congress had literally paralyzed the work not only of the US intelligence community but of its foreign service as well. And so the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe at the time when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don't know. I'm not saying it because I look to tell secrets, but because the time has gone and many of the actors are gone as well. 

"Turki's 'secret' was that the Saudi royal family had taken over intelligence financing for the United States. It was during this time period that the Saudis opened up a series of covert accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington. Starting in the mid-1970s, bank investigators say, these accounts show that tens of millions of dollars were being transferred between CIA operational accounts and accounts controlled by Saudi companies and the Saudi embassy itself. Turki worked directly with agency operatives like Sarkis Soghanalian and Ed Wilson..."

(Prelude to Terror, Joseph J. Trento, pgs. 100-102)

Prince Turki

Turki had then effectively helped set up a "private CIA" to circumvent Congress during the mid-1970s. The CIA director at the time? George H.W. Bush. For more information on the infamous Safari Club, one of the chief fronts for this private CIA, check here.

Curiously, Mifsud was also director for a time of an entity known as the Centre for War and Peace Studies, a research center based out of the Link Campus University. Link was one of the two principal sponsors behind the Centre, the other being a Saudi charity known as Essam & Dalal Obaid Foundation (EDOF). EDOF is headed by an individual with longstanding links to Prince Turki and Saudi intelligence.

Mifsud's links to the Saudis, besides strongly suggesting connections to the Western security services, also places him firmly within the camp of the neo-liberal/globalist elite. This connection is further bolstered by his friendship with Link Campus colleague Gianni Pittella, a member of the European Parliament who headed the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats group in the parliament from 2014-2018. Pittella attended the 2016 Democratic National Convention where he made a big splash by taking a very vocal position against Republican candidate Donald Trump while also endorsing Hillary. Pittella has had a longstanding friendship with Mifsud.

Pittella

Needless to say, all of this should raise serious doubts about the notion that Mifsud was officially connected to the Russia government, or some type of spy for said government. These notions are further discredited by the actions of US officials after Papadopoulos had first mentioned Mifsud to the FBI on January 27, 2017. The FBI would then interview Mifsud between February 8-12 of that year, with no arrest occurring. Mifsud would continue to meet with senior UK officials during 2017, with the US seemingly taking no actions to warn their European counterparts about Mifsud's potential links to Russian intelligence.

If Mifsud was in fact a Russian spy playing a central role in establishing a channel to the Trump campaign, these actions are completely inexplicable. Further exasperating the credibility of Mifsud-as-a-Russian-spy are the inaction against his former colleagues in the wake of his 2018 disappearance. If in fact Mifsud was a spy for the Russians, he arguably was one of the most well placed in history. Through Link, he had established ample contacts throughout Western intelligence and diplomatic services, meaning that any number of his former colleagues could also be Russian agents. Surely this would have been of great concern to various Western intelligence services, and yet little effort has been made to find Mifsud since his disappearance so as to determine who he had compromised and/or recruited.

In other words, the lack of action on the part of Western security services strongly indicates that they do not take seriously the allegations that Mifsud is a Russian spy. If they did, he surely would have been arrested by the FBI in February of 2017 as he was allegedly the chief point of contact between Trump and the Russians. That he was let go speaks volumes. That no serious effort has been made to find him, despite colleagues insisting that he is hiding out in the Italian countryside with the aid of Italian intelligence (which was worked closely with the CIA since the end of WWII) should close the door on the notion that he is a Russian spy.

A Theater of the Absurd

Of course, the Steele dossier and what appears to have been numerous efforts to entrap Trump officials were not all that was on display. Who can forget the bizarre role of Stefan Halper, an acknowledged FBI informant placed in the Trump campaign. As was noted before here, Halper is a lifelong Republican with strong ties to the Bush family --to the point that he appears to have been running a spy ring within the Carter White House leading up to the 1980 Presidential Election on behalf of former CIA director and vice-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush. Halper had been working with Jeb Bush's campaign (it is widely believed supporters of Jeb are who initially hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump) for the 2016 elections, and then appears to have latched onto Trump's team in the spring of that year with the intention of spying.

Special Agent Walrus

Halper targeted the hapless Papadopoulos, among others. Halper met Papadopoulos several times in London with a Turkish woman described as his assistant. During at least one of these meetings, Halper brought up the the DNC email hack allegedly leaked by the Russians. He reportedly pressed Papadopoulos on this issue, leading the Trump official to believe that Halper was recording him with the intention of entrapping him. Halper's assistant, a woman named Azra Turk, also brought up the emails with Papadopoulos over drinks. She also allegedly flirted with him aggressively and invited him to meet her in Chicago (Papadopoulos lived there at the time). As such, the possibility exists that in addition to being targeted by two separate informants, a honey trap was also being laid for Papadopoulos. How big of a dupe did they think this guy is?

Using Halper was certainly a bizarre choice. After all, Roger Stone had recently written a book (with the son of E. Howard Hunt no less) attacking Jeb Bush and noting Halper's role in 1980 election intrigues on the part of Bush I. Surely, a few red flags were raised when Halper began cozying up to Trump officials. After all, even George Papadopoulos appears to have figured out that something was amiss with the man. But the coup de grace had to have been Halper openly endorsing Hillary right before the election.

***

Then question then becomes --why did the anti-Trumpers go to such great lengths to fabricate Russian collusion within the Trump campaign? After all, its not like there weren't any number of actual crimes that could have been used to stop Trump. If you want collusion with a foreign government, why not address the numerous improprieties between Trump officials and Israel? And what of Trump's numerous links to organized crime, which this blog has chronicled here, here, and here. 

Well, the problem with going after actual collusion with a foreign government is that both parties are thoroughly compromised in this sense, as I noted before here. And as for going after Trump's ample ties to organized crime, well, that might turn up somethings that would be very damaging to Democratic royalty as well. Consider, for instance, Trump's potential ties to a Kentucky-based crime syndicate known as the Company, noted before here and here. The Company. whose heyday was during the late 1970s and early 1980s, was comprised largely of former military and law enforcement personnel, was deeply involved in illegal drug and arms trafficking, and appears to have close ties to the administration of Kentucky governor John Y. Brown. During the early 1980s, Trump appears to have become close with John Y. and his wife, Phyllis George.

And so too did the Clintons during this era. As such, a thorough investigation into the Company would potential cause as many issues for the Clintons as Trump. The same could be set for Trump's mafia ties in NYC, where the mob had worked closely with the Democratic Party for decades. Do TPTB really want to dig too deeply into these murky waters?

John Y. Brown, Phyllis George, and Trump are standing for this picture taken during early 1980s in the midst of the Kentucky Derby season. Hillary Clinton looks on at the far left

There are no easy explanations for why anti-Trump forces felt the need to fabricate largely wholesale this Russian collusion narrative. As indicated above, it may have simply been because they needed something that wouldn't blow back on the forces behind the anti-Trumpers. Of course, fabricating this narrative is not without risks, as I'm sure John O. Brennan and James Clapper are just now starting to realize. Was it hubris, a mistaken belief that they could unseat Trump before light was shed on this bogus narrative, that drove them to embrace Russiagate? Or were both factions working together for a more sinister agenda?

Brennan and The Clap

Given the close ties Brennan and Clapper have to the private intelligence racket, and the close links various Trump officials have to the private military industry, such a possibility can not be discounted. Keep in mind, Erik Prince has been vigorously pushing to outsource the war in Afghanistan, potentially the first of further moves to privatize the national security state. If Russiagate proves to be as disastrous to the US intelligence community as the Iraqi WMDs debacle, Prince's proposal could gain real traction. 

But there is also a stark divide between the pro and anti Trump forces in the national security state. Brennan and Clapper, the two officials believed to have been at the forefront of launching Russiagate, are career intelligence officers with backgrounds in intelligence analysis and signals intelligence (SIGNIT), respectively. Neither man appears to have had a lot of expertise in covert operations, and appear to have been groomed for top posts in CIA and military intelligence, respectively. By contrast, the bulk of Trump backers drawn from the ranks of the national security state --which include Prince, General Michael T. Flynn, General Keith Kellogg, and General William G. Boykin (more information on this rogue's gallery can be found here) --are all special operations forces veterans with ample experience running covert operations. As such, while men like Brennan and Clapper may have set policy, it often fell to men like Prince, Flynn, Kellogg and Boykin to implement it in the field. 

What's more, there appears to be a lot of bad blood between Team Trump and the Obama administration. Of course, we can start with Trump himself. There has been much speculation that one of the catalysts for Trump's presidential run was the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association dinner where Trump was publicly humiliated by Obama himself. Assuming that this blog is correct, and Trump himself has been running black operations involving the mob and other unsavory elements since at least the late 1970s, its easy to see why being called out by a former community organizer might have got in the Orange One's craw.

Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents dinner

And then there's Erik Prince. While still CEO of Blackwater, the company's CIA contracts were canceled once Obama assumed office. To add insult to injury, Prince's CIA work was allegedly "outed" by Leon Panetta (another anti-Trumper), Obama's original CIA director and later Secretary of Defense. Prince left Blackwater in 2010 and did not work for the US government again during the Obama years. Having lost his company and millions of dollars of government contracts surely stung Prince a bit.

Erik Prince during better days

Elsewhere, General Michael T. Flynn was forced to retire before his tenure as director of the DIA was complete due to pressure from Obama officials. One of those, incidentally, was James Clapper. Flynn was not the only Trump backer Clapper has ruffled the feathers of, either. General William G. Boykin had left government service in 2007, after Rumsfeld had been outed as Secretary of Defense and replaced by Robert Gates, a long time Bush family alley. At the time Boykin was serving a the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, his boss being controversial neo-con Stephen Cambone. Gates quickly took steps to change this state of affairs by making Clapper the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence after Cambone resigned.

"... After taking Cambone's job, Clapper moved quickly to dismantle some of Cambone's prized programs. In April 2007, after ordering a review of the Counterintelligence Field Activity Office, he terminated CIFA's massive Talon database, which over a period of six years a compiled dossiers on thousands of U.S. citizens...

"Gates showed his cards again in May 2007, when he accepted the retirement of General William Boykin, who had overseen the Pentagon's counterterrorism operations and command of the Joint Intelligence Operations Centers. Gates replaced him with Major General Richard Zahner, the NSA's director of signals intelligence. This, too, sent a strong message: Boykin have been one of the biggest proponents of dispatching Pentagon intelligence collectors abroad to gather information for future military operations, a practice that Gates and Clapper quickly ended in 2007. Now the military's covert operations would be run by a technocrat skilled in the classified arts of electronic eavesdropping and information sharing. Putting an NSA man loyal to the DNI in Boykin's place meant, first, no more ranting about Muslims following 'the devil'; and, second, someone whose loyalties were to the national agencies – the NSA, the NGA, and the NRO – rather than to the Pentagon."

(Spies for Hire, Tim Shorrock, pgs. 181-182)

During his time as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Boykin had gone to great lengths to increase the Pentagon's HUMINT (human intelligence) capabilities. As Jeremy Scahill reports in Dirty Wars, a staunch opponent of this process had been John O. Brennan. Indeed, Brennan and Clapper appear to have been at the forefront to reverse Bush II era intelligence reforms that Boykin had played a key role in launching. And here Brennan and Clapper are in an all out war with the Trump regime while Boykin remains close to Keith Kellogg, whom he has known for 35 years. It is also highly likely that Prince and Flynn have had dealings with Boykin during his tenure as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence as well.

Boykin

These connections stretch coincidence and strongly imply that there is bad blood between the pro and anti Trump factions stretching back to at least the Bush II years. As such, I do believe the civil war is quite real, and both ideological and personal in nature. In the case of Trump's national security backers, the whole thing has the air of a revolt against the bureaucratic classes within the CIA and Pentagon from their former subordinates tasked with directly waging the empire's wars. Unfortunately for Brennan and the Clap, despite the numerous high level post they've held over the years, they do not seem to be as well versed in the dark arts as the empire's field operators. And this is hardly a surprise.

Epilogue: The FBI Revolt

In the theme of a revolt from below against the bureaucracy, something similar appears to be happening in the FBI. In the companion piece to this one, I noted the longtime associate both Trump and his political mentor, Roy Cohn, had with the Bureau. There I speculated that this relationship may have influenced the actions of Robert Mueller and James Comey in reversing Trump's political fortunes in 2019 and 2016, respectively.

But upon further research, I have found compelling evidence that Mueller and Comey were being pressured from below. Specifically, from the Bureau's New York field office. Within the FBI, there appears to be a similar divide between field agents and the Washington bureaucracy that I have outlined above within the CIA and Pentagon. Reportedly, the New York office is especially resentful of their superiors in Washington and this came to a head over the Hillary Clinton email scandal. Comey allegedly committed his October Surprise weeks before the 2016 election out of fear that the New York office would soon leak the recent discovery of emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop that were considered relevant into the ongoing Clinton email investigation.

Reportedly, factions within the New York FBI office were fanatically anti-Hillary and pro-Trump. This is interesting in light of Trump's longstanding relationship with mobster and longtime FBI informant Felix Sater. Sater has had dealings with The Trump Organization since the early 2000s, eventually becoming a crucial adviser around 2006 and would continue to work with the organization up until 2016. Sater also worked as an FBI informant for much of this time as well. When Sater was first "turned" during the late 1990s, his original handler was an FBI agent known as Leo Taddeo. At the time, Taddeo was working with the New York office, which he would continue to work (after doing some work overseas) with until 2015, at which point he was the Special Agent in Charge of New York's Cyber/Special Operations Division. Given that Sater has been based out of New York for decades now, it is likely he enjoyed an ongoing relationship with the New York office.

the FBI's New York field office

Isn't it interesting that a longtime business partner of Trump's happened to be an FBI informant with links to the New York office, the same New York office that played a crucial role in forcing Comey's October Surprise? And even more interesting is the fact that several crucial members of Special Council Robert Mueller's staff also had ample dealings with Sater over the years. And what if Sater was aware of damaging information from his time as an FBI informant working with these investigators? Certainly that would have effected Mueller's investigation, to put it mildly.

Final Thoughts

The more I look at these threads, the more convinced I become that Trump's  election was driven by a revolt from the lower levels of the national security state against their DC overlords. Despite the tremendous resources these overlords have at their disposal via the neoliberal elite --including control of the media (both old school and social), academia, NGOs, most of the major cities in these United States, and so on --they're proven largely ineffectual at stemming this revolt. While this may seem surprising on the surface, the opposition largely consists of the men (and even a few women) tasked with enforcing the post-9/11 national security state. They have overseen repressive measures at home and toppled numerous countries at home throughout the twenty-first century. As such, Brennan, Clapper, Mueller, Comey, and their ilk are likely in for a very rude awakening.

As is the American public at large if this covert civil war spills out into the open.