The Origins of the Ukraine War
U.S. and NATO involvement in the February 2014 Coup and Maidan Massacre
Source: Covert Action Magazine
Ukraine 2014: The Tipping Point of Terror
By Jim Cole
April 2, 2023
Part I of a CAM investigation into the origins of the Ukraine War: U.S. and NATO involvement in the February 2014 Coup and Maidan Massacre, and their historical antecedents
As I write, the world is on the edge of nuclear and humanitarian crises after a year of the Ukraine “proxy” war with Russia. No single event can be seen as the sole cause, but the most dramatic lurch in the story was the “Revolution of Dignity” in Ukraine in November 2013 to February 2014, notably the horrific massacre of protesters and police in Maidan (Independence) Square on February 20, 2014.
Without dismissing the large sectors of Ukrainian society with legitimate grievances against corruption and stagnation, this was a bloody coup d’état, engineered largely by the U.S. over years with parts played by NATO puppets and local proxies. Viktor Yanukovych was elected in internationally recognized fair elections, and new elections were planned to occur within a year. But powerful interests and a large section of the public believed it could not wait as he could not be trusted. And he was chased out of the country like a hunted animal.
And, like all “color revolutions,” despite the underlying legitimate grievances, it was no true upheaval or revolution at all, it was simply local elites of the same class switching their allegiances to another external power. As Ukrainian political researcher Volodymyr Ishchenko describes, four groups gained power after the violent 2014 coup: “the oligarchic opposition, the NGOs, the far right and Washington-Brussels.”[1]
Many protesters congregated in Maidan Square from late November to February, sparked by the governments reticence to agree to the EU association agreement and its clauses on economic reform. Initially peaceful, the protests experienced periodic escalations in violence, often precipitated when things were settling down.
But it was the sniper attack of February 20, 2014, that was the crucial event that pushed things over the edge and led to the violent overthrow of the government, the consolidation of elements of fascist power in the government, and snowballed into the annexation of Crimea, a civil (and proxy) war in Donbas and the 2022 Russian “invasion” or “Special Operation Z,” depending on which side of the prism one is. The official and Western-implied view is that it was Yanukovych, or perhaps Russian-backed snipers, behind the massacre, yet those events received barely any coverage and no conclusive investigation or trial has occurred.
Who were the snipers? Who trained them? Who paid them? Who planned it? Who ordered it? Who benefited? Who covered it up and why?
The Liberal-Fascist Alliance: Imperial Terrorism
Before we look at the influence of U.S. soft power on events, it is essential to consider the history of U.S. support of fascist and nationalist groups during the Cold War, including the recruitment of hundreds of Nazis in the Reinhardt Gehlen organization to develop the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND)[2] and the use of diaspora Croatian and Ukrainian nationalists-fascists as spies and covert actors.[3]
This dual track of elite power—using both soft social democratic or liberal and hard fascist hands—is neither new nor a U.S. invention. For example, the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919 by fascist Freikorps were pursuant to orders of Gustav Noske of the Social Democratic Party.[4]
Mark Twain was so taken aback at the “banditry” of Teddy Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Cabot Lodge’s vile lurch into global imperialism that he suggested the flag should be changed into black and white stripes with skull and crossbones replacing the stars.[5] One hundred and twenty years later, and perhaps as many million people killed in aggressions of regime change and counterinsurgency since, the comparison to piracy seems a quaint anachronism.
When your modus operandi is anti-communism, fascists are your best friends. In fact, the rabid anti-communism was and is itself a front for corporate imperialism, and its true aim was and is to crush any resistance, whether it is indigenous sovereignty or an uncooperative local elite.
In the recent post-war U.S. context, in parallel to the “left-hand” overt and covert support of center-left political actors—a sort of “democracy washing”—there were simultaneous “right-hand” covert recruitments of fascist militias across the world. In Europe (and Turkey), for example, there were (are?) the Operation Gladio-type military-intelligence “stay-behind operations” that also apparently practiced a “strategy of tension” terrorism under U.S.-NATO control.[6]
Similar imperial terror strategies of sabotage, death squads, torture and propaganda were also used in Asia (e.g., the CIA’s Edward Lansdale/General Thé’s terrorist bombing campaign in Saigon 1952–53,[7] Operation Phoenix in Vietnam and similar operations earlier in the Philippines and Indonesia), Latin America (e.g., funding, training and intelligence support for police, military and paramilitaries in Operation Condor counterinsurgency in the Southern Cone and death squads in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador) and the Middle East, such as Shah-era SAVAK torture and assassination and the use of so-called Mujahadeen, Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and ISIS-ISIL mercenary-terrorist groups in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.[8]
Lest we forget, the Homeland is no exception to imperial aggression, and counterinsurgency (including provocateurism and terror) was and is rife; the FBI’s COINTELPRO was the enemy of any group even hinting at challenging the power structure and would not hesitate to intimidate, incarcerate or assassinate (most often in overzealous police raids as in Fred Hampton’s case), especially when their targets got geopolitically wise; its PATCON agents (including a German BND agent)[9] riddled and provoked the right-wing militia movement in the 1990s; the CIA’s Operation CHAOS along with Army intelligence monitored hundreds of thousands of anti-war activists and infiltrated, rattled and incited thousands of organizations; and the FBI’s GOON squads terrorized and neutralized the American Indian Movement.[10] Once one understands that the priority is counterinsurgency—elite power protecting itself—and not public or national safety, the violence and illegality of these operations are indefensible. And this is perhaps only the tip of a vast and disturbing iceberg, not to mention the links almost always found, when one takes the time to dig, between intelligence agents and terrorist acts on even cursory research of an event.
Back to foreign policy: in the end, to win a client-state against the interests of the majority of its citizens, a final push of terror, shock and violence is often needed for both regime change and—once a state is a client—to protect the regime with counterinsurgency operations. Once the masses are terrorized and traumatized or disenfranchised, it is much easier to maintain the status quo, and the elites might consider the country “stabilized.”
But the goons and dragoons that do the dirty work of empire are largely only pawns, radicalized with weaponized nationalism to face killing and death without squinting in the service of empire. Meanwhile, safely a few steps detached and hidden behind the façade of liberalism or feigned benevolence and endless trails of front organizations, the power players keep their hands clean and faces out of sight. These psychotic puppeteers use their psychotic puppets as agents of chaos, division and terror against the masses and their enemies.
In Ukraine, you do not have to look far to see an 80-year history of U.S. meddling with fascist groups for their own ends. The oldest is the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) which was formed in the 1920s, made up the 14th Waffen SS Division during World War II, and its Bandera OUN-B branch. After OUN head Stepan Bandera was killed in 1959, Yaroslav Stetsko became its leader and, like many fascist-nationalist leaders across Eastern Europe, was chosen by U.S. intelligence—initially military intelligence, later the CIA—as their man to fight communism by any means necessary and, ultimately, like all of these brainwashed psychos, as a tool of U.S. imperialism.[11]
More recent groups are the Ukrainian National Assembly—Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO), founded in the 1990; its 2013 offshoot, Right (Pravy) Sector, founded by Dmytro Yarosh; and Svoboda, formed from the OUN.
All of these ultra-nationalist groups and more were supported by U.S. politicians and agencies before the coup, were present at Maidan, and formed the leadership and majority of the “Maidan self-defense.” Svoboda—supported by the U.S.—had already gained 10% of the vote by 2012, no doubt thanks to a savvy political grooming of their leader and violent anti-Semite Oleh Tyahnybok.[12] After the coup, Svoboda and Right Sector leadership gained prominent positions in Poroshenko’s post-coup government. Svoboda’s new politicians, for example, included Oleksandr Sych as Vice Premier for Economic Affairs, co-founder Andriy Parubiy as Secretary of the Security and National Defense Committee, as well as ministers for education, agriculture, and the environment.[13]
One can also see “Gladio-B” parallels in the use of jihadists, mujahadeen and “moderate rebels” in the 1980s to the present, and some consider the training, funding and arming of neo-fascists more recently as a “Gladio-C.” (As a report by the Counter Extremism Project stated in an April 2020 report on Ukraine: “In 2019, right-wing extremism effectively replaced jihadi terrorism as the number one threat to internal/homeland security of the countries of the broader West.”)[14]
In many of these projects there have been accusations of assassination and terrorism, including “false-flag” operations that blame an atrocity or outrage on the target in order to increase state authority, destabilize and weaken enemies, precipitate invasion or intervention, drive the permanent war economy and marginalize left-wing (or more correctly, “non-aligned”) politics.
As Italian fascist and convicted bomber Vincenzo Vinciguerra said in 1992 of CIA-NATO Operation Gladio’s strategy of tension that killed hundreds in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s: “You were supposed to attack civilians, women children…innocent people outside of the political arena for one simple reason: To force the Italian public to turn to the state…turn to the regime and ask for greater security.”[15] It is the elite’s covert use of military, intelligence, police and paramilitary fascist might to maintain control in so-called liberal democracies.
As well as state terrorism, these sleeper cell “stay-behind networks” also perform sabotage operations, and there is no doubt that equivalent forces are still active and under CIA-DIA-NATO direction in most enemy states, including Russia and Belarus.[16] And it seems such cells were activated there before the Russian attack of February 24, 2022.
Mainstream media, particularly recently, claim Ukraine as a legitimate democracy, with the defense that the parliamentary vote is less right wing than other European nations. However, the continued co-opting of fascists into state power by other means, and reverence for fascist heroes such as Stepan Bandera, speaks of deeper roots. For example, in the early 1990s, officials from the Ukraine Defense Ministry attended an SS Galician Division reunion in Kyiv, whilst a similar reunion occurred in Lviv, endorsed by the city council and celebrated with the renaming of a street after Stepan Bandera, one that ironically had been called Peace Street.[17]
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More recently, as part of a tsunami-level neo-liberal PR campaign, the fascist brown is liberally whitewashed by both internal players seeking political power and the external U.S. and EU power-brokers not wanting their pawns weakened. It is important to look for blips in this whitewashing to see behind the propaganda to the true power of fascists in Ukraine. When you rule by fear, you do not need to be large in number, only in the right positions to create, validate and use that fear.
The fact that Zelensky is Jewish is often mentioned by the naïve or deceptive as an obvious sign that “Ukraine can’t be that fascist.” But this ignores the strange bedfellows of money and power politics, particularly in a region that has been pumped full of aid, gas money, corrupted investment and propaganda for decades, and has long been a battleground between the U.S. and Russia as well as between a large minority of Ukrainians and Russia.
Behind Zelensky and many of the notorious nationalist-fascist militias in the Donbas war, such as the Azov Battalion, is Ihor Kolomoisky, the PrivatBank and Burisma-linked billionaire.
Not only is he accused by the U.S. Department of Justice of millions in fraud and embezzlement, but Federal Court records show a far greater level of embezzlement that triggered a recession in Ukraine: “Between 2006 and 2015, more than $4.45 billion was transferred without any apparent effort by the banks or the government to stem the movement of dollars as the oligarch and his partners acquired an enormous [U.S.] real estate portfolio.”[18] Yet, for the most part, the government, Deutsche Bank and mainstream media continue to look the other way. “He might be a totally corrupt oligarch with no morals, but he’s our guy!”
Apart from the shared source of income, Ukrainian politicians have had very real threats of assassination from the neo-fascists, and I believe they continue to take them seriously.
Like other post-Soviet countries, Ukrainian civic activists, largely working for or influenced by U.S. and EU-funded NGOs, can hold what can seem a paradoxical combination of nationalist, neo-liberal and pro-EU views.[19] For example, during the 2013-14 protests, the EuroMaidan press—a George Soros-funded media central to the movement—published a piece defending even clearly hard-line fascists such as Dmytro Yarosh and their violence as a necessary force for change. Paradoxical views, like cognitive dissonance, are a sign that you are being manipulated.
A sort of “my bully is the good bully” moral ambiguity, and a recipe for escalation and disaster. This willingness to co-opt extremism (or be co-opted by extremists) even extends to ISIS-trained Jihadi fighters of the Sheikh Mansur Brigade, who came fresh from Syria and were managed by the Right Sector in the war in Donbas.
Even more broadly, liberals seem not to grasp nor have memory of basic geopolitics, the “offensive realist” or realpolitik view as openly decreed by many prophets of U.S. imperial policy like Zbigniew Brzezinski, George Kennan, Robert Gates, Alexander Haig and the neocons of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)—let alone the covert action, soft power and slick PR that hides realpolitik behind a façade of a surreal Disney-on-the-Deathstar show.
They are trapped by their own privilege, a framing by corporate media, and in the naïve belief that their leaders practice what they preach as their billion-dollar PR campaigns turn darkness into light. I call it the “propagandascope.”
In this insane view, complete acquiescence to U.S./NATO/West/North—whatever you want to call the neo-liberal empire—is called “neutrality”; there are no other ways of living; history is over and resistance is futile. And because of its righteousness, its professed liberal values—its true sole value being elite profit motive—it is an inevitable and manifest destiny, as the unprecedented powerbrokers of the first American century, like the Dulles brothers and Henry Luce—all sons of Presbyterian ministers—believed. America, god and the free market.
Soft-Power Imperialism
“In a counterinsurgency situation the primary sources of insurgent strength are not a strong military organization and its technological industrial support, but the sources of discontent of the people within the nation, and thus, the people themselves.” — Special Operations Research Office, 1962 [20]
The greatest trick of empire is to hide in plain sight; the main aims of empire are to protect itself, neutralize its threats and to grow. Its main weapon for all of this is psychology—the appeal of virtue on one side, the threat of fear and anger on the other—and the most powerful form of this is the political use of atrocity to control the population.
After the exposures of clandestine imperialism of the CIA, et al., in the 1970s’ congressional investigations, and related whistleblowing from greats like Philip Agee (who incidentally offers an excellent, concise description of soft power in this 2005 interview), John Stockwell and Ralph McGehee, the CIA’s political action methods of imperialism evolved to overt soft power methods of NGOs, as neo-liberalism and spin took hold after the 1970s scandals and Vietnam failure.
The New Cold War started as the last one was ending, with a U.S. drive for global unipolar “benevolent” hegemony, later termed “full-spectrum dominance.” USAID began Ukraine projects in 1991 and recently described its interventions there as a 30-year partnership that “helped establish a vibrant and independent media, an active civil society, and a broader entrepreneurial class.”
This groundwork and astroturfing ensures that development is toward the American beacon and sphere of influence in terms of politics, economics, military, national security, civil society, labor, academia, culture and media; most importantly, it is intended that markets and resources (such as gas) are opened for U.S. and European multinational corporate exploitation.
As more and more soft-power influence has developed through countless and ever-multiplying USAID, State Department, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) as well as European and the “philanthropic” projects of George Soros [whose International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been in Ukraine since 1989] and Pierre Omidyar, events in Ukraine escalated under Obama and through State Department -eocons such as Victoria Nuland and their Military-Industrial connections.
Nuland is the ex-CEO of war hawk Democratic think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and wife of PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan. Might as well call them all Republocrats or Demublicans, especially when it comes to imperial foreign policy.
Soft power includes political, diplomatic, cultural and media influence to co-opt civic and political leaders and capture the hearts and minds of the people. The darker side of this is sanctions, weaponizing aid (including IMF aid) as leverage as well as covert actions such as sabotage, provocateurism, assassinations and other “destabilizations” to create a society rotten-ripe for regime change. We will discuss the soft power apparatus developed in Ukraine in more detail in part II
Regime Change
Regime change requires an infiltration of society by the flow of (largely U.S. taxpayer) money to build infrastructure and cultural and political influence in a target state over years. In current USAID Orwellian parlance, these soft-power projects are called “stabilization and transition,” i.e., destabilization and regime change.
The local effect of each dollar and each project amplifies and is amplified by the level of public discontent, the weakness of local government and the level of opposition control of local and international media. Although color revolutions are largely an information war of hearts and minds, where the government is legitimate and has significant local support, brutal tactics of insurgency are ultimately needed for regime change.
The main strategies of regime change are:
Soft power: Provide weaponized aid, development, humanitarian assistance and media to win public opinion, ideology and culture.
Political co-opting: Co-opt and unite opposition, ideally including military leaders.
Political grooming: Train and fund a new generation of overt agents of change, the future political leaders (e.g., the World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders” program).
Covert Action/Black operations: Train and fund covert agents of change (often fascist or extremist) to do the dirty work of insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Narrative control: Develop a sympathetic media.
Economic warfare: Diplomatic isolation, sanctions and sabotage to “make the economy scream.”[21]
Mobilization: Organize mass protests and PR with media control, while also warning that “there will be blood.”
Provocateurism: Goons and dragoons of power engineer provocation, confrontation, outrage and chaos and the soft arm controls the media analysis through immediate (social media), short (mainstream news) and long term (NGO reports and books).
Assassination of key political leader or false flag targeting opposition leader or public citizens.
Denial and cover-up via censorship, propaganda and narrative bias. It helps if you built the whole mediasphere.
Dominique Fonvielle, who spent 15 years as an analyst with France’s foreign secret service, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), described the following steps of regime change to German filmmaker Susanne Brandstaetter in 2003:[22]
Identify opposition forces to destabilize ruling regime (need to be credible and influential)
Effective propaganda to smear the ruling regime
Prepare (convincing) future head of state and staff
Create revolutionary milieu
Spark a revolution/coup.
The methods of covert action for taking power with insurgency or securing power with counterinsurgency are ultimately the same: targeting a group of people to neutralize them by getting information, ruining their reputation and disrupting their function.
The U.S. foreign policy machinery is entirely geared to grind down countries that resist its drive for political and economic domination. Coups are planned well in advance and cost a lot of money.
A key mid-level operator of the Ukraine 2014 coup, Victoria Nuland, estimated that the U.S. had spent $5 billon on civic, political and media projects in Ukraine from 1991 to the end of 2013, and I presume this does not include astronomical budgets for military, paramilitary or covert actions; private oligarch NGOs like those of Soros, Omidyar, Gates and Thiel; nor does it include behind-the-scenes deals or the carrot-and-stick use of IMF and World Bank loans and diplomatic pressure on NATO allies that, regardless, aim to drive neo-liberal economic reform and the looting of public resources and infrastructure.
Nuland announced her figure proudly at a U.S.-Ukraine Foundation meeting in 2013, with a large Chevron sign next to her. Did Ukrainians on the street not see this? Or did they not see it for what it was?
The Americans have moreover completely deceived the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian government with regard to the completely unrealistic victory of Ukraine in this war, in my opinion, because in any case the big loser in this war is Ukrainian population itself and also as a consequence Europe with all the crisis in which it was engulfed by the will of the politicians.
— Pierre de Gaulle, grandson of Charles de Gaulle, December 2022[23]
Like most regime-change operations, the 2014 coup involved a two-edged (Gladio) sword approach: one side soft, neo-liberal, political and “diplomatic”; the other side hard, dirty, bloody and fascist. The former co-opts the public’s genuine liberal aims and grievances against economic conditions, authoritarian tendencies and corruption. The latter is covert action; generally outsourced to local extremists and non-local private mercenaries, training and hiring extremists to do the dirty work when needed.
In Ukraine’s case, it is clear fascist extremists were involved by the prominent position as “Maidan security” provoking violence and in the post-coup government positions they were rewarded with after the coup. The far-right Svoboda (originally the “Socialist-Nationalist Party”), Right Sector, Azov Battalion and C14. The Azov Battalion, dismissed by NATO media as a minor aberration, post-coup became an official branch of the Ukraine Army numbering tens of thousands.
It is also clear fascists were involved in escalating the violence, and are proud of the muscle they flexed—C14 head Yevhen Karas recently proclaimed that the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” would have been a “gay parade” if not for the instrumental role of neo-Nazis. The moderates and many liberal-progressive activists considered groups like Svoboda as the only party of action, making a deal with the devil, and some insisted at the time, such as the EuroMaidan Press (funded by Soros’s IRF) that the Nationalist fascists such as Dmytro Yarosh are needed to protect citizens from the state violence of leaders like Yanukovych; “Someone who is ready to risk his life so I can live in freedom and peace—can`t be a bad guy. It’s that simple.”[24]
Strange bedfellows (and tragic naïveté), indeed.
The fascist psychos and ultra-nationalist ideology also became emboldened as the “anti-terrorist operation” evolved into the Donbas war. The initial wave of regular Ukrainian soldiers lacked a desire, when it came to it, to kill their siblings and cousins in the east in 2014. And so, later in the year, Azov, et al., took over and the ideology was spread in parallel to the de-Russianizing of Ukrainian identity.[25]
Ultimately, for imperial advance, the nationalist extremists ready to die serve as a destabilization grenade, exploited by local and foreign oligarchs as henchmen to protect their interests and to destroy and bleed their enemies, who are conveniently many in form. For the foreign elite, if this chaos and terror also destroys the local population and country, so be it. As long as access to energy and other valuable resources at least does not fall into enemy hands, the military industry oligarchs can make billions off the endless war. Should peace come after all is destroyed, so be it; there are also billions to be made in rebuilding projects along with excellent PR opportunities.
False-Flag Attacks
There are many documented and admitted examples of false-flag attacks,[26] where an atrocity is used to provoke increased authority and loss of civil liberties, a military intervention or regime change. The basic profile is:[27]
Highly emotive event: Spectacular and traumatic
Media bonanza: Instant media saturation with widespread coverage
Sham investigation: Case is quickly closed, with a scapegoat/patsy identified with group being demonized; and cover-up
Political reaction: Dramatic government/group reaction:
a) Erosion of rights/civil liberties for “safety”
b) Military action or invasion
c) Regime change—fake revolution masqueraded as a democratic uprising.
As they are black operations ordered and sanctioned by powerful groups, with the media on their side, and strict compartmentalization and plausible deniability, evidence is hard to come by unless there are whistleblowers. Even then, such dark actors are easy to discredit, or can be silenced with threats, blackmail or assassination. It pays to look for:
The desired intent before the event
The reaction after the event
Who wanted this?
Who benefited? Which government, group, company or organization?
“Unknown Snipers”: False-Flag Crowd Assassination Precedents
If not enough people die, if not enough blood flows, the people will never stand up for themselves.
—Gheorghe Ratiu, head of domestic intelligence in Romania’s Departamentul Securității Statului “Securitate” 1986-1989[28]
There are many types of “big shock” atrocity that can provoke the reaction needed for a coup or military intervention, ranging from those that occur with no foreign manipulation other than the white propaganda that makes it well known, to false-flag black operations that create the event(s) and control the media interpretation. The effect is magnified by use of controlled media—the propaganda multiplier. Where there is no incident that can be publicized or propagandized to provoke outrage, the most effective provocation is a false flag, laying blame on the target government.
Whether or not instigated by an insurgent, opposition or external agent, poisonings, such as the Yuschenko poisoning and the “Orange Revolution”; assassinations, such as that of Rafic Hariri and the “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon; bombings, such as Israel’s Lavon affair in Egypt, 1954; chemical attacks (e.g., Douma, Syria, April 2018); and other provocations and atrocities are used to achieve public and political momentum for regime change.
Protest provocation can be used by or against a host government, i.e., for counterinsurgency or insurgency, respectively. Regime-change (i.e., insurgent) protests are increased by soft-power means and PR, but uglier methods of agent provocateurs and paramilitaries are used to bring serious conflict, outrage and a sense of chaos and illegitimacy of the target government that can only be quenched by a volte-face or military intervention. However, to frame the atrocity in favor of insurgency/the opposition, the (majority) media must be under control, to fan the flames of justice or revenge and to manage a cover-up. This requires co-ordination of social media campaigns, local news networks and amiable/compliant international media, NGOs, commentators, foreign governments and academia to form a propaganda multiplier, which takes years of investment and development by the imperial government. We will discuss the Ukraine imperial mediasphere later.
But let’s first look at some historical events with similarities to what happened in February 2014 in Kyiv: paramilitaries, terrorists or mercenaries randomly firing on crowds to provoke insurgency.
Syria 1982
Hama uprising, February 3, 1982: After years of terror campaigns and brutal reprisals, Muslim Brotherhood snipers ambushed a government soldier’s patrol and their commander, Abu Bakr (Umar Jawwad), declared Jihad against the Ba’athist Assad regime. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) estimated a few months later that 2,000 died over the three-week battle, including soldiers, jihadists and civilians. [29] Many subsequently suggest much higher numbers, particularly of civilians. The jihadists, desiring an Islamic state, were well-funded and well-armed, with U.S. weapons, communications equipment and the backing of U.S.-allied Jordanians, Christian Lebanese and Iraqis. [30]
Although not firing on a protest and not obviously a false flag, it was a foreign-funded insurrection, and the foreign media blamed the Syrian government almost exclusively for the bloodshed, ignoring the opposition violence (a common theme). As the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA; if you haven’t heard of them, the largest of intelligence agencies, it is because they are better at their job than the others) report stated in 1982: “Even if the plan were not successful the Hama rebellion could become a symbolic rallying point for future anti-government activities.” As in many other interventions before and since, extremists are used as a “battering ram” or “chaos agents” to foment regime change, and the association is either denied or whitewashed by the control of the media.
Romania 1989
Possibly along with the use of snipers in Moscow in 1993, Romania—December 1989—appears to be a rare example of a co-U.S. and Soviet black operation involving “unknown snipers” to get rid of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime blocking European reunification. Remember this was when team USA was negotiating “fixing” the Soviet economy and both sides viewed Ceaușescu as the main barrier to progress. It is telling that this was the most violent of the initial post-communist transitions.
More than 1,000 people died around late December 1989, most by random shootings including those by snipers, across the country, the vast majority after the Ceaușescus were arrested on December 22, 1989. The murderous chaos distracted from the coup itself and led to a desperate desire for stability and authority and quick international validation of and, ironically, sympathy for Ion Iliescu’s new National Salvation Front government.
The snipers were called “unknown terrorists” for years but the repeated recent prosecutions against the Consiliul Frontului Salvării Naționale (Council of the National Salvation Front, CFSN) regime that took power after the Romanian coup of 1989 indicate the local coup plotters had substantial support from Moscow, Budapest and Washington. Ion Iliescu (who became president), Gelu Voican Voiculescu, Iosif Rus and Emil (Cico) Dumitrescu have been repeatedly indicted for crimes against humanity for provoking the “psychosis” that led to the killings—a strangely evasive and medieval way to describe intentional massacre.[31]
A more accurate charge would be complicity (along with the U.S., Hungary and Soviets) in being psychos that ordered mass random assassinations, distributed weapons to anyone with a trigger finger and pumped the country full of fear-inducing propaganda in order to provoke more psychosis, i.e., false-flag state terrorism.
During the brief mock trial that preceded the Christmas Day 1989 executions of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu—which were simply accepted as an inevitable and natural course of events in the global media—there are interesting statements by an unidentified military “judge” and the “defendants” themselves about the identity of the “terrorists” still causing chaos around the country:[32]
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Mr. President, I would like to know something: The accused should tell us who the mercenaries are. Who pays them? And who brought them into the country?
PROSECUTOR: Yes. Accused, answer.
CEAUSESCU: I will not say anything more. I will only speak at the Grand National Assembly.
And, later:
CEAUSESCU: You as officers should know that the government cannot give the order to shoot. But those who shot at the young people were the security men, the terrorists.
ELENA CEAUSESCU: The terrorists are from Securitate.
PROSECUTOR: The terrorists are from Securitate?
ELENA CEAUSESCU: Yes.
The Ceaușescus are obviously not incriminating themselves in stating the terrorists are members of Securitate. Rather, coup plotters included members of the government, army and Securitate.
The new regime was promoted before and after the coup in Western media—particularly, of course, by Radio Free Europe—and CIA reports from 1982 and 1985 make it clear that Ion Iliescu was their chosen replacement for Ceaușescu years before the coup.[33]
And so—anointed by the interventionist god of free-market consumerism—he immediately took power on December 22nd, with his first statement that same day clearly stating the country’s new position as completely supportive of U.S./NATO and Soviet agendas, i.e., pro-free-market reform and European reunification.[34] Roadblock cleared. Although, just to keep the path completely clear, the terrorist destruction continued for another week.
On December 24, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock met with Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Ivan Aboimov. They agreed they were both in favor of supporting the “new leadership of Romania”—only two days old and (one would imagine) ill-defined to them unless they are privy to magical foresight or privileged information.
Matlock’s main priority in the conversation was to know if the Soviets would intervene to support the new regime, in humanitarian or military aid, to which Aboimov replies in the affirmative. Matlock then asks if they would consider intervening militarily, to which he replied in the negative, stating that the Soviets gladly henceforth hand over Brezhnev’s policy of eastern sphere intervention to the Americans.[35]
This last point is focused on almost as a distraction in the literature as if it were a profound wisecrack, referring both to the shift to a unipolar world and a barb at the U.S. invasion of Panama. But more to the point is that it is clear from the transcript that they are completely on the same page regarding getting rid of Ceaușescu and bringing in the coup plotters, which means they must at least know who these people are, what they are planning and that they unreservedly approve of them. Matlock is likely focused on the intervention policy as it is a contingency of the strategy of insurgency tension to provoke international intervention. As it turns out, this was not required, perhaps as the horrendous chaos subdued any dissent or counterrevolution.
Susanne Brandstaetter’s excellent 2003 documentary, Checkmate: Strategy of a Revolution, exposes Western intelligence and U.S. State Department involvement in Romania 1989, with direct interviews with protesters, CIA agents, Romanian intelligence, CIA and French DGSE officers, as well as a revealing interview with Miklós Németh, Hungarian prime minister at the time. No wonder many Romanians have always suspected large foreign complicity.[36]
In it, Dominique Fonvielle says that paramilitaries were trained in Hungary and Germany, and were smuggled into the country in small groups to be ready for provocation of protests and “paramilitary actions” (presumably including sniper attacks).[37] There were also reports of Russian “tourists” entering in larger numbers in the days before the protests.[38]
Also in the film, Németh—somewhat coy and sheepish, yet also clearly enjoying the reminiscing and salacious topic—confirms there were paramilitary training camps with U.S. personnel in Austria, Germany and Hungary. More precisely, the ex-head of domestic Securitate, Gheorghe Ratiu states that they were U.S.-led camps providing training in provocateurism and guerrilla operations in Traiskirchen, Austria; Zirndorf, Germany [presumably the Pinder Barracks]; and Bicske and Budapest, Hungary. Most likely there were others.
Ratiu also claims in Checkmate that, from early in the protests in Bucharest, a faction of the army simply started handing out weapons to the general public, leading to many fear-induced shootings and killings between civilians, the army and Securitate. As with snipers, the purpose was to maintain fear and insecurity until the new authority of Ion Iliescu’s new US- and NATO-approved National Salvation Front government was in place. Pushing chaos on the public creates a pushback for authority. Although this chaos is often blamed on a “power vacuum,” this is a myth as Iliescu picked up the reins immediately after Ceaușescu was deposed, according to his co-conspirator and army chief (who, conveniently for his Hungarian handlers, spoke Hungarian), General Victor Stanculescu.
This is all pretty convincing. But if, like me, you prefer straight-talking witnesses and whistleblowers over mealy-mouthed diplomats and spooks—especially the brutal and perhaps not very bright militarist ones that do not even see what is wrong with violent imperialist intervention—we can look to Major Craisor-Constantin Ionita’s 2001 thesis submitted for a master’s degree in Military Studies at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia.[39]
Titled “The Influence of International Law Upon Military Operation on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) During Romanian Revolution, December 1989,” it is an unexpected description of the revolution as a foreign-sparked coup by NATO, Hungary and (perhaps under a sense of naïve obligation to the U.S. as the new dictators of its mafia-neo-liberal future) Russia. Notably, he states that it was GRU Military Intelligence, not the KGB, that was involved in the Russian arm, which aligns with diplomatic cables of the time indicating that the KGB had (or would only give) terrible intelligence for Gorbachev during the “coup-volution.”[40]
Ionita, now a researcher at the National Defence University of Romania, contends that:
Large numbers of “tourists” came into Timisoara from Hungary and Yugoslavia just before the beginning of the revolution. They were former refugees who had received training for “diversionary operations.”
Gorbachev described his role in the Romanian Revolution and in the execution of the Ceaușescus in the media—particularly in the January-February 1990 issue of Europe magazine (Bruxelles).
“After the Gorbachev-Bush meeting at Malta (the beginning of December 1989), professional people from the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence), were prepared to start a revolution in Romania’s principal cities. Their role was only as a spark to start the revolutionary fire, already existent in cities. The strategic objective was to overthrow [Ceaușescu]. The operational objectives were the Communist Party buildings in Romania’s principal cities.” “Only as a spark” is an interesting and ambiguous qualifier that I do not believe would stand up in any court of law.
International media played a key role, especially American Freedom Europe and Voice of America, and the British BBC with “a vigilant campaign against [Ceaușescu], carefully observing psychological and moral influence of Romanians living in cities.” Amplified by Hungarian media, they “tried to create a hostile mood against the communist regime, to encourage dissidents and to incite a revolt within cities.”
The CIA set up the “Trust Organization” in early December to encourage and support dissident movements in Eastern Europe, and destabilize the communist regimes in these countries, including Romania.
Meanwhile, NATO countries increased their embargo against those countries that did not implement democratic reform.
“At the same time of [Ceaușescu]’s attempted escape, three ‘dissident persons,’ selected by Moscow to replace him, were helped by ‘professionals’ to occupy T.V. and Radio central stations”—Ion Iliescu, a Gorbachev friend and future President, Nicolae Militaru, a GRU agent and future Minister of National Defense, and Petre Roman, future Prime Minister.
The terrorists’ plan was to sow confusion and get the military fighting the Securitate necessitating Warsaw Pact intervention. They also successfully disabled the air defense system.
Finally:
At the beginning of [the] revolution it was thought that foreign agents and spy agencies, who wanted to destroy the communist ideals, started and supported the people revolt in Timisoara. That assessment led to the right of the military personnel to use deadly force in self-defense, their unit’s defense and defense of buildings under protection against any hostile act. In the midst of crowd there were some 300-400 revolutionary professionals trained by foreign countries (USSR, Hungary, NATO countries) to increase the popular revolt. If the civilians used rocks, “Molotov cocktail” (incendiary bottles), chains, and metallic balls to seize administrative and political buildings, these professionals handled white and fire armament.[41] Due to their actions, soldiers were killed and soldiers opened fire against civilians.
On the contrary, CIA-friendly commentators still suggest it was fiercely loyal Securitate groups—particularly the Unitatea Specială de Luptă Antiteroristă (USLA) anti-terror squad—perhaps with the help of (always convenient) “Arab Terrorists,” who terrorized Bucharest for days, including attacks on embassies.[42] The main evidence supporting this is from UK, U.S. and Canadian embassy cables during the period and some declassified CIA reports that identify the terrorists as loyalists aiming for a Ceaușescu counterrevolution, despite his being deposed politically on December 22 and mortally on December 25. How this also squares with the strictly “need to know” basis of black operations, as well as the clear benefit of attacking prominent westerners in provoking and validating a crisis, is unclear.
Lastly, one wonders if the Hungarian-Bolivian terrorist, jackal, murderer, intelligence agent and ex-BBC journalist Eduardo Rózsa-Flores was involved in Romania 1989 as he was involved in false flags and murders, fighting for Croatia in the Yugoslavian civil war only a couple of years later. According to leaked Hungarian secret service files, the KGB and Hungarian secret service trained Rózsa-Flores was doing provocateurist work in Budapest in September 1989, and was planning a Romanian trip with anti-communist activist and director Roland Antoniewicz, who claims he was unaware of Rózsa-Flores’s undercover role.[43]
Venezuela 2002
Caracas April 11, 2002. Nineteen killed and scores injured, with a key part played by snipers (and some police loyal to Caracas mayor and U.S. puppet Alfredo Peña) firing at pro-government and opposition protesters as well as, at some points, police. This was a plan in the failed coup of military leaders, supported by the U.S., Venezuelan elite and anti-Chávez media [see Angel Palacio’s 2004 documentary Llaguno Bridge: Keys to a Massacre for more].[44]
That the violence was planned is apparently evidenced by the practice run recording for CNN’s Otto Neustaldt, where the generals denounced the violence that was yet to occur. Later that month, Venezuelan Congressman Roger Rondon accused Ambassador Charles Shapiro and two U.S. military attachés of involvement and stated that two foreign gunmen, one American and the other Salvadorean, were detained by security police but were “given some kind of safe conduct” and disappeared.[45]
Many other suspects were released during the short reign of the de facto government, including seven suspected snipers arrested in the Hotel Ausonia – and more than 60 pro-Chávez supporters were killed in the protests for his release, which received very little outcry in the mainstream and foreign press.
Thailand 2010
April 10, 2010: “Red shirt”/United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship protesters, supporters of Dubai-based, U.S.-backed billionaire ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, convened at Bangkok’s “Democracy Monument.” Mysterious gunmen embedded with the protesters used sniper fire and grenades to create chaos and kill six soldiers and a colonel. Thai troops returned fire: 25 died and 840 were injured.
CNN initially did not report that protesters were armed, then conceded two months later that there were “men in black firing automatic weapons on April 10.”[46] The international spokesman for the redshirts admitted in a Reuters interview about the recent “vibrant”(!) protests, that the men armed with AK47s and M16s in black were ”a secret unit within the army that disagrees with what’s going on.”[47]
And he continues, apparently without irony, “Without them, the black-clad men, there would have been a whole lot more deaths and injuries.” Although these violent and soft “change agents” appear local, the insurgent opposition movement is U.S.-backed as Thailand is too close to China for Washington’s liking. It will take a leak to discover exactly how but there are countless examples from which to extrapolate.
Syria 2011
March 17-18, 2011: The violence in Syria started in a small town near the Jordanian border, Daraa, with a series of demonstrations and reports of snipers killing both demonstrators and security forces. The vast majority of Western media (CNN, NYT, Al Jazeera, AP, etc.) ignored the police/security force deaths and reported most all deaths as civilian. In fact, as reported by Israeli, Lebanese and Indian news sites, most of the initial deaths were police, and multiple government buildings and the SyriaTel phone company building were also torched.
This bias set the tone for the rest of the reporting on Syria that followed, continuing to deny that there was an Islamist armed insurrection, let alone that they were supporting it with the aim of weakening Assad [48] and instead blaming provocateurism on “secret police” trying to foment a reaction to allow a larger crackdown. Similar events followed over the next month, with snipers firing on crowds “in the coastal cities of Banias, Jabla and Lattakia, in the central industrial city of Homs and in towns close to Damascus, Harasta, Daraya and Duma.” The effect described by one witness was that “Anger is rising, the street is boiling.”
An Al Jazeera correspondent reported at one incident in Douma in April 2011 that “it was an incredibly chaotic scene, and it seems as though pretty much everyone down here in the southern part of the country is now carrying weapons. It is unclear who was firing at whom, that’s part of the confusion.[49] Yet no media were acknowledging that there was an armed insurrection occurring, who they were, where the weapons came from or where their bullets were going.
Was it foreign-backed armed terrorists or “government snipers” killing soldiers and civilians? Or both? The fact that the DIA stated in a 2012 Department of Defense Information Report that their intent was to destabilize Syria and install an Islamic state in eastern Syria—and hence why they continue to fund, arm and train Islamist extremists to this day—suggests the snipers were most likely a U.S. strategy of regime change, escalating the ongoing conflict that has so far caused half a million deaths, millions injured and more than six million refugees.
Yemen 2011
March 18, 2011 (the same day as the violence in Daraa, Syria), 53 protesters were killed in Sanaa, Yemen, and hundreds injured, by rooftop snipers.[50] Did President Saleh al-Ahmar think his U.S.-Saudi backing would allow him to get away with such an insane “crackdown” on protests? Or were these insurrectionist snipers? Why such a complete non-reaction from the U.S. and West, when the same month they declared war on Libya, to “protect [Libyan] civilians and meet their basic needs”? Such is the difference between a client and non-client state. It is always telling where the media projects its amnesic newsfeed gaze.
One “Western official” quoted in the UK’s Telegraph in 2011 said, “It is not in the West’s best interests to see this degenerate into a Libya-style conflict that would play into the hands of Islamist militants, which is why it would be better for Saleh to go sooner rather than later.” Well, Saleh indeed soon went, but the degeneration occurred regardless, to cause a war and a humanitarian disaster as the Houthis rose to power.
Nicaragua 2018
Nicaragua has been a focus of U.S. ire ever since the Sandinistas came to power in 1979. The U.S. tried to push things again in 2018, in an extremely volent but failed coup attempt, also backed by the Catholic Church and local elite trade groups, focusing on youth groups, social media and the “propaganda multiplier” and some provocative protesting, sabotage and terror involving paid delinquents. There are also accusations of police violence and Sandinista thuggery, though it seems the deaths were near equal in terms of pro- and anti-government members of the public and at least 20 police were killed in 2018.
Opposition groups, for example, used criminal goons to man the hundreds of tranque checkpoints that besieged towns, abducted, tortured and murdered Sandinistas, set large fires, attempted to blow up stolen fuel tank trucks in towns and—like the CIA-organized trucker strike in Chile in the early 1970s that “made the economy scream”[51]—cut off trade for months.
Riding a wave of soft-power foreign-funded NGOs and anti-government media, the violence escalated quickly, starting with student protests on April 18th sparked—somewhat obscurely—by changes in social security reforms: “a 1% rise in worker contributions, the 3.5% rise in employer contributions (over time) and a 5% cut in the benefit which was also a trade-off for expanded medical coverage.”[52]
Snipers were certainly involved. As lleana Lacayo told Amnesty International: “Most of the deaths that occurred in the country…are carefully aimed shots, a single shot fired with precision at the head or jugular or chest, they are shots that aim to kill and they are fired by professionals.”[53]
The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH) reported in May that 36 people died of gunshot wounds between April 19 and May 2, and 22 of these were by head, neck or chest shots. Opposition media reported that, between April 19 and July 3, there were 309 deaths, and 127 (41.5%) of these deaths were due to direct, single shots to the head, neck and chest.[54] And, as Barbara Moore states in the LA Progressive:
Specific, eye-witness accounts of sniper use by the opposition have been shared with me and according to the same source even the government has withheld some information for the sake of relations with neighboring countries [namely, El Salvador]. That transnational gang members were involved in the attempt to destabilize the country was confirmed in June, but the extent to which that was the case is not yet known.[55]
There are other reports of snipers targeting police. For example, on July 8, two police officers—Faber López Vivas and Hilario de Jesús Ortiz Zavala—were killed and two others wounded by sniper fire in Jinotepe. [56] A U.S. resident reported to Barbara Larcom of the Alliance for Global Justice:
Our neighbor here…,whom we have known for years, is a member of the antiriot police. He told us that the day the roadblocks/barricades were removed … he was one of [a number] who were the first to step outside the police station. There was only one way out. When they stepped out, there was a sniper on top of [named] building who was waiting for them and began picking them off, one by one. He was the only one who wasn’t shot and had to try and drag his friends out of harm’s way. One was killed, and the others luckily survived but with major injuries…. After the fighting they were able to capture several people. He said many of them were foreign gang members, mostly from El Salvador.….He also said that early on in the protesting they would be receiving fire from protesters and meanwhile, they could see someone firing on the protesters from behind.[57]
The vast majority of the violence by local and mainstream international media was blamed on Nicaraguan police, claiming they fired indiscriminately into crowds and that they armed pro-government mobs. Amnesty International claimed in its May 2018 report that the government had “a strategy of indiscriminate repression with intent to kill not only in order to completely smash the protests, but also to punish those who participated in them.”[58] Yet there is ample evidence of extreme violence and murder committed by the protesters that was ignored by even “progressive” international media.
A key event, very similar to the events in Venezuela in 2002, was the pro- and anti-government marches with separate routes in Managua on Mother’s Day, May 30. Before the marches, as in Caracas 2002, opposition leaders repeatedly stated in the media that violence and deaths would occur. Only after the marches, when a group of opposition protesters ventured off route toward the Sandinista post-march concert, did violence occur. Setting up a roadblock near Dennis Martínez National Stadium, they encountered police and gunfire began. Eight died, including two Sandinistas.
One report on this day by a collaboration among the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), and the Organization of American States (OAS) involved a model with forensic and acoustic analysis of social media by the spooky New York Times-friendly SITU Research consultancy—whose involvement in official narrative Maidan massacre research we will discuss in Part III.
In tandem with many NGOs and “independent experts”—if you are bored, try a game where you search each expert in this report and see if you can find one without a direct link to USGOs or NGOs—SITU concluded, despite the lack of evidence identifying the shooters,[59] that police snipers were responsible for the death of three of the protesters during the clashes and that this was “part of the systematic repression of civilian demonstrations.”[60]
This analysis omitted any media incriminating opposition protesters, despite the mass of such media and other evidence of protester violence. It also ignores shooting at Sandinistas and the well-reported presence of opposition protester weapons and guns as well as the possibility of a false flag as in Caracas 2002.
One has to dig into the middle of the full (500-page) GIEI report to read, “Lastly, these scenes show the presence of four armed individuals among the protesters, but the National Police and the pro-government media did not report any attacks perpetrated by protesters during these initial moments.”[61] It is worth noting that the report, which discusses violence from April 18 to May 30, 2018, mentions multiple instances of witnesses reporting unidentified snipers.
Other “Unknown Snipers”
Other examples include Lithuania 1992; Russia 1993, when Yeltsin’s counterrevolution made use of snipers; Iran 2009; Kyrgyzstan June 2010; Tunisia January 2011; and Egypt and Libya, also in 2011.[62]
During the siege of Sarajevo 1992-1996, there were multiple false-flag attacks, including cease-fire shelling, bombing and sniper fire. Recently declassified Canadian UN cables, for example, state that Bosniak and foreign Mujahadeen fighters (flown in by the United States) were “not above firing on their own people or UN areas.”[63] In a very different context, although only one person died, the still “unsolved” case of the murder of British police officer Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in London in 1984 also appears to fit the prototype of an intelligence-linked false-flag murder during protests by an “unknown sniper.” Around the same time, the Operation Gladio-linked Brabant random murders in supermarkets in Belgium in 1982-1985 appear to be state false-flag terrorism that killed dozens.
State Terror, Imperialism and Control
All events personal and political can be understood as a dynamic of power. The problem is—as we have discussed and as the above examples of state terror make clear—power hides itself masterfully, not least as it protects itself in counterinsurgency and projects itself in insurgency.
What it hides most are its most effective tools: covert action including propaganda, terrorism, assassination and sexual blackmail; and its sole purpose, the amoral pursuit of elite greed. In the face of such barbaric political reality, one has to consider case-by-case whether a terrorist attack, mass killing or shooting—whether the weapon is a bomb, gun, knife, poison, vehicle or saboteur’s wrench—serves a directly or indirectly useful political purpose, not least for imperial propaganda. As ex-Securitate domestic chief Gheorghe Ratiu said, if there is a political desire for regime change, there must be sufficient blood and outrage for the public to want it.[64] If there is not, it must be created, in reality or in the minds of the public via the media. Blood that is the sacrificial fuel for Martin Luther’s “wheels of history”; blood that shocks, paralyzes and traumatizes, creating the martyrs of progress, progress toward the manipulative, threatening but comforting arms of elite power.
Reviewing the above cases, some patterns emerge. Lots of effort, time and money is needed both to nurture the network of dissidents and opposition prior to a push for regime change and to ensure the media coverage is controlled during and after the event. The imperial strategy for regime-change insurgency (“revolution,” if you believe them) is essentially the same as the strategy for counterinsurgency, i.e., it centers on soft-power networks, political training, propaganda and control of media, galvanized by a strategy of tension precipitated by provocateurs and paramilitary guerrilla tactics such as random snipers. We can call them the strategies of insurgent and counterinsurgent tension.
Inside the client-states of the empire, atrocity—including torture, assassination and random terror and fear—is used for counterinsurgency and control. This has been well documented in the U.S.-installed, trained and controlled Latin American and Asian military regimes as well as in the client-states of Europe since the Second World War. Italy’s “years of lead” of the 1970s and 1980s have been well-documented as a part of U.S.-controlled counterinsurgency via NATO-CIA’s Operation Gladio, also involving elements of other elite supranational networks such as Le Cercle and local elite networks like the Masonic Propaganda 2 group.[65]
Hundreds were killed in bombings and shootings, the socialist left was neutralized, marginalized, co-opted and vilified and Aldo Moro was assassinated as he tried to bridge social democrat and democratic socialist parties, all to push the politics to the center right, within the supranational neo-liberal empire under U.S. control through the CIA and NATO (with some history of MI6 and DIA involvement). Anyone who suggests there was any national sovereignty motivating these machinations is delusional or deceptive.
Similar Gladio/“stay-behind” operations are known in all NATO countries, for example, the “strategy of tension” random Brabant killings of Belgium in 1982-1985 and the horrific Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin, Michel Nihoul, Paul Vanden Boeynants and Marc Dutroux pedophile-murder-blackmail network both appear linked to the Belgian Gladio network.
Although the latter involved the largest national scandal in modern Belgian history, culminating in the White March of more than 300,000 grieving and outraged citizens in Brussels on October 20, 1996, the elite criminals completely squashed any investigation, via typical counterinsurgency measures of media control, co-optation, smearing, obstruction, distraction, threats and murder. On this scale, one can only sense that the price is the Belgian soul.
If Gladio is new to you, I recommend starting with Arthur Rowse’s 1994 article in CovertAction Quarterly (No. 49) entitled “Gladio: The Secret U.S. War to Subvert Italian Democracy”; Philip Willan’s Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (1991/2002); Allan Francovich’s stunning 1992 three-part BBC documentary; and Daniele Ganser’s pivotal 1995 book NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe; and exploring other elements on the Wikispooks website and elsewhere (with a caution for limited hangouts).
More recently, continuous with the near ubiquitous links to intelligence seen in “terror attacks,” the former commissioner of Spanish Police, José Manuel Villarejo, stated in the country’s high court in 2021 that the vehicle attacks of Barcelona in summer 2017, which killed 13 and wounded 130, were intended by the National Intelligence Center (CNI), to give Catalonia “a little scare” before their independence referendum.[66]
We will not explore the common debate of state terror as to whether the elite’s political-military-intelligence apparatus made it happen or let it happen on purpose, or as blowback (unintended consequences) or errors of surveillance in anti-terror infiltration operations (i.e., a “sting-gone-wrong”). In this case and in many others, it seems the terror is intentional and has many political benefits, not least a fearful and divided populace, leaving us mere pawns on the devil’s chessboard.
The ultimate dark lessons of the above examples are that state terrorism is a real and powerful tool of imperial insurgency and counterinsurgency; it has been used in many countries (including inside the U.S.) for many years; and, although the empire has supranational elements, even wealthy client-states of the U.S. have ultimately been at the behest of their Atlantic master, largely via networks of the military and intelligence. Regime change and strategy of tension counterinsurgency operations involve countless examples of well-documented state terrorism.
They require atrocity, the ultimate psyop of control; provocation to desperate pleas for external or internal justice and protection from or by authority depending on who the perceived threat is.
Whether or not an atrocity is a false-flag provocateurist covert action, the cause and details, as far as much of the public is concerned, are effectively irrelevant next to the control of the media by those in power, who prescribe or sanction the acceptable analysis.
As this is amplified in the emotive moments after an atrocity, and forges in the public’s psychic framework, it then enters legacy and is lost to imperialist amnesia, even where vague lingering doubt remains. Any subsequent critical analysis is then fighting against fixed or disappearing neural (and digital) networks and suffocating in the mounting layers of silt from the dirty, rich and ceaseless river of propaganda.
Notes
Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Towards the Abyss,” New Left Review, no. 133/134 (April 13, 2022): 1–1.
“CIA AND THE ORIGINS OF THE BND, 1949-56, VOL. 1,” vol. 1, 3 vols. (National Clandestine Service: Central Intelligence Agency, 2006), https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA%20AND%20THE%20ORIGINS%20OF%20THE%20BND,%201949-56%20%20%20VOL.%201_0001.pdf.
Kevin Ruffner, “Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists” (Central Intelligence Agency, 1998), https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/STUDIES%20IN%20INTELLIGENCE%20NAZI%20-%20RELATED%20ARTICLES_0015.pdf.
Klaus Gietinger, The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, trans. Loren Balhorn (London: Verso, 2019).
Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (Henry Holt and Company, 2017).
Arthur E Rowse, “Gladio: The Secret U.S. War To Subvert Italian Democracy,” CovertAction Quarterly, no. 49 (Summer 1994), https://archive.org/details/rowse-gladio-the-secret-u.
Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (London: Verso, 2007), P 27. [Available at: https://archive.org/details/budaswagonbriefh00davi.]
Christof Lehmann, “ISIS Unveiled: The Identity of The Insurgency in Syria and Iraq,” nsnbc, June 19, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20140619052302/http://nsnbc.me/2014/06/15/isis-unveiled-identity-insurgency-syria-iraq/.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories(Lanham, MD: Regnery Publishing, 1997), p. 71. [Available at: https://archive.org/details/secretlifeofbill00ambr.]
David Brown and Robert Merrill, Violent Persuasions: The Politics and Imagery of Terrorism (Seattle : Bay Press, 1993), p. 149. [Available at: http://archive.org/details/violentpersuasio0000unse.]
Paul H. Rosenberg and Foreign Policy In Focus, “Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret,” The Nation, March 28, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/seven-decades-nazi-collaboration-americas-dirty-little-ukraine-secret/.
David Stern, “Svoboda: The Rise of Ukraine’s Ultra-Nationalists,” BBC News, December 22, 2012, sec. Magazine, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20824693.
Zoltan Grossman, “Ukraine: The Enemy of Your Enemy Is Not Always Your Friend,” CounterPunch, March 11, 2014, https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/11/ukraine-the-enemy-of-your-enemy-is-not-always-your-friend/.
Kacper Rekawek, “Career Break or a New Career? Extremist Foreign Fighters in Ukraine” (Counter Extremism Project, April 2020), https://www.counterextremism.com/sites/default/files/CEP%20Report_Career%20Break%20or%20a%20New%20Career_Extremist%20Foreign%20Fighters%20in%20Ukraine_April%202020.pdf.
Gladio, 3 vols., Timewatch (United Kingdom: BBC, 1992), https://archive.org/details/opgladio.
“The CIA Is Using a European NATO Ally’s Spy Service to Conduct a Covert Sabotage Campaign inside Russia under the Agency’s Direction, According to Former U.S. Intelligence and Military Officials.,” Jack Murphy, December 24, 2022, https://jackmurphywrites.com/169/the-cias-sabotage-campaign-inside-russia/.
Martin A Lee, The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists, 2017, 309, http://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/product/openreader?id=none&isbn=9781135281243.
“PG INVESTIGATION | Shadowy money built steel empire—with bank’s help,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 22, 2022, https://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2022/02/20/Ihor-Kolomoisky-US-banks-warren-ohio-steel-plant-ukraine/stories/202202200063.
Ishchenko, “Towards the Abyss.”
Carol Cina, “Social Science for Whom? A Structural History of Social Psychology” (State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1981), 307.
“‘Extreme Option: Overthrow Allende,’” National Security Archive, September 14, 2020, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2020-09-15/extreme-option-overthrow-allende.
Checkmate: Strategy of a Revolution, Documentary (LOOKSfilm, 2003), https://archive.org/details/checkmate-strategy-of-a-revolution/Checkmate+Strategy+of+a+Revolution+Part+1+-+YouTube.mp4.
Antoine Potier, “Urgentissime !!! Nouvelle Intervention de Pierre De Gaulle Sur Le Conflit En Ukraine et Sur l’avenir Des Relations Franco-Russes !,” Ciel de France, December 26, 2022, http://cieldefrance.eklablog.com/urgentissime-nouvelle-intervention-de-pierre-de-gaulle-sur-le-conflit–a213605651.
“Euromaidan Press. “Maidan-As-It-Is: The Extreme Right Wing & EuroMaidan OR ‘Glory to Ukraine,’” EUROMAIDAN∙PRESS, February 10, 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20140623193017/http://euromaidanpress.com/2014/02/10/maidan-as-it-is-the-extreme-right-wing-euromaidan-or-glory-to-ukraine/.”
Shaun Walker, “Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat,” The Guardian, September 10, 2014, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukraine-neo-nazis.
Washington’s Blog. “53 ADMITTED False Flag Attacks,” February 23, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20190713101700/https://washingtonsblog.com/2015/02/x-admitted-false-flag-attacks.html.
“The Age of False Flags.” False Flags. Gaia. Accessed September 4, 2021. https://www.gaia.com/series/false-flags.
Checkmate: Strategy of a Revolution.
“Syria: Muslim Brotherhood Pressure Intensifies” (Defense Intelligence Agency, May 1982), https://web.archive.org/web/20121224063537/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_documents/DIA-Syria-MuslimBrotherhoodPressureIntensifies.pdf.
Patrick Seale with the assistance of Maureen McConville, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 335.
“Ion Iliescu and Gelu Voican Voiculescu Were Indicted for Crimes against Humanity in the Case of the Revolution,” G4Media.ro, December 21, 2018, https://www.g4media.ro/ion-iliescu-si-gelu-voican-voiculescu-au-fost-inculpati-pentru-crime-contra-umanitatii-in-dosarul-revolutiei.html.
“TRANSCRIPT OF THE CLOSED TRIAL OF NICOLAE AND ELENA CEAUSESCU,” Washington Post, December 29, 1989, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/12/29/transcript-of-the-closed-trial-of-nicolae-and-elena-ceausescu/8ae8f002-1f19-487c-a7aa-ed4334f74af6/; Livezeanu, Irina. “Item #690: Transcript of the Closed ‘Trial’ of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, December, 1989.” Making the History of 1989, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media, George Mason University. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/690.html; “Transcript of the Trial of Nicolae and E. Ceausescu,” Ceausescu.org, accessed January 18, 2023, http://www.ceausescu.org/ceausescu_texts/revolution/trial-eng.htm.
“Unrest in Romania: Causes and Implications” (Central Intelligence Agency, March 1982), https://web.archive.org/web/20170124132628/https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP83B00228R000100070004-7.pdf; “Romania: The Outlook for Ceausescu,” Special National Intelligence Estimate, Memorandum for Holders (Central Intelligence Agency, December 1985), https://web.archive.org/web/20170123131938/https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP87T00573R000300350007-6.pdf.
Eduard Rudolf Roth, “The Romanian Revolution of 1989 and the Veracity of the External Subversion Theory,” Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 24, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 37–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/0965156X.2015.1118816.
Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas S. Blanton, and V. M. Zubok, eds., “Document No. 116: Four Soviet Foreign Ministry Documents Regarding the Situation in Romania December 20–25, 1989,” in Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Eastern Europe, 1989, National Security Archive Cold War Readers (Budapest ; New York: Central European University Press, 2010), 665–67, https://books.openedition.org/ceup/2752.
“Most Romanians Feel They Don’t Know the Truth about the 1989 Revolution,” Romania Insider, December 22, 2014, https://www.romania-insider.com/most-romanians-feel-they-dont-know-the-truth-about-the-1989-revolution.
Checkmate: Strategy of a Revolution.
Richard Bassett, “Rising Linked to Russian Tourists,” The Times, March 2, 1990, The Times Digital Archive, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/IF0501806877/TTDA?sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=8cbd3996.
Craisor-Constantin Ionita, “DTIC ADA402205: The Influence of International Law Upon Military Operation on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) During Romanian Revolution, December 1989” (MASTER OF MILITARY STUDIES, Quantico, Virginia, United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College Marine Corps University, 2001), http://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA402205.
Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas S. Blanton, and V. M. Zubok, eds., “Document No. 116: Four Soviet Foreign Ministry Documents Regarding the Situation in Romania December 20–25, 1989,” in Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Eastern Europe, 1989, National Security Archive Cold War Readers (Budapest ; New York: Central European University Press, 2010), 665–67, https://books.openedition.org/ceup/2752.
‘White arms’ are non-explosive weapons such as: knives, daggers, swords, bayonets, clubs, axes, spears, slings, bows, and crossbows.
romanianrevolutionofdecember1989, “The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 Declassified (CIA, US Department of State, British Foreign Office, Canadian External Affairs Department ),” Roland O. Thomasson, PHD (blog), February 23, 2020, https://rolandothomassonphd.home.blog/2020/02/23/the-romanian-revolution-of-december-1989-declassified-cia-us-department-of-state-british-foreign-office-caNadiyan-external-affairs-department/.
“Dokumentumok: Rózsa-Flores Eduardo Kádárért Szervezett Tüntetést 1989 Nyarán; Ligacsovhoz, a KGB-Hez És a Securitatehez Készült,” Kuruc.info hírportál, accessed January 17, 2023, https://kuruc.info/r/10/39290/; Antoniewicz R. Antoniewicz Roland a Metepedia wikiből. Accessed January 17, 2023. http://antoniewiczrolandmetapediawiki.blogspot.com/.
Angel Palacios, Llaguno Bridge: Keys to a Massacre, 2004, https://vimeo.com/40502430. Also available here: https://archive.org/details/llaguno-bridge-keys-to-a-massacre-complete-movie-424p.
Duncan Campbell, “American Navy ‘Helped Venezuelan Coup,’” The Guardian, April 29, 2002, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/29/venezuela.duncancampbell.
“CNN, BBC Correspondents Defend Coverage,” accessed April 15, 2022, https://www.asiaone.com/News/Latest+News/Asia/Story/A1Story20100612-221758.html.
“Red Means Stop, and Anger, in Vibrant Thai Protest,” Reuters, April 21, 2010, sec. World News, https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-47881220100421.
“Department of Defense Information Report” (Defense Intelligence Agency, July 30, 2012), https://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf.
“‘Nine Killed’ at Syria Funeral Processions – Middle East – Al Jazeera English,” May 13, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110513130342/http://english.aljazeera.net//news/middleeast/2011/04/20114231169587270.html.
“Yemen Protests: Evidence Snipers Shot to Kill,” accessed April 15, 2022, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/yemen/8392796/Yemen-protests-Evidence-snipers-shot-to-kill.html.
Seymour M. Hersh. “C.I.A. Is Linked to Strikes In Chile That Beset Allende,” The New York Times, September 20, 1974, sec. Archives. https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/20/archives/cia-is-linked-to-strikes-in-chile-that-beset-allende-intelligence.html.
“Letter From Nicaragua: A Catastrophic Well-Orchestrated Event Is Occurring,” PopularResistance.Org (blog), June 10, 2018, https://popularresistance.org/letter-from-nicaragua/.
“Nicaragua: Shoot to Kill: Nicaragua’s Strategy to Repress Protest,” Amnesty International, May 29, 2018, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr43/8470/2018/en/.
“Snipers Hunting Down Citizens In Nicaragua, Former Army Major Says,” TODAY NICARAGUA, July 11, 2018, https://todaynicaragua.com/snipers-hunting-down-citizens-in-nicaragua-former-army-major-says/.
Barbara Moore, “The Story of a Coup,” LA Progressive, October 23, 2018, https://www.laprogressive.com/latin-america-2/nicaraguan-coup.
“Dismissing the Truth,” Alliance for Global Justice and Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign Action Group, October 2018), p. 25.
“Nicaragua 2018 – Myths and Facts,” in Live from Nicaragua, by Alex Anfruns et al. (Alliance for Global Justice, 2019), 39–59, https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.161/jwp.e46.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/live_from_nicaragua_june_2019.pdf.
“Nicaragua: Shoot to Kill: Nicaragua’s Strategy to Repress Protest,” Amnesty International.
John Perry, “Revisiting 2018 Mother’s March in Nicaragua: New Report Repeats Old Bias,” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, July 2, 2020, https://www.coha.org/revisiting-2018-mothers-march-in-nicaragua-new-report-repeats-old-bias/.
“Marcha de Las Madres” (IACHR / SITU Research / Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes / Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF)), accessed January 11, 2023, http://marchadelasmadres.com/#/es ; Perry, John. “Revisiting 2018 Mother’s March in Nicaragua: New Report Repeats Old Bias.”
“Report on the Violent Events That Took Place between April 18th and May 30th, 2018” (Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) Nicaragua, April 2019).
Gearóid Ó Colmáin, “Unknown Snipers and Western Backed ‘Regime Change,’” Global Research, March 7, 2014, https://www.globalresearch.ca/unknown-snipers-and-western-backed-regime-change/27904.
Secker, Tom, and Kit Klarenberg. “Declassified Intelligence Files Expose Inconvenient Truths of Bosnian War.” The Grayzone, December 30, 2022. https://thegrayzone.com/2022/12/30/declassified-intelligence-files-bosnian-war/.
Checkmate: Strategy of a Revolution.
Rowse “Gladio: The Secret U.S. War To Subvert Italian Democracy.”
“Villarejo Says That the 17-A Attacks Were a ‘Mistake’ by the CNI That Wanted to Give ‘a Little Scare in Catalonia,’” 20 Minutos, accessed May 26, 2022, https://www-20minutos-es.translate.goog/noticia/4939230/0/villarejo-dice-atentados-17a-error-grave-cni-queria-dar-pequeno-susto-cataluna/?autoref=true&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB.
Copyright © Jim Cole, CovertAction Magazine, 2023
Source: Covert Action Magazine
U.S.-NATO Involvement in the 2014 Ukraine Coup and Maidan Massacre: The Soft Power Ecosystem and Beyond
By Jim Cole
April 16, 2023
The Psychology of Color Revolutions
Color revolutions are U.S.-funded regime-change operations utilizing a sophisticated understanding of psychology, sociology and political organizing to foment and precipitate an “electoral revolution” resulting in a U.S. client state or one that meets other geopolitical purposes. They require a large ecosystem of change agents, including military, intelligence and diplomatic government actors, foundations, NGOs, PR companies and other contractors and corporate co-conspirators and media, developed over years with millions or billions in investment.
They have been successful in Serbia (2000), in Georgia’s Rose Revolution (2003), in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004), in Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution (2005), Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution (2005), Kuwait’s Blue Revolution (2005), Iraq’s Purple Revolution (2005), and in Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution (1989). Others, such as Ukraine 2014, were ultimately more characterized by violence but featured the same change-agent organizations; still others, such as Venezuela (2018) and Belarus’s Slipper Revolution (2020), failed, likely as the target regime is too entrenched and/or the soft-power ecosystem is too inhibited.
Although on the surface they utilize civic group energy and genuine discontent, particularly “creative non-violence resistance” of student and youth, their main power is in the control of the interpretation of unfolding events by both local and foreign audiences. This might make them “post-modern coups” in that they reflect a shift of regime-change operations from military hard power to civilian soft power, from reality to perception of reality, where the power of propaganda is much more insidious, yet the managers remain those connected to state and corporate power.
As with all propaganda, the control of the narratives in color revolutions is rooted in manipulation through fear and desire; a false promise of dissipating this fear through a desired candidate or policy, to channel the population against their current regime and pursue a direction in harmony with imperial interests.
Fear is also induced by some change agents (chaos agents such as saboteurs, snipers or terrorists) whose aim is to destabilize society and citizens’ sense of security, to provoke a desire for security internally (counterinsurgency) or for regime change in a foreign target (insurgency).
Insurgency/regime-change operations have become a sophisticated science of mass manipulation, researched by government, academic and foundation scientists for decades, involving the work of political and behavioral scientists, PR firms, social media experts, intelligence agents, local and foreign professional activists, and strategists and tacticians employed through governmental agencies, foundations and a plethora of NGOs.
“Collectively, their job is to make a palace coup (of their sponsorship) seem like a social revolution; to help fill the streets with fearless demonstrators advocating on behalf of a government of their choosing, which then legitimizes the sham governments with the authenticity of popular democracy and revolutionary fervor.
Because the operatives perform much of their craft in the open, their effectiveness is heavily predicated upon their ability to veil the influence backing them, and the long-term intentions guiding their work.
Their effectiveness is predicated on their ability to deceive, targeting both local populations and foreign audiences with highly-misleading interpretations of the underlying causes provoking these events.”[1]
Mass manipulation is as old as power, but for the modern era we might start, a century ago with Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd and the work of Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays as the originator of consumer propaganda (aka “PR”), the linchpin of our globalized and falsified non-culture.
As the military and intelligence agencies became more interested in soft power, funding increased for think tanks such as the deceptively named Albert Einstein Institution, an offshoot of Harvard University where political scientist Gene Sharp evolved a sophisticated—but very accessible—understanding of how to foment revolution in target countries.
His work had such a convenient overlap in appearance and terminology with civil rights campaigning and ostensibly non-violent and anti-war ideals, it escaped many people’s attention for decades that he was central to neo-imperial expansion “by other means” and that many of these worked in tandem with other soft-power techniques as well as covert-action operations with no façade of humanitarianism.
Two fundamental influences on the psychology of color revolutions are the cultural bias that comes from 80 years of American Century cultural imperialism with which the world has been bombarded and the endlessly exploitable genuine grievances citizens have against their own leaders, who may be separate from U.S. spheres of influence but can be just as immoral and vile.
Cultural bias, via entertainment, such as cartoons, as propaganda and by deep cultural bias and ties to the Homeland that prove very useful, for example, in how the U.S. pressures UN voting by threatening diplomats’ bank accounts and other ties to the U.S. or U.S. organizations and companies. Like the political, civic and media narratives of soft power, these have a profound effect on world view, values, critical thinking and perception of causes of events and possibilities for political progress, i.e., what is perceived as possible and desirable.
Legitimate dissent, oppression and foreign interference, of course, are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they are synergistic in escalating the tension for regime change, and genuine discontent or ethno-religious tension, for example, are an Achilles heal for an imperial force to target and exacerbate with divide-and-conquer, destabilization and other strategies of domination and regime change.
It is an intentional strategy of U.S. imperialism to impoverish, destabilize and neutralize non-client countries over decades, by sanctions, sabotage, propaganda, war, terror and other strategies, so that manufactured discontent becomes legitimized, certain sectors are energized while others are disenfranchised, and the hidden hand of imperialism is largely to blame.
Soft Power Imperial Apparatus: USAID, NED, Embassies, Soros, Omidyar, et al.
The purpose of soft power is to pressure governments, persuade people (propaganda) and co-opt future leaders. Much of this is done through political, labor and civic groups, other NGOs and media, media, media.
If you can look past the oligarch-level PR, the aim of U.S. empire is to instill free-market reform for multinational market penetration and control of global political economy.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED, a CIA offshoot founded in the 1980s) currently funds about 1600 different NGOs (negating the “non” part of their title), and hundreds have been funded in Ukraine since the 1990s. The two main NED arms, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) have both had Kyiv offices since 1992, running what then-regional NDI head Nelson C. Ledsky termed the “Ukraine experiment” in an update statement to the House of Representatives in 2005.[2]
In Serbia 2000, for example, the NDI focused on the opposition parties, while IRI focused on the young protesters and “paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundred yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.”[3] This mild division of taste and labor is about the extent of the difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to foreign policy.
About 40 NED-funded organizations are named in the NED’s 2004 Annual Report as operating in Ukraine, by far the most of any country that year.[4] But this is not a complete picture, even of the NED’s involvement, let alone the other soft-power agencies, many of which seem allergic to the spotlight; as Ron Paul said in a December 2004 speech before the U.S. House International Relations Committee, “That is what I find so disturbing: There are so many cut-out organizations and sub-grantees that we have no idea how much U.S. government money was really spent on Ukraine, and most importantly how it was spent.”[5] Twenty years later, you can amplify everything by about the same number.
By their own admission—thoroughly flooded across the millions of documents, websites, articles, press releases and media flowing from this industry that puts U.S. taxpayer money into oligarch accounts and aims to destroy any (potential) competition—all of this money is spent in a near religious faith in U.S. supremacy, manifest destiny and free market imperialism.[6] The misdirection underlying this is that it is for benevolent reasons, when it is clearly for ruling elite greed and has caused an inconceivable amount of destruction since the dawn of colonialism and the genocide of indigeneity.
But the Ukrainian cut-outs just grew and grew because, as NED President Carl Gershman said in 2013, “Ukraine is the biggest prize” in Europe.[7] And since late February 2022, the aid floodgates opened completely to fuel the proxy war to the last Ukrainian.
The NED board always tellingly includes some national security leaders, such as current CIA Director William J Burns, who was head of the NED-associated Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. After all, they have taken on the main burden of political, psychological, and social action jobs the CIA did covertly before the 1970s scandals led to the foundation of the NED. Only they do it mostly in plain sight—much less stressful!
Don’t forget the USAID and State Department, its embassies and those of wealthy client-states, also fund soft power with billions. Oh, and don’t forget the para-State Department oligarchs like Soros, whose International Renaissance Foundation spent $181 million in Ukraine from 1990 to 2015. Although that pales next to Victoria Nuland’s jubilant admission that the United States government had spent $5 billion on political change in Ukraine. According to memos leaked in DCLeaks in 2016, after his quarter-century of investing in Ukrainian neo-liberalization, Soros was nearly dictating elements of post-coup policy, including how to market the Ukrainian coup to potential Russian allies like Greece. His massive donations to the Democrats over recent decades—including $25 million to the Hilary shitshow in 2016—obviously confer heavy geopolitical influence, such as directly advising Secretary of State Clinton via email on how to respond to the Albanian situation in 2011.
The Omidyar Network—founders of the controlled opposition/whistleblower-capturing The Intercept—also got in on the soft power, according to the Kyiv Post, at least to the tune of $200,000 in 2012—funding the “Center UA” in 2012 with USAID and NED.[8] They also gave $335,000 to “New Citizen” to one of the Center UA projects. Center UA is one of many weaponized anti-corruption NGOs particularly targeting anti-U.S. politicians, i.e., Yanukovych at the time.
It is blatant that the concerted aim of all these countless interrelated departments, organizations and corporations is neo-liberalization for elite U.S. interests—by pressuring, forcing and demanding shock therapy IMF/World Bank privatization reforms and nurturing a generation of a political class with the same outlook to serve their masters. U.S. elites used to be fine with a friendly dictator, but I think they realized in the 1980s that soft power—weaponized aid, diplomacy, sanctions and humanitarianism—is more profitable and maintains the spic-and-span humanitarian façade of modern imperialism.
A key think tank behind political action in opposition countries has been the Albert Einstein Institution under the direction of the political change specialist Dr. Gene Sharp, a specialist and best-selling author in “nonviolence as a form of warfare.”
A key AEI operative, and friend of Sharp’s with decades of political action experience in Southeast Asia, was Colonel Robert Helvey. Michael Dobbs gleefully described in a December 11, 2000, Washington Post article, how at an IRI sponsored seminar at the Hilton hotel in Budapest:
“[T]he Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.
Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharpe [sic], whom he describes as ‘the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement,’ referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist.”[9]
It is crazy: People read the word “non-violence” (and “pro-democracy,” “Einstein” and, if they are really hoodwinked, “Harvard”) and the references to civil rights, etc., and some sort of virtue switch is triggered that presumes the motives are not only benign, but benevolent and noble. It is a sickness of living in this false-liberal wilderness of mirrors, drunk on this manifest-destiny poison that saturates America and the Western world under its spell.
And so it is interesting that Gene Sharp has only recently been identified and analyzed as an arm of U.S. imperialism, for example, in a comprehensive set of articles by Marcie Smith. Many still harbor vague thoughts of him as a supporter of national liberation movements—the exact opposite of the AEIs true intentions: anti-sovereignty and pro-imperialist. It is as if many fell for the whitewashing of “for freedom and democracy” and propaganda of weaponized humanitarianism/white man’s burden and forgot to look behind the neo-liberal curtain as to what was driving the multi-billion-dollar machine. Whoops. Again, it is hard not to get caught up in such massive, slick, trillion-dollar PR that has been flowing continuously since the dawn of the American century in 1898.
Any organization of dissent that truly tries to expose and counter the establishment’s machinations, once it crosses a threshold of influence, will be targeted: first, with monitoring and surveillance; followed by infiltration, co-optation and smearing; and, ultimately, by outright capture or sabotage. But when a voice comes from within the belly of the beast, no matter how noble and grand its professed nature and ideologies, do not let its sweet whispers in your ear for a moment.
Soft Power: Political, Diplomatic and Economic Pressure
As well as co-opting, training and funding the young street-level protesters and NGO puppets, it is necessary to unite, co-opt, train and fund the official political opposition, directly and indirectly. For example, building up to the Serbian election of 2000, more than 20 opposition leaders met with U.S. officials and “private democracy experts,” mostly in Budapest, to coordinate the $41 million campaign of 2000.[10]
And these astronomical NGO interference budgets mentioned above do not include private contractors brought in through other funding routes, sometimes elicit, and the involvement of the EU, the World Bank and the IMF, the latter that the U.S. will often control, like a tap, to remind locals who’s the boss. As in Biden’s threat to withhold a $1 billion IMF loan if his lapdog Petro Poroshenko did not fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, investigating the gas embezzlement scam, by Mykola Zlochevsky’s (now Zelensky and Azov Battalion funder Kolomoisky’s) Burisma Holdings Ltd. Yes, the same Burisma that paid Hunter Biden $83,333.33 a month for simply being on the board.[11]
Although this is after the coup, it perfectly reflects the reasons for it. Biden recounted the tale with warmth and humor, as if around a cowboy’s campfire, at a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, “On Defending Democracy:”
“‘We’re not gonna give you the billion dollars….If the prosecutor [Shokin] is not fired, you are not getting the money.’ Well, son-of-a-bitch….He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid…”
To be clear: Here is a U.S. vice president and future president bragging about blackmailing the “leaders” of a foreign country that his own government implanted, to fire someone who, before he crossed Biden, seemed a rare example of an uncorrupted Ukrainian politician (Viktor Shokin—who has, since Nuland, Pyatt and Biden turned against him in late 2015, been in fear of his life)—in order, seemingly, to cover up his own apparent association with millions in tax fraud.
The gentleman he refers to as “solid” as future prosecutor general was not only not a lawyer, he was a recently released prisoner, Yuriy Lutsenko—described by Daria Kaleniuk, director of the (U.S., EU and “private international” funded) Anti-Corruption Action Center Ukraine, as “a crook” who “abused office for self-enrichment” and did not solve a single case in more than three years.[12] (It is an interesting theatrical short-circuit irony where you have a Western-funded NGO/individual criticizing a Western-installed puppet. Of course, theater, like circuses, delivered in constant and endless news-cycle drama stories, distracts from larger agendas and accumulates to provoke a numb, hypnotized and amnesic public.)
There is a unique, deep but shrill sycophancy heard in Poroshenko’s voice when he regularly talked with Biden. The chocolate king, despite his already disgusting wealth, has a palpable slavering greed for the further enrichment and power being a Biden/U.S. proxy elite entails. Is it a warped form of love, the worship of such power? It is a degenerate addiction.
Not just Biden held such close constant interest in Ukraine: It is interesting to note the parade of senior U.S. and EU politicians and influencers who spoke to crowds at Maidan during the protest. Portrayed as a sort of echo of the “Winds of Change” of 1989, as if bricks of the Berlin Wall were still hitting the ground—when in fact, it was to become more like the random slaughter of Romania 1989 than drunken hope of Berlin 1989—the list tellingly includes:
Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs
Geoffrey Pyatt, Ambassador
Catherine Ashton, EU foreign policy chief
Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Chris Murphy (D-CT), threatening sanctions if there were any violence against protesters, spoke on stage with Oleh “Sieg Heil” Tyahnybok on December 13, 2013
Bernard-Henri Lévy (February 2014)—who also met with Poroshenko twice and Vitali Klitschko in February and subsequently described the massacred victims as “European, indeed…because in the Maidan, for the first time in history, young people would die clutching the starry flag of Europe.” This is deep-level, trauma-based PsyOps BHL is delivering. (Don’t forget, as well, his starring role in the Libyan regime change of 2011.)
What sort of a neutered state allows a foreign state to parade its leaders through its capital inciting regime change? But the figureheads are only the front of the show, soft imperial power saturates a target like a rising tide.
Soft Power Tech: Civil Society 2.0
If the Gene Sharp-style color revolutions of the 2000s embraced youthful energy, symbols, slogans, top-level PR strategy and new media, those of the 2010s were influenced further by Silicon Valley’s advances in the awesome and terrifying political potential of social media, not least in surveillance and propaganda in the service of imperialism.
Don’t forget the military and intelligence roots of the internet, mobile phones and software. The interlinkage is seen not just by analyzing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Stanford Labs and the many patents in your tech now spying on you owned by the Department of Defense, or the investments of the CIA’s In-Q-Tel in Silicon Valley startups and companies; it is also clear by seeing how often State Department, military and intelligence organizations partner with tech companies in different projects and by the interchange of personnel, particularly since the Obama administration.
Core to this are Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, a bridge between Google and the State department. As Julian Assange, who met both of them secretly in 2011, described in his review of their 2013 book The New Digital Age:
“[It] is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.
The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not.” [13]
The policy influence of Cohen is clear during and after his (official) State Department Policy Planning tenure of 2004–2010 that earned him a seat at the Council on Foreign Relations, with the introduction of zeitgeist (and already dated) terms like “21st century statecraft,” “diplomacy 2.0” and “civil society 2.0” to U.S. government foreign policy projects and documents.
Color revolution strategies have always focused on media narratives and co-opted youth as agents of change—as in Otpor in Serbia 2000—but as social media came to dominate, this became a new weapon in imperialism for insurgency and regime change.
An interesting innovation in Ukraine in 2012, TechCamps were first organized through the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. The project was developed initially by Katie Dowd and Angela Baker, both Advisers for Innovation at the U.S. Institute of Peace (should it be War?) in Washington.[14]
The conferences were run at the embassy from 2012 to 2014 by Luke Schtele, an Assistant Press Attaché in the Obama administration, and funded by public and private grants. According to his bio at Fulbright conferences in 2014 and 2015, Schtele “led the implementation of the U.S. Department of State’s Civil Society 2.0 initiative in Ukraine” and “organized a series of TechCamps and media forums in Ukraine from 2012–2014, training more than 350 activists and journalists in the use of digital technology and communications.” [15]
Soon after the fifth TechCamp on November 14-15, 2014, at the embassy, and just before the start of the Maidan protests, Deputy Oleg Tsarov had the audacity to complain in parliament that the U.S. Embassy TechCamp projects and funding were illegal intervention in Ukrainian sovereignty, information warfare and manipulation of public opinion to sow dissent by the United States, against the UN Resolution 2131 (XX) of December 21, 1965, entitled Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty.
He may have been drowned out by the boos of the opposition, defending their gravy train, but he was right. An early TechCamp project included mobilizing youth in internet-poor areas, particularly the poorer and more Russian-speaking east, to share messages via SMS, called “SMS Like” and “SMS-President,” developed by Vadim Georgienko at TechCamp 2012, after speaking to Trevor Knoblich who developed the similar FrontlineSMS. Other projects included initiating the “journalism without borders” project, using online games for social causes. TechCamps in Ukraine were funded by the State Department as well as private support, including from Coca-Cola and Microsoft.
After the coup, Schtele and some of his team proudly presented the achievements of TechCamp Ukraine at Fulbright conferences in 2014 and 2015, along with some interesting social media soft-power change agents. They included Professor Josephine Dorado of The New School, a “Trainer, State Department,”; Olena Sadovnik [Media Development Officer, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe]; and Vadim Georgienko [Developer, Creator of SMS-President and Dobrochyn crowdfunding platform]. The summary of the TechCamp project is identical for both and worth repeating in full: [16]
“Igniting Citizen Action in Ukraine through Mobile Storytelling
This session will highlight work being done by Fulbrighters and other agents of change at TechCamps, an initiative under the U.S. State Department and U.S. Institute of Peace which aids civil society organizations in developing countries by building their digital capacities. We will look at TechCamps through the lens of Ukraine and focus on how building skills around mobile story telling galvanized citizen actions and continues to address the challenge of communicating in conflict regions.”
Social media was the main driver of the Maidan protests, which “unexpectedly erupted outside the election cycle, on a random Thursday evening,” beginning with a Facebook post by a U.S. astroturfed journalist.[17]
When Soft Power Fails, Coercive Violence Follows
And so soft power and its main tool, propaganda, multiply exponentially in the endlessly nourishing flow of money. The “ugly truth” if you speak to an old school military realist, or get an ex-CIA agent drunk enough, or infiltrate a group of defense contractors and their stooge senators as they ride waves of euphoria at the call of any military escalation, is that, geopolitically, “they” will sometimes also be content with chaos and destabilization of a target country, no matter the death and refugee toll.
This Plan B works as it also prevents and weakens competition and gives the military-industrial complex a good cash stream for a few years or decades. An endless war is more profitable than a successful one and still has geopolitical advantages. Being the last country left standing is as solid a path to “full spectrum dominance” as any other.
Although some NGOs proudly display the logos of embassies, USAID, NED, etc., a regular occurrence is the defense of some agencies attempting to hide the foreign source of their funding. Their argument is that this is used as a strategy to attack them. This farcical logic does somewhat limit anti-corruption efforts, though.
And how did all these billions of investments, this political and economic macro and micromanaging and the two “color revolutions” improve Ukraine? Bloated oligarchic corruption to previously unimaginable levels;[18] empowered, armed, funded and normalized neo-fascists;[19] and started a civil war that claimed 14,000 lives even before the Russian invasion of 2022 and more than 200,000 wounded in the first year since the invasion, not to mention millions of refugees.
Because the soft power so ceaselessly targeted at Ukraine, the “prize of Europe,” was inevitably going to turn ugly and dark, the U.S. had to turn to hard power to achieve its aim of breaking Russia from Europe, at least so the U.S. can shift its imperial aggression to China while Ukrainians die.
Ultimately, all the methods of regime change, of empire, are a continuum, a selection of tools that escalate in violence and—safe in their Washington, New York, Houston and San Francisco mansions; or Swiss, Belgian, French or German chateaus; or English Home Counties Manors—the oligarchs don’t care about violence, death and chaos they create, as long as the income stream flows and the profits of missiles, minerals, oil and gas, and finance black magic continue to rise. The ugliest truth is that one creates the other.
As John McCain described the Arab Spring—very much the fruits of U.S. soft-power funding via NED and dozens of other tentacles—it is a crafted weapon intended to weaken Russia and China, despite overtures of cooperation; it is “a virus that will attack Moscow and Beijing” and collateral damage, or fear of all-out war, is irrelevant to these power-deranged psychos.[20] If you don’t understand what these different crafted weapons of imperialism are, and how they work, you will have zero ability to interpret geopolitical events, and will likely go insane trying to understand history or reality as you are manipulated in a web of lies.
Notes
Eric Pottenger and Jeff Friesen. “Color Revolutions and Geopolitics,” May 28, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20160528135032/http://colorrevolutionsandgeopolitics.blogspot.com/.
“Ukraine: Developments in the Aftermath of the Orange Revolution,” § Committee on International Relations (2005), http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa22653.000/hfa22653_0f.htm.
Michael Dobbs, “U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition: Political Consultants Helped Yugoslav Opposition Topple Authoritarian Leader,” The Washington Post, December 11, 2000, http://archive.is/AaTL.
“2004 NED Annual Report” (National Endowment for Democracy, 2004), https://www.ned.org/docs/annual/2004AnnualReport.pdf.
Henry J Hyde, et al., “Ukraine’s Election: Next Steps,” Pub. L. No. Serial No. 108–161, § Committee on International Relations, 63 (2004), 49, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/congress/2004_hr/041207-transcript.pdf.
David K. Shipler, “Missionaries for Democracy: U.S. Aid for Global Pluralism,” The New York Times, June 1, 1986, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/01/world/missionaries-for-democracy-us-aid-for-global-pluralism.html.
Carl Gershman, “Former Soviet states stand up to Russia. Will the U.S.?” The Washington Post, September 26, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/former-soviet-states-stand-up-to-russia-will-the-us/2013/09/26/b5ad2be4-246a-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html.
Mark Ames, “Pierre Omidyar Co-funded Ukraine Revolution Groups With US Government, Documents Show,” Pando, February 28, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20140601233828/http://pando.com/2014/02/28/pierre-omidyar-co-funded-ukraine-revolution-groups-with-us-government-documents-show/.
Dobbs, “U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition.”
Idem.
Olivier Berruyer, UkraineGate – Inconvenient Facts (Les-Crises.fr), accessed March 1, 2022, https://ukrainegate.info/.
Part 1 – A Not So Solid Prosecutor, UkraineGate: Inconvenient Facts (Les-Crises.fr), accessed January 16, 2023, https://ukrainegate.info/part-1-a-not-so-solid-prosecutor/.
Julian Assange, “Opinion | The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” The New York Times, June 1, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html.
“TechCamp Kyiv: Building a Bridge Between Civil Society and Technology,” October 8, 2012, https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/19335.
“Fulbright Association 37th Annual Conference Event Guide: Dare to Act” (Fulbright Association, 2014), https://fulbright.org/2014-conference/.
Idem.
Tetyana Bohdanova, “Unexpected Revolution: The Role of Social Media in Ukraine’s Euromaidan Uprising,” European View 13, no. 1 (June 1, 2014): 133–42, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12290-014-0296-4.
Andrew Cockburn, “Undelivered Goods: How $1.8 billion in aid to Ukraine was funneled to the outposts of the international finance galaxy,” Harper’s Magazine, August 13, 2015, https://harpers.org/2015/08/undelivered-goods/.
Yasha Levine, “Refugees, Neo-Nazis, and Super Patriots: Heading into the Ukrainian War Zone,” Pando Quarterly, September 25, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20210515201559/https://pando.com/2014/09/25/refugees-neo-nazis-and-super-patriots-heading-into-the-ukrainian-war-zone/.
Steve Clemons, “The Arab Spring: ‘A Virus That Will Attack Moscow and Beijing,’” The Atlantic, November 19, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/the-arab-spring-a-virus-that-will-attack-moscow-and-beijing/248762/.
Copyright © Jim Cole, CovertAction Magazine, 2023
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