TBR News April 3, 2019

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. May 3, 2019: “Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.

I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.

He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.

He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.

His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.

He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.

Commentary for May 3 “Franklin Roosevelt was, in the beginning of his long reign, very popular with American voters but when he started dictating to Congress, he made terrible enemies who blocked him at every turn. Eventually, Franklin lost control and while he could dictate to the White House staff, he had lost his power. The same thing is happening to Trump but he never had the national popularity Roosevelt had although Trump is certainly an audacious and chronic liar. Trump is firmly in the pocket of the Russians, Israel, the Christian nutties and the far, SS-oriented right wing hate groups. This, too, shall pass away. (The sooner, the better) ”

 

The Table of Contents

• Mueller report: Five looming legal battles between Congress and Trump
• House Judiciary chief sets Monday deadline for full Mueller report\
• William Barr is acting like Trump’s henchman
• The Complete Mercenary
• Prison for a Cartoon in the France of Voltaire
• Official Record of all Prisoners in Auschwitz Concentration Camp from May of 1940 through December of 1944.
• The Silent Jew- An Open Letter
• Encyclopedia of American Loons
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 

Mueller report: Five looming legal battles between Congress and Trump

May 2, 2019

by Anthony Zurcher, North America reporter

BBC News

The US attorney general spent five acrimonious hours in front of a congressional committee explaining his handling of the Mueller report. The intensity of some of the exchanges suggests multiple legal and battles lie ahead between the Democrats in Congress and President Donald Trump.

A day after Attorney General William Barr traded blows with senators, the stakes ramped up considerably as he refused to testify to another committee and the Democratic leadership accused him of lying under oath.

Here’s a look at five areas where the fighting could be the most heated – and where they could be headed.

Waiting for Mueller

Mr Barr’s Senate testimony on Wednesday may have prompted as many questions as it answered, raising to a fevered pitch Democratic calls to hear from Robert Mueller himself.

They want to ask him why he failed to reach a conclusion on whether the president obstructed justice, and what he thinks about the attorney general’s handling of his report.

They’ll also want to question him about the contacts between the Trump campaign team and Russians – and how close they may have come to being a criminal conspiracy.

Although Republican Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham says he has no interest in calling Mr Mueller before his committee – insisting that the matter is closed – House Democrats have other ideas.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler, said negotiations are continuing over finding a date, perhaps in May, when the special counsel can testify before his committee.

Mr Barr has said he has no objection to Mr Mueller making such an appearance and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway also said that Mr Mueller – who is still, technically, a Justice Department employee – can testify.

But increasing conflict between the White House and Congress could change this calculus.

Outlook: Mueller spent most of his time as special counsel shrouded in secrecy and silence. It seems unlikely, however, that he will be able to quietly disappear from the national stage.

Punishing Bill Barr

In a press conference on Thursday morning, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi straight-up accused William Barr of committing a crime.

She was specifically referring to the attorney general’s claims, during congressional testimony in early April, that he was unaware of reports of dissatisfaction with his handling of the Mueller report expressed by members of the special counsel’s office.

Democrats now believe this was a lie – based on a recent revealed letter from Mr Mueller to Mr Barr complaining that the attorney general’s four-page summary did not “fully capture the context, nature and substance” of his work.

Mr Barr countered that his communications were with Mr Muller himself, not his team, and the dissatisfaction had to do with the media coverage of his letter, not how he relayed Mr Mueller’s findings.

Needless to say, Democrats aren’t buying it.

Then there are other reasons Democrats are angry at Mr Barr – such as his refusal to testify before the House Judiciary Committee and his decision to ignore congressional document subpoenas.

What are Democrats going to do about it? Mrs Pelosi only made vague references to a “process”, but they have several options if they want to punish the attorney general.

They could make a criminal referral for lying to Congress, which would be forwarded to a US attorney in Mr Barr’s Justice Department. They could hold Mr Barr in contempt of Congress, which would have to be enforced by US attorneys in the Trump administration.

The House of Representatives could also vote to formally censure the attorney general, putting a black mark on his record but not much more.

Finally, they could try to impeach the attorney general and have him removed from office. The process would be similar to that for removing a US president – a majority vote in the House of Representatives followed by a trial in the US Senate requiring a two-thirds vote to “convict”.

Only one White House cabinet official has ever been impeached – Ulysses S Grant’s Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876 – and he was ultimately acquitted of corruption charges by the Senate.

Outlook: Legal proceedings seem unlikely. Censorship appears pointless. Impeachment would be an uphill fight, but it could also serve as proxy battle for the impeaching Mr Trump himself, venting frustration for Democrats who are itching for a fight but wary of taking on the president directly.

The McGahn subpoena

While Mr Mueller’s appearance before the US Congress would be a blockbuster occasion, he’s not the only individual Democrats want to question in open testimony. The special counsel’s report detailed how former White House Counsel Don McGahn felt the president pressured him to fire Mr Mueller and, later, write a memo saying that Mr Trump issued no such directive.

When Mr Barr was questioned about the matter by Senate Democrats, he said the president only suggested Mr Mueller be “replaced” because of a perceived conflict of interest – and then instructed Mr McGahn to write a memo to correct inaccurate media reports.

Democrats, needless to say, aren’t buying this, viewing the episode as one of the most obvious instances of possible obstruction of justice. Mr Nadler has issued a subpoena calling on Mr McGahn to testify before his committee on 21 May so his committee can get the former Trump aide’s account directly.

That’s not the end of the matter, of course. Mr Trump has said he plans to fight all the congressional subpoenas his administration is receiving, with Mr McGahn’s probably high on the list.

The White House could claim “executive privilege”, a legal principle that protects the confidentiality of advice a president receives from his aides. Although that privilege was waived when Mr McGahn spoke with Mr Mueller’s office, a recently revealed letter from White House lawyer Emmet Flood to Mr Barr indicates the president intends to preserve those protections going forward.

If both sides dig in, Mr McGahn’s freedom to talk to Congress could end up a matter for the courts to decide.

Outlook: Executive privilege is a controversial legal principle, but there are plenty of judges – and Supreme Court justices – who could be eager to see these presidential protections strengthened. Mr McGahn would be a blockbuster witness – but the Mueller report may end up being his only public account.

An unredacted report

While most of the Mueller report was made public in mid-April, there are still roughly 36 pages that the Justice Department has redacted – because of sensitive intelligence data, grand jury information, material relevant to ongoing investigations or matters concerning “peripheral third parties”.

Democrats in Congress want to see the entire report and have issued a subpoena – again courtesy of House Judiciary Chair Nadler – to force the Justice Department to hand it over.

The White House has said the report was produced by the special counsel for the attorney general, and Congress has no right to see it in its entirety. There’s an unstated concern that if the report receives wider distribution, its sensitive contests will leak to the public.

Attorney General Barr said in his Senate testimony, however, that there were no significant areas of disagreement between Mr Mueller and himself over what to redact. There’s no guarantee that the blacked-out portions of the report contain any new, explosive information.

Still, it could very well end up another battle between two branches of government, the executive and legislative, that will have to be decided by the third, the judiciary.

Outlook: This could end up being a fierce battle over a hill that doesn’t matter in the larger war.

Trump’s tax returns and other documents

There are two separate legal battles brewing over congressional requests for Donald Trump’s business records and – that holy grail for many on the left – his tax returns.

A month ago, Richard Neal, the Democrat in charge of the House Ways and Means Committee, formally requested that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) provide him with copies of the president’s tax returns for six years, citing a seldom-used 1924 law as authority.

So far Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, whose department oversees the IRS, has only said he’s reviewing the matter.

The president and his lawyers, on the other hand, have called the request improper and insisted that the IRS not comply.

“The Democrats are demanding that the IRS turn over the documents, and that is not going to happen and they know it,” acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said a few days after the first committee request was filed.

If the Treasury Department continues to drag its feet, the Democrats could start court proceedings that eventually determine the constitutionality of that old federal law and the legality of the Democratic action.

Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s personal lawyers have filed a flurry of lawsuits to prevent an accounting firm and two banks used by Mr Trump’s businesses – Deutsche Bank and Capital One – from complying with requests by several Democratic-controlled House committees for Trump organisation financial records.

Courts have previously given Congress broad subpoena powers as part of their legislative and investigatory responsibilities, but Mr Trump’s lawyers are painting the move as a partisan fishing expedition that intrudes on the privacy of the president and his family.

Democrats counter that a thorough inspection of Trump businesses is the only way to ensure that he doesn’t have financial involvements that are illegal or make him susceptible to foreign influence.

Outlook: This appears set for another long, drawn-out legal battle. Democrats could find a way to circumvent the federal government, however, if New York state – which possesses the president’s state tax returns and oversees many big financial institutions – hands over what they have to Congress.

 

House Judiciary chief sets Monday deadline for full Mueller report

May 3, 2019

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler gave Attorney General William Barr until Monday morning to give lawmakers access to the full, unredacted version of U.S. Special Counsel Robert’ Mueller report on his Russia probe.

Nadler informed Barr of the 9 a.m. (1300 GMT) Monday deadline in a letter on Friday after the attorney general failed to show up at a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled for Thursday.

“In refusing to comply with congressional oversight requests, the department has repeatedly asserted that Congress’s requests do not serve ‘legitimate’ purposes,” Nadler said in the letter.

“This is not the department’s judgment to make,” he added. “Congress’s constitutional, oversight and legislative interest in investigating misconduct by the president and his associates cannot be disputed.”

Barr’s refusal to appear before House Judiciary Committee on Thursday drew an angry rebuke from Democratic lawmakers, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accusing the attorney general of lying to Congress and adding, “That’s a crime.”

The House panel met anyway on Thursday and weighed its next steps in a growing constitutional confrontation between lawmakers and the executive branch.

Nadler said he may move to hold Barr in contempt of Congress over his refusal to comply with the subpoena for the full report, which describes Russia’s interference in Trump’s favor in the 2016 U.S. election and Trump’s subsequent attempts to impede Mueller’s probe.

Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by David Alexander and Jonathan Oatis

 

William Barr is acting like Trump’s henchman

The attorney general seems willing to distort facts, to cunningly parse words, and to condone behavior that borders on criminality

May 3, 2019

by Austin Sarat

The Guardian

William Barr has shown himself to be a loyal foot soldier for the president who appointed him. From his 24 March summary of the “principal conclusions” of the Mueller report to his press conference on the day he released a redacted version of the Mueller report to Congress, to his testimony on Wednesday before the Senate judiciary committee, Barr’s recent performances have demonstrated the extreme loyalty Donald Trump found wanting in his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

And what is good for the president is bad for America.

Barr’s appearance before the Senate judiciary committee and his refusal to appear on Thursday at a House judiciary committee hearing were just the latest disappointments for those who hoped his nomination and confirmation would once again make the office of attorney general a bulwark of the rule of law.

After the fiascos that marked the service of Sessions and of the acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, Barr initially looked like a sober, responsible and surprisingly, un-Trumpian choice to lead the Department of Justice. Having served as attorney general under George HW Bush, he seemed to be the embodiment of the Republican legal establishment, so much so that in 1991 he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate.

But when Trump tagged him for a return to the office of attorney general there were some red flags. Most prominent among them were Barr’s embrace of the theory of the so-called “unitary executive”. This theory holds that the president alone possesses the power to control the entire executive branch.

More recently, but before he was named attorney general, Barr offered the justice department an unsolicited memo arguing that no president could ever commit the crime of obstruction of justice.

That memo may have been the most vivid sign that Barr was performing for an audience of one, the one who would later designate him as attorney general.

But in spite of these warning signs, commentators across the political spectrum welcomed his appointment and called him “highly qualified and committed to the traditions, procedures and mores of the justice department”.

Others noted his “reputation for integrity and straight dealing” or praised him as a “strong defender of the rule of law”.

Today, not three months since he was again confirmed by the Senate, Barr hardly seems to embody “integrity and straight dealing” or to be a “strong defender of the rule of law”. Instead, he has acted as political ally, not to say a henchman, for the president who appointed him.

This conception of the attorney general as the president’s strong political ally goes as far back as the service of Edmond Randolph, George Washington’s first attorney general. In the 20th century, it was seen in Richard Nixon’s appointment of John Mitchell and Ronald Reagan’s choice of Edwin Meese.

What is radically different in 2019 is that Barr is allying himself with and dutifully serving a president who has shown contempt for the norms, principles and commitments that are fundamental to the constitution and the rule of law.

And what is not only different but also dangerous, is that Barr seems willing to distort facts, to cunningly parse words and to condone behavior that borders on criminality.

Robert Mueller called him out for distorting facts in his rebuttal to Barr’s summary of the special counsel’s report. As Mueller put it, that summary “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance of this office’s work and conclusions”.

Barr’s artful and deceptive use of language was fully on display in his testimony before the judiciary committee this week. Take the following exchange with California senator Kamala Harris.

“Has the president,” Harris asked, “or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone? … Yes or no?”

“Um, the president or anybody else?” Barr said.

Harris then said: “Seems you’d remember something like that and be able to tell us.”

“Yeah, but I’m trying to grapple with the word ‘suggest’,” Barr replied. “There have been discussions of matters out there that they have not asked me to open an investigation, but –”

Harris asked: “Perhaps they’ve suggested, hinted?”

Barr replied: “I don’t know, I wouldn’t say suggest. I don’t know.”

Rather than a straightforward answer appropriate for a “person of integrity” and for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Barr tried to protect the White House while seeking to avoid committing perjury.

As if such evasive and deceptive behavior were not bad enough coming from the attorney general, Barr also went out of his way to offer a pretext of legality to some of Trump’s most questionable actions. He argued that Trump’s “firing of then FBI director James Comey in May 2017 and the attempted firing of Mueller a month later were ‘authorized by the constitution’ and therefore ‘facially innocent’”.

In addition, he told the judiciary committee that if the president thinks that a legal proceeding was “based on false allegations, the president does not have to sit there, constitutionally, and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate that proceeding, and it would not be a corrupt intent, because he was being falsely accused.”

Responding to Barr’s recent actions and testimony, Democrats have called for his impeachment or his resignation. But Barr is not going anywhere. Trump finally has his supremely loyal attorney general. Barr’s distortion of facts, artful and deceptive use of language, and bizarre legal theories have won him the president’s admiration. Talking about his testimony before the judiciary committee, Trump’s said that Barr did a “fantastic job”.

The threats to democracy and the rule law that the Trump administration has long posed is now buttressed by the work of the attorney general. Alas, Hillary Clinton got it right when she said that, left unchecked, Barr’s views would put the US on “the road to tyranny”

 

The Complete Mercenary

How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback

May 3, 2019

by Matthew Cole

The Intercept

When Erik Prince arrived at the Four Seasons resort in the Seychelles in January 2017 for his now-famous meetings with a Russian banker and UAE ruler Mohammed bin Zayed, he was in the middle of an unexpected comeback. The election of Donald Trump had given the disgraced Blackwater founder a new opportunity to prove himself. After years of trying and failing to peddle a sweeping vision of mercenary warfare around the world, Erik Prince was back in the game.

Bin Zayed had convened a group of close family members and advisers at the luxurious Indian Ocean resort for a grand strategy session in anticipation of the new American administration. On the agenda were discussions of new approaches for dealing with the civil wars in Yemen, Syria, and Libya, the threat of the Islamic State, and the United Arab Emirates’ longstanding rivalry with Iran. Under bin Zayed’s leadership, the UAE had used its oil wealth to become one of the world’s largest arms purchasers and the third largest importer of U.S. weapons. A new American president meant new opportunities for the tiny Gulf nation to exert its outsized military and economic influence in the Gulf region and beyond.

Prince was no stranger to the Emiratis. He had known bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the UAE, since 2009, when he sold the sheikh on creating an elite counterterrorism unit. That deal ended badly for Prince, but Trump’s election had recalibrated his usefulness. As a prominent Trump supporter and close associate of Steve Bannon, not to mention the brother of incoming cabinet member Betsy DeVos, Prince was invited to the meeting as an unofficial adviser to the incoming administration.

When Prince joined the Emirati royals and other government officials on a deck overlooking the Indian Ocean, bin Zayed made it clear to everyone there that “Erik was his guy,” said a source close to the Emirati rulers, who was briefed by some of those in attendance. Prince, in bin Zayed’s view, had built and established an elite ground force that bin Zayed had deployed to wars in Syria and Yemen, the first foreign conflicts in his young country’s history. It was because of Prince, bin Zayed said, that the Emiratis had no terrorists in their country. Prince had solved their problem with Somali pirates. “He let his court know that they owed Erik a favor,” the source said.

Part of that favor apparently involved facilitating an introduction to Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of an $8 billion Russian sovereign wealth fund and a close associate of President Vladimir Putin. Prince repeatedly and under oath in testimony to Congress denied that his meeting with Dmitriev had anything to do with the Trump administration, describing it as no more than a chance encounter over a beer.

“We were talking about the endless war and carnage in Iraq and Syria,” Prince told the House Intelligence Committee. “If Franklin Roosevelt can work with Joseph Stalin after the Ukraine terror famine, after killing tens of millions of his own citizens, we can certainly at least cooperate with the Russians in a productive way to defeat the Islamic State.”

Although the UAE has been a very good customer of U.S. arms dealers, bin Zayed had grown frustrated with the Obama administration’s refusal to work with Russia to end the war in Syria. Russia was actively courting the UAE, and from bin Zayed’s perspective Russia was a key player that couldn’t be ignored, according to a current and a former U.S. intelligence official. Trump’s public infatuation with Putin and his apparent eagerness to improve relations with Russia gave the UAE a chance to play dealmaker and diminish Iran’s position in the Middle East, starting with the war in Syria.

Prince’s 30-minute meeting with a Putin intimate shortly before Trump’s inauguration has drawn intense interest from Congress, the Mueller investigation, and the press. The Mueller report established that the meeting was a pre-arranged attempt to establish a backchannel between Russia and the incoming Trump administration and has led House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department for perjury. Yet the focus on Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election has deflected scrutiny from what the meeting reveals about Prince’s unique role in the world of covert services.

Blackwater made Prince an infamous symbol of U.S. foreign policy hubris, but America’s most famous mercenary has moved on. Although he continues to dream of deploying his military services in the world’s failed states, and persists in hawking a crackpot scheme of privatizing the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Prince has diversified his portfolio. No longer satisfied with contracting out former special forces operators to the State Department and Pentagon, Prince is now attempting to offer an entire supply chain of warfare and conflict. He wants to be able to skim a profitable cut from each stage of a hostile operation, whether it be overt or covert, foreign or domestic. His offerings range from the traditional mercenary toolkit, military hardware and manpower, to cellphone surveillance technology and malware, to psychological operations and social media manipulation in partnership with shadowy operations like James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas.

This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen of Prince’s former colleagues and peers, as well as court records, emails, and internal documents provided to The Intercept. An examination of Prince’s time working with the UAE in particular reveals suspicious financial transactions at a moment when his personal finances were under stress and his mercenary ventures were failing. The picture that emerges is one of a man desperately trying to avoid U.S. tax and weapons trafficking laws even as he offers military services, without a license, in no fewer than 15 countries around the world.

Prince’s former and current associates describe him as a visionary, a brilliant salesman with remarkable insight into the future of warfare, who is nonetheless so shady and incompetent that he fails at almost every enterprise he attempts. And yet he endures. Prince is thus, in many ways, an emblematic figure for the Trump era.

Suitcases Full of Cash

Prince’s partnership with bin Zayed got underway, fittingly, with a slapstick moment in early 2010, when two of Prince’s men, a veteran of the Canadian special forces and a Lebanese fixer, were ordered by Emirati security officials to meet at an Abu Dhabi intersection. There, a few government employees helped Prince’s men load the trunk of a Chevy Impala with more than half a dozen carry-on suitcases, most worn and with busted wheels. The two drove back to their hotel, Le Méridian, where they unloaded the bags, returned to their room, and summoned their immediate supervisor, a former Navy SEAL who had known Prince in the military, telling the American that they had a problem. Their new company, Reflex Responses, often called R2 for short, was so new it didn’t yet have a bank account or even an office with a safe.

When the former SEAL entered their hotel room, the contents of the suitcases had been largely removed, much of it dumped onto a bed: bricks of new, sequential $100 bills, in $10,000 stacks, each bound by a green and white band. The three men counted each stack, measuring the height to be sure that they all had 100 $100 bills, until they tallied it all: roughly $13 million. For the first two weeks of the program, the hotel room, always occupied by a security guard or a company employee, served as the Reflex Responses vault. Hotel staff were not allowed to clean the room, and by the time R2 opened a bank account and deposited the money, the room was covered in empty whiskey bottles and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.

Prince had arrived in the UAE at a low moment. The Obama administration had made clear in its first months that it would not welcome new Blackwater contracts. The company had become infamous after Blackwater security contractors shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded dozens more in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. By 2010, Prince had changed Blackwater’s name and sold the company, ceasing to work on any U.S. government contracts. As Prince negotiated a settlement with the Justice Department for a series of Blackwater arms trafficking violations,  then-CIA Director Leon Panetta discovered a secret assassination program involving Blackwater operatives that former Vice President Dick Cheney had hidden from Congress. Prince was bitter, blaming the Obama administration for leaking his CIA role and comparing himself to exposed CIA operative Valerie Plame. Prince couldn’t understand why the American public viewed him as a villain. “He was genuinely upset,” said a former colleague who discussed the public scrutiny of Blackwater. “He kept asking, ‘Why do they hate me?’”

A converted Catholic raised by Christian fundamentalists and the scion of a Midwestern auto-parts fortune would seem to be an unlikely ally to the Muslim crown prince of a tiny, oil-rich Arab kingdom, but from their first meeting in 2009, Prince and bin Zayed hit it off. Almost immediately it was clear they shared common enemies: Islamic militants and, especially, Iran. Prince was introduced to bin Zayed after pitching a two-page schematic of a light attack airplane — an agricultural crop duster modified with surveillance and laser-guided munitions — to the Emirati government as the Blackwater sale to a private equity group was being negotiated. When the Emirati ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Al Otaiba, learned that Prince’s legal problems with the Justice Department would mean that he wouldn’t be able to be involved in building, selling, or brokering armed aircraft, the Emirati government approached another aviation manufacturer to help establish an entire air wing of armored and weaponized crop dusters. In exchange for Prince bowing out of the deal quietly, Otaiba introduced him to bin Zayed explicitly in order to find another role in which he could assist the UAE government.

Bin Zayed was determined to bolster the UAE’s sphere of influence and project power in the Middle East. Despite Prince’s tarnished reputation, bin Zayed saw in him a glimpse of the future. It didn’t hurt that “Erik could sell you your own hat,” according to one former associate. The former SEAL and self-described CIA “asset” saw in bin Zayed a willing buyer who shared his desire to play soldier. Prince sold bin Zayed on the idea of creating a half-billion-dollar program in which he would train, equip, and lead an elite cadre of foreign soldiers called the Security Support Group that would serve as a presidential guard for the Emirati monarchies and help quell any internal unrest. Bin Zayed insisted that Prince use non-Muslim ex-soldiers, according to two senior advisers who helped build the unit, telling him that he did not believe Muslim soldiers could be trusted to kill other Muslims. Eventually, Prince also sold bin Zayed on the creation of an armed aviation wing, a team to protect the Emirates from a weapons of mass destruction attack, and a separate force to combat Somali piracy.

One indication of both Prince and R2’s growing value to bin Zayed was that Prince became a favored foreign policy and military adviser, joining bin Zayed’s inner sanctum. Prince told his colleagues at R2 that bin Zayed, whom Prince often referred to as “the boss,” gave him ownership of two side-by-side villas in Abu Dhabi, which were originally worth $10 million each. The wealthy enclave was built as a luxury community, each villa with a private beach, and quickly housed several foreign embassies. Prince’s neighboring houses sat at the end of a residential peninsula and had expansive views of central Abu Dhabi across a sea channel, a pool, and beachfront in the Persian Gulf. Prince built a dock for his sailboat, which has a Blackwater logo across the port side.

The $13 million in the suitcases was an advance on $110 million the UAE gave Prince to get Reflex Responses off the ground. The deal gave Prince and his team a guaranteed 15 percent profit margin on whatever the company spent in addition to salaries. Prince had long tried to own a piece of each part of the foreign conflict supply chain: planes, ships, vehicles, weapons, intelligence, men, and logistics. Reflex Responses gave him a blank check to do just that.

Structurally, Reflex Responses became a model for how Prince masks his involvement in selling or providing military services, which was a necessity given that he’s unlikely to obtain an arms trafficking license under the U.S. State Department’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Officially, Prince was never an R2 employee. He officially worked for a company called Assurance Management Consultants, which shared a floor in an Abu Dhabi office tower with Reflex, where he oversaw the entire military program. It was Prince who hired and installed Reflex’s senior management, according to people directly involved in the effort. And it was Prince who recruited and hired the subcontractors who fulfilled Reflex’s contractual requirements. Prince flew to South America, where he helped oversee the recruitment of former Colombian soldiers who served as both hired guns and a training cadre for the fledgling Emirati security force.

Prince’s approach to management created problems almost immediately, issues that would arise again and again in his various projects. In what would become a pattern, Prince’s American colleagues at Reflex were troubled by his directives about ITAR regulations. Prince argued to his lawyers that because Reflex was an Emirati company, working on an Emirati government contract, he was not required to have an ITAR license from the State Department to sell military services. “We’d tell him, ‘No, that’s not how it works. You’re an American,’” said one of Prince’s former colleagues involved in Reflex Responses. “It was stupid, honestly. There was a way to do it legally and make lots of money, but Erik didn’t care. When Erik wakes up in the morning, Erik does whatever he feels like doing. I always assumed that’s how it is when your father is a billionaire.”

In response to a request for comment, a Prince spokesperson stated: “Mr. Prince at all times relied upon the advice of counsel, including both in-house compliance counsel and outside experts, to ensure compliance with ITAR and other laws.”

Prince also hid his financial interest in subcontractors working with R2. Six months into the project, senior executives discovered that Prince had an arrangement with Thor Global, the company that he’d insisted Reflex use to hire the Colombian soldiers. On paper, Thor Global was wholly owned by Robert Owens, a former aide to Oliver North during the Iran-Contra affair, but Prince received a substantial amount of the money R2 paid Thor Global, according to court documents and two former Prince colleagues familiar with the arrangement. “I asked Erik if the crown prince knew he was self-dealing,” said one of the former colleagues. “Erik wouldn’t answer.”

Owens’s involvement and connection to North is not incidental. Prince and North are friends, and Prince has told others over the years that he greatly admires the former Marine officer and Reagan National Security Council staffer, who was convicted on three felony counts during the Iran-Contra scandal. (The convictions were reversed in 1991.)

A former colleague said it took him some time to recognize that Prince generally works to control the entire supply chain of any mercenary or security contract. “Everything he does, he skims,” said the former colleague, who has known Prince for two decades and described how Prince generally operates as a military services provider. “He will run a contract through two companies and then dictate that those two companies have to subcontract out to another eight companies. What he doesn’t disclose is that he owns all or part of those eight companies and will take 25 percent from each company. Then, he can use those same eight entities to make the money disappear.”

After Prince’s first team of U.S. executives quit, he brought in another former SEAL and a former CIA officer. That team conducted audits and quickly discovered financial problems. “There was massive embezzlement going on inside R2,” said a third former employee with direct knowledge of the company’s finances. “Overbilling, false billing, missing cash — millions were gone.”

According to four former Reflex employees and consultants, the alleged graft and embezzlement ran through two of Prince’s lieutenants, who handled logistics and administration for R2. The first was a former Blackwater employee who told colleagues at Reflex that he’d done intelligence work in the Middle East for the Pentagon’s intelligence agency. Internal R2 documents list him as the first employee of the company. Several of Prince’s colleagues confronted him about the missing money and his lieutenants’ conduct, but Prince rebuffed any effort to remove them. Contacted by The Intercept for comment, Prince’s lieutenant denied that he had ever embezzled or stolen money and denied ever working for R2. He said that he had worked for Assurance Management and occasionally “consulted” for R2.

Prince did not respond on the record to questions about the financial improprieties.

While money was disappearing from Reflex Responses’s accounts as a result of these financial shenanigans, Somali pirates were engaging in a more traditional form of robbery off the Horn of Africa, harming UAE shipping interests. Prince had a solution: a sea, air, and land battalion to eradicate the pirates. He established a group for this purpose within Reflex Responses known as Special Projects and hired a former South African special forces officer named Lafras Luitingh, who also worked for Executive Outcomes, a private military company comprised mainly of apartheid-era South African soldiers

Together, Prince and Luitingh created the Puntland Maritime Police Force in northeastern Somalia, in a semiautonomous region home to the most active Somali pirates. A United Nations monitoring team subsequently documented extensive violations of the U.N. arms embargo of Somalia, including falsifying export paperwork for small arms and attacks that left civilian casualties by Luitingh’s company, Saracen, a subcontractor on the project. The two-year program resulted in “an elite force outside any legal framework … answerable only to the Puntland presidency,” according to a U.N. investigation into the PMPF. Both Prince and the UAE denied involvement, but one source with knowledge of the operation witnessed Emirati intelligence officers providing a suitcase with millions of dollars in $100 bills to Luitingh for his payroll. Citing Prince’s involvement in the police force, the U.N. report said, “This externally financed assistance programme has remained the most brazen violation of the arms embargo by a private security company.”

Although Prince and the UAE’s involvement was meant to be largely clandestine, Prince sought publicity for the program, according to a person with direct knowledge. Prince arranged for a February 2012 Fox News segment from North, then a military analyst for Fox News, who embedded with the PMPF in Puntland and explicitly reported that the UAE was behind the fledgling military unit. The media attention enraged the Emirati government, according to one of Prince’s former colleagues who worked with him at the time, and blamed him for the unwanted publicity.

The program’s lack of legal legitimacy was perhaps the least troubling legacy of Prince’s vision, however. The program shut down shortly after a South African mercenary was murdered by one of the local soldiers hired to fight the pirates during one of the first operations the Puntland force conducted. According to a contemporaneously filmed documentary of the anti-piracy effort, the killer was a relative of a pirate targeted by the unit. The unit had been infiltrated from the beginning, a failure of basic counterintelligence, which a former CIA officer, who was also involved, readily admitted in on-camera interviews. The U.N. would later report “credible” allegations of human rights violations stemming from corporal punishment, which led to severe injuries and a death at the South African-run PMPF camp.

Robert Young Pelton, an author who worked for Prince on the Somalia project and helped write Prince’s autobiography (and recently lost a civil suit against Prince over a contract dispute), said Prince’s efforts were “delusional. He operates with a 12-year-old’s mindset of war. He’s romanticized the South African mercenaries who fought those ugly wars.” Pelton said when Prince first showed him a map with plans for the security force, he realized that Prince had never been to Somalia. Pelton said Prince told him that the idea for an anti-piracy force came from reading “The Pirate Coast,” a book detailing a secret American operation in 1805 to end piracy off the coast of Libya.

As with the Security Support Group, the anti-piracy force suffered from mismanagement. According to two individuals who worked on the program, at least $50 million meant for the anti-piracy force had gone missing by the time the Emirates decided to stop funding the effort. Among the items that were never returned or accounted for were several aircraft, including at least one cargo plane and two helicopters, as well as several ships. Before he was asked by the Emirates to end his involvement in the program, Prince brought in a former intelligence operative to conduct an audit of the PMPF program. The American identified $38 million in cash that the UAE had delivered to Luitingh, for which the former South African mercenaries refused to provide accounting or receipts. “I told Erik, ‘[Luitingh] and the South Africans couldn’t account for $38 million,’” said a former Prince employee. “Erik wasn’t upset at all. He just said, ‘I’m sure they are just saving it for a rainy day.’” Luitingh did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Over a six month period beginning in late 2011, after the New York Times exposed Prince’s involvement with the UAE’s Security Support Group and the deployment of the anti-piracy force, bin Zayed gradually removed Prince from his multiple projects for the government. The parting of ways came as a result of the unwanted media exposure, U.N. pressure, and ongoing financial audits. The UAE shut down Reflex Responses and rolled what they wanted to keep into new companies with new management.

As his private military ventures with the UAE stumbled, Prince shifted to private equity, establishing an investment fund focused on African natural resources called Frontier Resource Group. But Prince’s income dried up after the UAE stopped funding him and he began having cash-flow problems. One of his personal bankers grew alarmed as Prince cashed out Treasury bonds to fund Frontier Resource. According to tax, banking, and internal business documents obtained by The Intercept, Prince at the time was worth less than $100 million, and much of his wealth was tied up in real estate and fixed-income investments. One of Prince’s creditors, Michigan’s Huntington Bank, refused a request for a $6 million increase on a $17.5 million line of credit, according to emails and other documents obtained by The Intercept. In turning Prince down, the bank reduced his line of credit by $2.5 million.

In late 2011, the Emirati government asked one of Prince’s former colleagues, Reno Alberto, if he would take over Prince’s aviation contract. Alberto was a former Navy SEAL who Prince originally hired to help save the Reflex Responses project. An Emirati general offered Alberto the job on two conditions: Reflex Responses needed to be shuttered so that a new corporate entity could take its place, and Prince could not be involved. Alberto agreed and created a new, temporary holding company called Vulcan Management. Vulcan would take the roughly $100 million resulting from the liquidation of R2 and hold it until a new entity could be established to create a wing of armed helicopters for the UAE air force.

Prince soon came calling on Alberto, however, claiming that a portion of the roughly $100 million left over from Reflex Responses was his and that any future contract for Alberto was a consequence of Prince’s efforts and therefore should result in him receiving a percentage. Prince claimed repeatedly to Alberto that bin Zayed had directed that some of the leftover R2 funding be paid to him. Prince and his business adviser Dorian Barak arranged to structure the payout as a loan from Alberto’s Vulcan Management to one of Prince’s holding companies in Bermuda. Barak, on behalf of Prince, requested that the loan be divided into 10 transactions, which Prince could then call on Vulcan to pay out as needed. Prince told several other colleagues that he felt he was owed upwards of $40 million for his effort in getting bin Zayed to create the SSG and establish R2. Alberto, who stood to make millions in his new venture, reluctantly agreed to pay his former boss through a loan.

On July 26, 2012, Barak emailed Prince, informing him that a wire transfer of approximately $5.9 million was sent by Vulcan, according to an email obtained by The Intercept. The money was wired to Prince’s Frontier Resource bank account in Abu Dhabi.

“That was fast. Well done,” Prince responded.

Prince pitched Frontier Resource to potential investors as a $500 million private equity fund. Fund documents state that Prince would provide 10 percent of the funding. In late 2011 and early 2012, as FRG tried to get off the ground, Prince had soft commitments from investors in the UAE, including bin Zayed’s brother Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the Emirati national security adviser. But by the time he’d taken his first draw of the Vulcan loan, Prince was toxic, and the outside financial commitments had withered and disappeared. Sheikh Tahnoon, however, appears to have invested at least $5 million, according to internal Frontier Resource documents provided to The Intercept.

Then, in October 2012, Prince directed Alberto and Vulcan to make a second wire transfer. This one, however, was not sent to Prince or his companies. According to documents reviewed by The Intercept, and confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of the transaction, more than $9 million was wired to Zafra Group, the company Sheikh Tahnoon had originally created to invest in Prince’s Frontier Resource. It is unclear why Prince wanted the Vulcan money routed to Zafra Group, but he told Vulcan that the payment had been ordered by “the boss,” according to the person with direct knowledge of the transaction. In effect, Prince had steered UAE government money meant for an armed helicopter wing to one his fund’s investors, a senior member of the Emirati royal family.

When Prince asked for $10 million in the third installment, Alberto refused and subsequently told Prince that no more installments would be paid. According to a person with knowledge of the dispute, Alberto learned that no one in the Emirati royal family had ordered the payments to Prince.

The loan to Prince, which has not been previously reported, was not repaid to Vulcan, and the entire $15 million was written off as a loss by the company in subsequent years, according to a person with direct knowledge of the transaction. Prince did report the $5.9 million payment as a loan on his personal tax returns that year.

The Intercept sent Prince a detailed list of questions for this article. In response, a Prince spokesperson stated that “Vulcan Management’s loan, which was made in connection with FRG’s investment activity, was at all times fully disclosed to both FRG’s auditors and the IRS.” Prince would not comment for the record about the circumstances of the loan, or why he directed the $9 million payment to Zafra.

A New Frontier

Over the next several years, as his speculations in African natural resources turned into losers time and again, Prince looked to China for new funds, creating Frontier Services Group with an investment banker and former Marine named Gregg Smith. For Smith, the business model seemed simple enough: Frontier Resource would find undervalued, distressed assets, and Frontier Services would transport the materials out of Africa. Smith says he saw the potential of a logistics company to move freight and natural resources across Africa, where the Chinese were increasingly active. “We wanted to start a straightforward logistics company,” Smith said recently. “Trucks and planes and that’s it.

Prince had other ideas, as did some Chinese investors, who made it clear that they wanted a “Blackwater China.” Although Frontier Services attracted a $110 million investment from a Hong Kong tycoon named Johnson Ko and the China International Trust Investment Corporation, a state-owned investment company, Prince’s investment fund lost money, and several projects ended in a total loss, according to three people with knowledge of Prince’s investment portfolio. Instead, Prince would end up directing FSG to purchase companies that Prince had a financial interest in — as well as services from such companies — in an effort to salvage his private-equity fund’s investment. In total, according to documents, FSG spent $8.5 million on Prince-connected businesses. And as he had with Thor Global and Reflex Responses, Prince failed to disclose his financial interest to the FSG board prior to most of the transactions. The board eventually passed a resolution prohibiting undisclosed self-dealing.

For two years, beginning in 2013, while Frontier Services executives ran a legitimate logistics and aviation company, Prince was traveling around Africa pitching paramilitary services under the Frontier Services banner. As reported by The Intercept, Prince proposed creating counterterrorism forces, a private air force, and a “black ops” program for Nigeria to defeat Boko Haram. He made a similar pitch to President Salva Kiir Mayardit of South Sudan to help him defeat rebels there. There were meetings and proposals for Libya, Cameroon, and Kurdish Iraq, none of which found a buyer. Although Prince failed to sell an entire paramilitary force, he did make money across the continent and the Middle East “advising” countries on how to fight wars. According to one of his closest colleagues, over a roughly five-year period, including his time as chair of the board of FSG, Prince earned as much as $10 million from his meetings. Prince’s efforts were nothing if not ambitious. “Erik was trying to create a private JSOC,” said a former senior military officer who discussed many of Prince’s ideas with him. Since he left Blackwater, Prince has sold or pitched his war supply chain in no fewer than 15 countries, nearly all of them with majority Muslim populations.

Prince tried to hawk surveillance products and services as well. In 2014, he demonstrated for some of his Frontier Services colleagues cellphone geolocation software that he said he had licensed from an Israeli company. At a strip mall diner in Washington, D.C., Prince pulled out a laptop and punched in a cellphone number. The program identified the most recent cell tower the phone had connected with, allowing the user to locate the target within 300 meters and revealing the last 10 calls the targeted user made. Prince, according to one person who discussed the software with him, believed his time at Frontier Services had “cleaned” his image up with the U.S. government enough that he approached both the CIA and the Pentagon, offering to run the software in counterterrorism operations. He was rebuffed. Later, he and one of his deputies claimed that they sold the program to the Saudi and Emirati air forces to locate bombing targets in Yemen.

In 2015, Prince became involved in the ongoing conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan spent hundreds of millions of dollars equipping and training their small military. Prince was brought in by a former Russian weapons supplier to help create a training force. Prince would ultimately be kicked off the contract after his business partners accused him of wildly padding the proposed contract by adding a series of unnecessary expenditures that would have been provided by companies to which Prince had financial ties. In an effort to smooth over Prince’s anger at being fired, the Russian weapons supplier offered him $5 million, according to three people with direct knowledge of the offer. Prince agreed to take the money but insisted the payment be made through a complex series of loans between companies that Barak would set up. When his Russian colleague refused the terms and offered a simple check made out to Prince for the total amount, Prince walked away from the deal, according to a person with direct knowledge of the incident.

In response to questions from The Intercept, a Prince spokesperson stated: “FSG contemplated a logistics, construction, and aviation support project in Azerbaijan, but neither FSG nor Erik Prince ever moved forward with it, and neither FSG nor Mr. Prince was ever offered money to abandon the project.”

As The Intercept has reported previously, when Frontier Services Group discovered that Prince had secretly modified two crop dusters to be used as light attack aircraft, and had used an Austrian company he’d secretly purchased a stake in, FSG hired the law firm King & Spalding to conduct an investigation to determine whether Prince had violated arms trafficking laws. (Prince attempted to sell the two weaponized aircraft to Azerbaijan as part of their buildup — another potential violation of ITAR). The attorneys, supervised by current FBI Director Christopher Wray, concluded that Prince had likely violated U.S. law in his effort to sell the crop dusters. In 2016, FSG disclosed the ITAR violations to the Justice Department, which opened an investigation.

The Rise of Trump.

Although Prince’s turn in Africa as a mercenary was a bust, he was somewhat successful at recasting himself as a globetrotting businessman through Frontier Services Group. The 2016 presidential election and the rise of Donald Trump now promised a full-scale rehabilitation. The potential for a Republican administration would be an opportunity for new U.S. government contracts and, possibly, something even more lucrative. After Trump had clinched the Republican nomination, Prince told his Chinese business and government contacts that if Trump won, he would be the next secretary of defense.

Prince’s family has a history of supporting right-wing and conservative causes. Edgar Prince, Erik’s father, was a major financial contributor to former President Gerald Ford, and in recent years, the family has supported Mike Pence, first as a member of Congress and later as Indiana governor. While in Congress, Pence helped Prince navigate Capitol Hill in the aftermath of the killing of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah in 2004. Prince became an enthusiastic Trump supporter. By Election Day, Prince had donated $250,000 to Trump’s 2016 election effort.

During the campaign, Prince solidified his relationship with Steve Bannon, appearing on his Breitbart radio show on SiriusXM less than a month before Bannon formally joined the Trump campaign. Four days before the 2016 election, Prince went on Bannon’s show and smeared Hillary Clinton, claiming without evidence that a New York City police investigation into former Rep. Anthony Weiner had uncovered extensive criminal activity by the Democratic presidential candidate. Prince claimed that the Obama administration had suppressed the investigation implicating Clinton using “Stalinist tactics.”

In apparent coordination with Trump’s advisers, Prince had also begun exploring the world of domestic information warfare. In August 2016, according to the New York Times, Prince brokered a meeting at Trump Tower between George Nader, an aide to bin Zayed, Donald Trump Jr., and Joel Zamel, the owner of Psy-Group, an Israeli private intelligence company that specialized in manipulating elections using social media accounts and untraceable websites. The Trump campaign apparently passed on the offer. Prince already had familiarity with private Israeli intelligence companies through Dorian Barak. Several years earlier, Prince had been offered a financial stake in what was then a fledgling company called Black Cube, run by former Mossad officers. The company gained notoriety during the #MeToo movement when a firm representing Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein hired Black Cube to help stop publication of an account of his abuses. Black Cube hired an operative who used false identities to approach actress Rose McGowan, as well as a reporter looking into the multitude of sexual misconduct and assault allegations against Weinstein.

Prince declined to invest in Black Cube, but appears to have liked the idea of selling a service that provided undercover operatives. During the 2016 election, he became involved with James O’Keefe and Project Veritas, a group of conservative provocateurs who specialize is using hidden-camera footage and secret recordings. O’Keefe, a protégé of the conservative firebrand Andrew Breitbart, describes himself as a “guerrilla journalist” and has used undercover cameras in an effort to expose purported liberal bias in political groups and the media. Trump often promoted O’Keefe’s videos and met with O’Keefe just days after he declared his candidacy. (A few weeks before that, Trump had donated $10,000 to Project Veritas through his foundation.) It is unclear if Trump’s support of Project Veritas spurred Prince’s interest in the group, but in late 2015 or early 2016, Prince arranged for O’Keefe and Project Veritas to receive training in intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr. According to a former Trump White House official who discussed the Veritas training with Rubio, the former special operative quit after several weeks of training, complaining that the Veritas group wasn’t capable of learning. Rubio did not respond to requests for comment.

In the winter of 2017, Prince arranged for a former British MI6 officer to provide more surveillance and elicitation training for Veritas at his family’s Wyoming ranch, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. Prince was trying to turn O’Keefe and his group into domestic spies. For his part, O’Keefe posted photos on Instagram and Twitter from the Prince family ranch of himself holding a handgun with a silencer attached and wearing pseudo-military clothing. He described the ranch as a “classified location” where he was learning “spying and self-defense,” in an effort to make Project Veritas “the next great intelligence agency.”

“Erik was weaponizing a group that had close ties to the Trump White House,” said the former White House official familiar with Prince’s relationship with O’Keefe and Project Veritas.

It is unclear how much involvement Prince has with the selection of targets for O’Keefe’s stings and undercover operations, but several months after the organization received training in Wyoming, a Project Veritas operative was exposed by the Washington Post after she posed as a sexual assault victim of Roy Moore, who was then a Senate candidate in Alabama.

After Trump won the election, Prince began sending defense and intelligence policy proposals to the Trump team via Bannon, including his plan for privatizing the war in Afghanistan. The plan called for removing all U.S. troops and replacing them with a small cadre of security trainers, a small fleet of light attack aircraft, and a surge of covert CIA operations. In an attempt to appeal to Trump, Prince tweaked his proposal with a plan to secure mining concessions for Afghanistan’s vast untapped mineral resources, an idea with obvious parallels to his failed efforts in Africa. But the national security establishment was uniformly opposed and it failed to gain traction

Armed with his beliefs about reshaping the Middle East and Afghanistan, and enjoying his new status as an unofficial adviser to the next U.S. president, Prince was invited back to Mohammed bin Zayed’s royal court.

Prince later testified before the House Intelligence Committee that his invitation was linked directly to Trump’s victory. “I think the Obama administration went out of their way to tarnish my ability to do business in the Middle East, and, with a different administration in town, [the Emiratis] probably figured that that downdraft wasn’t present anymore … so it was not a surprise that the meeting happened. And those are the kind of things we talked about, whether it’s Somalia and terrorism there or Libya, Nigeria, and of course all the places that are even closer to the UAE.”

Meanwhile, Prince’s relationship with Bannon has gone from fellow ideological traveler to business partner. According to a former Trump White House official and the former U.S. official close to the UAE royal family, Prince has teamed up with Bannon to offer a newer version of the armed crop duster to the Emirati air force. The pitch includes Israeli-made avionics and surveillance software for geolocating targets on the ground. Prince and Bannon are also offering a different package to the Emirate’s despised rival, Qatar. According to a former senior U.S. official who reviewed the proposal, Prince is currently hawking proposals for preventing social and political unrest from Qatar’s foreign laborers before and during the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The proposal specifically names Project Veritas as a partner and offers the Qatari government an ability to infiltrate the community of foreign laborers, who make up almost 90 percent of the country’s population of roughly 2.3 million. The pitch is designed to appeal to Qatari fears of a popular uprising and to fend off and neuter political dissent leading up to the soccer tournament. The proposal also offers social media monitoring and messaging — something Bannon would be familiar with from his past work for Cambridge Analytica.

In response to questions from The Intercept, Prince’s spokesperson said, “Mr. Prince supports Project Veritas’s mission of uncovering government largesse and corruption, and has allowed Project Veritas to use his family’s ranch in Wyoming. Mr. Prince has no business relationship with Steve Bannon, James O’Keefe, or Project Veritas, and has never pitched a project with Mr. Bannon to the Qatari or any other government.” Bannon would not comment.

To those who know him best, Prince’s latest proposals suggest that he sees business opportunities in services that are closer to political skullduggery than outright conflict. By marrying the two capabilities — social media manipulation and undercover surveillance by trained operatives — Prince has moved further along the spectrum of contemporary warfare. If a government won’t pay him for a heavily armed paramilitary force in a hot conflict, he appears prepared to offer services that utilize a less obvious, but perhaps more insidious, kind of weaponry.

Given his wealth and political ties, it may be that the Department of Justice will never have the political fortitude to thoroughly investigate Prince for defense brokering and trafficking violations, or to challenge his questionable ties to China’s intelligence service. But he does face legal scrutiny. The FBI is currently probing Prince’s work at Frontier Services Group, with a team assigned from the Washington field office. It is unclear whether the investigation is a continuation of the 2016 probe or stems from the Mueller investigation. Three different congressional committees are also investigating Prince, including his relationship with the Chinese government. The FBI declined to comment and would not confirm the existence of an investigation. Prince’s spokesperson stated that “other than his well-documented cooperation with the Special Counsel’s Office, Mr. Prince has had no interaction, directly or through counsel, with the FBI in years.”

Prince’s role in the Trump-Russia affair perfectly encapsulates his latest effort to refashion himself, this time as a self-appointed warrior diplomat. According to the Mueller report, Prince flew to the Seychelles a week before the inauguration, at least in part to meet with Kirill Dmitriev, who was acting as Putin’s emissary and sought a backchannel to the incoming Trump administration. But Prince repeatedly denied in his testimony that he flew to the Seychelles to meet Dmitriev. Prince also failed to disclose that he met with Dmitriev twice during his stay at the Four Seasons.

The Mueller investigation relied on the cooperation and testimony of George Nader, who arranged the meeting at bin Zayed’s behest. Nader testified that Dmitriev was “not enthusiastic” about meeting Prince. To help sell the meeting, Nader described Prince to Dmitriev as Bannon’s chosen representative for the Kremlin-directed meeting: “this guy [Prince] is designated by Steve [Bannon] to meet you!” Which suggests that Prince presented himself to Nader as an influential member of Trump’s circle. Testimony from both Bannon and Prince cast doubt on whether Prince flew to the Seychelles with Bannon’s knowledge or approval. If Bannon’s testimony is accurate, it’s quite possible that Prince oversold his influence with Trump and Trump’s inner circle to get the meeting with Dmitriev.

Although in his congressional testimony Prince described only a single interaction with Dmitriev at the resort bar, there was an earlier, longer private meeting in Nader’s villa. After the first meeting, Prince learned that an Russian aircraft carrier was moving off the coast of Libya, according to the Mueller report. Prince, who has spent years offering his paramilitary services in Libya, was incensed at the news, calling Nader to demand a second meeting with Dmitriev. Prince told Nader that he’d just checked with his “associates” and needed to convey an important message to Putin’s emissary. Prince told Mueller that he was speaking only for himself, based on his three years as a Navy SEAL. In the second meeting, Prince went off-script and warned Dmitriev that the U.S. could not accept Russian involvement in Libya.

As the report describes Dmitriev’s complaints to Nader after meeting Prince, he expected to meet a member of the Trump team who had more authority and substance: “Dmitriev told Nader that [redacted] Prince’s comments [redacted] were insulting [redacted].” As in so many other episodes involving Prince over the last decade, his involvement in the Trump-Russia political scandal is a result of his relentless ambition, combined with his snake-oil salesmanship and his ability to gain entry to rooms with genuine power, even if it quickly becomes apparent that he doesn’t belong there.

 

Prison for a Cartoon in the France of Voltaire

The Persecution of Alain Soral

May 2, 2019

by Jean Marois

The Unz Review

Alain Finkielkraut recently stated: “Soral is the most dangerous and ominous character of the public scene.” To understand the significance of these words, you have to know who is Alain Finkielkraut, and who is Alain Soral.

Finkielkraut is one of our French neoconservatives. Formerly a Trotskyist, he is now a nationalist. He embodies what Soral calls National-Zionism, that new ideology massively promoted by Jewish “intellectuals” and media pundits who, after calling for the abolition of borders and drowning Europe in mass immigration, now tell the French people to turn to Israel as a model for dealing with Muslims.

Finky, as we like to call him, also embodies the arrogance of ethnocentric Jews who get an undeserved ubiquity on television complaining about anti-Semitism and the next Holocaust. It is true that, when Finkielkraut shows up in a Yellow Vest gathering, he will be called “Sale sioniste!” which, as everyone is supposed to know, means “Sale juif!” which in turn is a potential holocaust. And so, whenever Finkielkraut gets insulted in the street, which happens, it is national news, and the President himself has to make the standard declaration: “The anti-Semitic insults he has been subjected to are the absolute negation of who we are and what makes us a great nation. We will not tolerate them.” That is the kind of important person Finkielkraut is. Oh! and Finkielkraut has been elected in the prestigious Académie Française among those we call “the Immortals”, although it is unclear under what pretext. Like Bernard-Henri Lévy, Finkielkraut does write books that are more and more heavily promoted but less and less read.

Alain Soral is indeed the most dangerous person for the National-Zionists. And the French elite of the media-finance-political complex are justifiably worried about the “soralisation des esprits”, an expression that has surfaced in recent weeks, as Soral’s name is heard here and there among the Yellow Vests. So the National-Zionists couldn’t hide their joy when learning from the national press agency (AFP) on April 15 that Soral was sentenced to one year in prison with an arrest warrant “pour contestation de l’existence de la Shoah” (“for denying the existence of the Holocaust”), an expression which only makes sense, I believe, if the Holocaust is God.

Soral’s crime was the publication, on the website of his association “Égalité et Réconciliation”, of a parody of a Charlie Hebdo cover mocking the Shoah mythology. The original cover, on the left below, appeared after the terrorist attack in Belgium in March 2016, which made 35 dead and 300 wounded. According to the judges, the original cover is protected by free-speech law, while the parody is obviously a crime deserving one year imprisonment, not for the artist, but for the man whose association posted it on Internet.

This is not the first time Soral is convicted. He has faced 60 court cases in recent years, and been fined to a total of 371,000 euros. Significantly, he has never been condemned for the contents of his books or videos, but for cartoons and illustrations posted on his website. HLast year, Soral was also put on trial for posting this photoshopped picture of Emmanuel Macron with his campaign slogan “En Marche” and three of his sponsors behind him, who happen to be Jewish: Jacob Rothschild (Macron worked for the Rothschild bank), Jacques Attali (a presidential adviser since Mitterrand, who boasts of having “put Macron’s foot on the stirrup”), and Patrick Drahi (Israeli owner of the major media that sold Macron to the French public).

Soral was finally discharged because a Socialist Party member named Gérard Filoche also tweeted this picture (then apologized), and the French court couldn’t decently convict Soral and not Filoche.

Soral is an essayist who has published best-selling polemical essays such as Vers la féminisation? – Démontage d’un complot antidémocratique (“Towards feminisation? – Analysis of an antidemocratic plot”). His latest book Comprendre l’Empire: Demain la gouvernance mondiale ou la Révolte des nations (“Understanding the Empire: Tomorrow global governance or an uprising of nations”), published in 2011, propelled him as one of the most insightful critic of the American-Zionist Machiavellian hubris.

Since then, Soral has produced about a hundred long videos commenting current events, some of them totaling half a million views, which is enormous for France. He has a real genius for producing analyses of deep politics and social issues that are profound, synthetic, and clear. He exposes in plain language the evil schemes of our elites and the lies of mainstream media. And he is not afraid to criticize this Jewish power that Gilad Atzmon defines as “the capacity to silence criticism of Jewish Power” (Atzmon’s books, by the way, are translated in French by Soral’s publishing company KontreKulture).

Soral has become the most outspoken critic of the “dictatorship of the CRIF (Conseil representative des Institutions juives),” the French equivalent of AIPAC and ADL combined. Thanks to the work of Soral and his team of investigators, literally millions of Frenchmen have become aware of the obscene power of the CRIF and their nefarious intrigue for criminalizing any criticism of Israel or Jewish power, under the pretext of fighting against “anti-Semitism”.

I once compared Soral to an exorcist, because by his very words, he forces the demons to come out and reveal themselves. He has become the bête noire of our corrupt political and media circus, and crystallizes their hatred. In 2014, Prime minister Manuel Valls had declared war on Soral as well as on his friend humorist Dieudonné, making it a national priority. This fury from the part of a statesman who declared, on a Jewish radio, being “eternally bond to Israel through my wife” contributed to both Vall’s discredit and Soral’s prestige, especially after Valls pathetically returned to his native Catalonia after his divorce.

Every sentence Soral receives makes him stronger, because it proves him right. Soral is uniquely dangerous because he never apologizes. He may very soon become the first Frenchman imprisoned for a political cartoon, and thereby the living proof that French democracy is dead. One year in prison is all he needs to write his next book: Mon Combat.

 

Official Record of all Prisoners in Auschwitz Concentration Camp from May of 1940 through December of 1944.

The Official Records

Prisoner records of Auschwitz camp from May, 1940 through December 1944 from the Glücks complete Concentration Camp microfilm records now located in the Russian Central Archives

(Note: The attached statistical tables concerning prisoners in Auschwitz camp from its inception to its closing are taken directly from Soviet archival material, now available on microfilm from the former Soviet Central Archives. Also, a good deal of corroborative material from the German Archives concerning the German State Railways has been located in the German State Archives (Bundesarchiv) and utilized. The railroad was responsible for the transportation of inmates to and from concentration camps in the figures from the Russian files is accurately reflected in the Reichsbahn documents.)

Summation: From July, 1941 through October 1944

• Total number of Jewish prisoners in the Auschwitz camp system: 173,000
• Total number of Jewish prisoners who died of typhus: 58,240
• Total number of Jewish prisoners who died of natural causes: 2,064
• Total number of Jewish prisoners transferred to other camps: 100,743
• Total number of Jewish prisoners executed: 117
• Total number of Jewish prisoners remaining in camp after German evacuation in January, 1945: 11,839

When the SS evacuated the Auschwitz work camp complex at the end of December 1944, they left a large number of prisoners behind. Many of these were too old or too sick to travel and they were left in their barracks, guarded by a Polish militia that had been raised earlier by Hans Frank, the head of the Government General (as occupied Poland was termed by the Germans.) With the approach of the Soviet army in early 1945, these Polish guards indiscriminately attacked the barracks with the prisoners inside, using hand grenades and machine guns.

The violent animosity of the Catholic Poles to their huge Jewish community is certainly well known. When the Russians invaded Poland in 1920, one of the greatest fears of the Polish leadership and the government was that the 500,000 Jewish residents of Warsaw’s Nalevski district would rise up against them in support of the advancing Bolshevik armies. Many Polish Jews fled after the failure of the Russian attack and a number of those left behind were promptly massacred by Poles when the central government collapsed after the German invasion of 1939.

Although exact figures of the dead among the remaining inmates are not available, several existing Soviet military reports put the death toll between 7,000 and 10,000. Former members of the Polish militia have subsequently claimed that many of the dead were shot down by Russian troops as they attempted to exit the liberated camp.

The Russians did not like Jews either, remembering their savagery against them during the salad days of Josef Stalin.

The truth of this matter will never be known but at least this is an atrocity that cannot be blamed on the Germans who were hundreds of miles away at the time.

How many of the 1,590 Hungarian Jewish deportees remaining in Auschwitz died in this Slavic holocaust is not known.

The Silent Jew- An Open Letter

by Rabbi Joel Timmerman

Some time ago, I watched with sadness the Columbia tragedy unfold on my television screen and my heart went out to the families of the dead. But later in the day, I had a telephone call from a friend with a bitter comment.

He said that the first few hours of the media coverage of the tragedy dealt with the background and career of an Israeli guest cosmonaut, Colonel Ilan Ramon, and little mention was made of the backgrounds of the American crew.

Another friend, a Jew, called me to say: “Just look at that on the TV! Why CNN is spending all their time talking about an Israeli war hero. Weren’t there any Americans on board?”

Of course there were Americans on board and this is the subject of my open letter.

There are several millions of Jews living in the United States. The bulk of us are Reformed Jews. Nearly all of us consider ourselves to be Americans. We and our children are proud to have served in the American military and even prouder to be citizens of the one nation that has welcomed refugee Jews, fleeing from European persecutions, and permitted them free access to American society.

A much smaller percentage of American Jews are Zionists. They view themselves as Jews first, Israeli’s second and, perhaps, Americans third. Their complete allegiance is to the state of Israel and not to America. They send money to Israel and, when they have access to it, military and commercial secrets. They are the Pollards of this country. They do not represent the rest of us at all.

The State of Israel has always been a Zionist state. It was born in violence and hatred. Jews, mostly from Poland, invaded the Palestine area, killing and maiming anyone who stood in their way: Arabs, British soldiers, civilians and even high UN officials. Bombings, bank robberies, arsons and mass murder attended the birth of this state. One man, Menachim Begin, blew up a hotel full of people and was later made Chief of State!

The Zionists have fastened themselves onto the instruments of power in the United States, feeling, rightly, that American soldiers, and most importantly, money, will nurture their state and protect it from their many enemies.

Instead of making efforts to co-exist with their neighbors, Israel has constantly attacked the impoverished Palestinian Arabs and killed as many of them as they could. The IDF has had no problem murdering Arab men, women and children. It has had no problem destroying the homes and businesses of the reviled Arabs and their sole, stated aim, is to drive the Arabs out of their homes so that Jews can take them over.

How redolent this is of the attacks by the Nazis, the Poles and the Russians in recent times past! It is true that the abused child becomes the abusing parent and Israel has in truth become the National Socialists of the Middle East.

The Zionists have infiltrated the American government to a remarkable degree. They have gained an astonishing hold in the American mass media. CNN, Time Warner, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek and Time magazines and a host of other media giants are either owned outright by Jews or are under the control of Jews.

These mighty organs daily pour out a great stream of pro-Israel commentary while Jewish organizations such as the ADL and various other pressure groups, make constant, threatening demands on a subservient American legislative entity.

The fact that there are many Jews in America that view such blatant and ruthless manipulation with horror is never reported in the media.

We are the silent Jews although we outnumber the loud ones twenty to one. Our views, those of tolerance and moderation, are never seen in the media but the frantic, fanatic views of the hysterical Zionists receive daily, slavish attention.

The American pubic is not stupid but it has no voice to express its concerns. Faked opinion polls, pious statements about Israel as “America’s best ally” can be seen daily in all the major branches of the media.

Believe me, Israel is not America’s best ally. Through the Israel lobby, American leaders and legislators do as they are told. The consequences of refusal or worse, opposition to Zionist demands is orchestrated oblivion. Furious because President Harry Truman blocked the sale of weapons of destruction to the rampaging Zionists in 1948, Jewish money backed Thomas Dewey. An assassination attempt was launched by the Stern Gang against Truman but failed.

The British, the United Nations and the United States eventually let the Zionists have their murderous way in Palestine because they grew tired of the constant acts of savage terrorism which seemed to inspire the terrorists to even greater infamies.

These miserable, vicious and ideological creatures have nothing to do with the great majority of American Jews. We deplore their savage, manipulative behavior because we know from bitter experience that eventually the American public will become aroused and infuriated. When that dismal day comes, and it will come, all the rest of us will be held to account for the savage brutes like Sharon and his butchers. We will become the eternal victims of a population enraged by the ruthless and self-serving manipulations of a small, detestable handful of chronic fanatics. We will, at last, lose the respect of our colleagues, our neighbors and our friends and again, the eternal wandering will begin.

Note here that Israel is afraid of both Iran and their Hezbollah. They have attacked Israel before, just as Israel has attacked them even earlier. Why should valuable Jewish youth be sacrificed in a war with Iran when expendable American youth can accomplish the same thing? Perhaps, and I have learned this from a close friend in the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Israel and America can also attack Saudi Arabia and thereby gain military control of two major oil producing areas.

The American President is not an intelligent or reasonable man but those who control him are and they, and the Israeli lobby can see that if both America and Israel can wrest control of oil from the Arabs, both countries will be better off…from the Zionist world view. Jews can make money from the captured oil fields and some of this can be stuffed into the pockets of America’s notoriously corrupt legislators…and bureaucrats.

This is a suicidal, very short-term policy. By catering to American religious fundamentalists, Jewish groups and the oil industry, Trump is digging the grave, not only of his own erratic and fanatic administration but also of very loyal American Jews.

The President may be a stupid man but his handlers are not but they are all so myopic that they cannot see that they are rushing in haste towards the top of a very high cliff.

If only it were the guilty, the stupid and the vicious that would plunge down to their deaths, nothing would be lost and much gained but they will drag with them tens of thousands of completely innocent people.

Joel Timmerman

Director, Holocaust Survivors Association

New York

 

Encyclopedia of American Loons

Aviva Romm

Aviva Romm is an integrative physician (she actually does, in fact, have a real medical degree), midwife, and herbalist, defender of Goop and its practices, and contributor to the astonishingly insane misinformation on the Goop website. Her association with Goop should give you a sense of the relevant level of trustworthiness Romm is aiming for. Romm’s primary victims targets are pregnant women, busy women, and parents, to whom she peddles her very own line of herbal supplements, books and online courses (herbal medicine for women, adrenal thyroid pro training), such as Healthiest Kids University: Natural Medicine for Children – unsurprisingly, Romm’s main marketing ploy is fallacious appeals to nature. There is a good discussion of herbal supplements here – they are mostly polluted drugs in unknown dosages with unknown effectiveness and potentially dangerous side-effects – and a decent list of questionable “nutritionists” here.

Though she has been part of the Goop defense team to be deployed against science-based criticisms through well-honed and precise marketing techniques and appeals to empowerment – conspicuously and completely avoiding the substance of the criticism – Romm did at one point actually seem to distance herself a bit from Goop, admitting that not everything on the site is effective or evidence-based. “I’m not one of these integrative doctors who basically just because it’s alternative thinks it’s safe and good. I try to keep my doctor thinking cap on as well,” said Romm. She doesn’t, of course, but it is at least interesting to see her admit the difference between thinking as a doctor and thinking as an altmed huckster and more than suggesting that the latter role doesn’t involve much sensitivity to evidence, critical thinking or the significance of accountability. Romm also pointed out that “those drug company commercials are making lots of people millions. So it’s not just one isolated situation with Goop;” a tu quoque is of course always best when presented in the context of a false equivalence. Romm is fond of false equivalences.

Toxins

Toxins feature prominently in Romm’s fearmongering, and she will readily tell us that “many health conditions that are adversely affecting children today can be traced back to environmental toxin exposure.” She is less sanguine about identifying these alleged toxins, of course, or trying to explain how they work or how the bullshit products she sells would help people deal with them.

She does, however, advise women to refuse glucola (a standard diabetes screening drink), claiming it is a “toxic cocktail”, and credits the Food Babe and the Food Babe’s chemophobia for alerting her to said toxins. Perhaps needless to say, glucola is not what’s toxic here. To attack glucola, Romm invokes conspiracy theories: don’t trust obstetricians or experts who actually work with patients; trust instead her, who don’t and therefore doesn’t need to take any responsibility for her advice (but is rather trying to sell you expensive quackery): the experts are actively conspiring to harm you, as Romm sees it, since nothing sells products better than sowing fear. There is a good takedown of Romm’s FUD tactics and rank dishonesty here.

“Should you detoxify before getting pregnant?” asks Romm rhetorically, and continues “[a]s a midwife and functional medicine doctor specializing in women’s health, I get this question often. And if I had gotten this question ten years ago, I might have said no.” “No” is of course the correct answer, but these days Romm’s got products to sell and has changed her advice accordingly. Romm’s blog is full of fashionable detox recommendations (“How to Detox Every Day: Top Ten Foods & Herbs”, “Detox Immunity”, “The Easiest, Most Effective Spring Detox Ever”, “Detoxing Before Pregnancy”), none of them based on evidence, but many based on demonstrable quackery and pseudoscience, like the idea of autointoxication, which was somewhat popular around 1900 but abandoned in the 1930s since no evidence for it was ever found nor plausible mechanism ever suggested.

Romm’s products

Romm’s products are roughly as worthless as her medical advice. Her dispensary contains an impressive range of expensive supplements sorted by categories like  “Natural Detox Support” and “Adrenal and Thyroid Support”. They are associated with a wide variety of nonsensical health claims like “replenish adrenals”, “detox”, “rejuvenate liver function” and “boost immunity” – needless to say, her products do no such thing, which is ultimately actually fortunate for her victims customers clients.

Much of her stuff addresses prevention of and remedies for adrenal fatigue, a bogus condition, and promises to “replenish and restore the adrenals and counteract the effects of an overwhelmed stress response system.” Given that the condition is bogus, at least you will never be in a position to claim that the products didn’t work as intended. They won’t do anything else either, except possibly hurt your wallet. Several of her supplements are targeted at children – or rather their gullible parents – and her “Natural Children’s remedies” section lists plenty of questionable supplements, including “Calm Child”, which is designed to “support calm, focuses attention in children.” She also has a “Super-Charge Your Children’s Health and Immunity with Natural Remedies” online lesson material includes, which discusses “toxins in vaccinations”, and herbal medicines.

Oh yes, Romm is at best deeply sympathetic to the anti-vaccine movement, having even written a book claiming to “offer a sensible, balanced discussion of the pros and cons of each routine childhood vaccination,” presenting “the full spectrum of options available to parents: full vaccination on a standardized or individualized schedule, selective vaccination, or no vaccinations at all,” and offering advice on how to use  herbs to provide “natural immunity”.

Among her top recommended supplements is curcumin (found in turmeric, good summary here), which is recommended for “leaky gut” (another bogus condition) and “detoxification from environmental chemicals” (another – you guessed it – nonsense claim). Curcumin supplements are of course demonstrably not going to do anything for anything either.

Romm claims to offer “evidence-based alternatives” of the kind that empowered women are apparently seeking. She wouldn’t know what “evidence-based” means, of course, but neither, we presume, does her target audience.

Diagnosis: A disgusting excuse for a person. It is hard to imagine that she is unaware that the advice she peddles is bullshit, and her marketing and FUD tactics are so well-honed and appear so deliberate that it is difficult to believe she isn’t completely aware of what she is doing.

Comment from Wikipedia: Goop (often stylized as goop) is a natural health company owned by actress Gwyneth Paltrow. It was launched as a “lifestyle brand” by Paltrow in September 2008, beginning as a weekly e-mail newsletter providing new age advice, such as “police your thoughts” and “eliminate white foods”, and the slogan “Nourish the Inner Aspect”. A lifestyle website was later added, and then Goop expanded into e-commerce, collaborating with fashion brands, launching pop-up shops, holding a “wellness summit”, launching a print magazine, a podcast, and a docuseries to be streamed on Netflix.

Goop has faced criticism for promoting and selling products and treatments that have no scientific basis, lack efficacy, and are recognized by the medical establishment as harmful or as misleading. In 2017, consumer advocacy group Truth in Advertising filed a complaint with the government regulatory agency regarding over 50 health claims made by Goop as dangerous and false.

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

May 2, 2019

by Dr. Peter Janney

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”

Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.

 

Conversation No.93

Date:Friday, July 25, 1997

Commenced: 9:17 AM CST

Concluded:9:45 AM CST

GD: How is the cold coming along?

RTC: It’s progressing.

GD: Don’t we all?

RTC: No, quite a number are regressing. I had a long call from Kimmel today about you. GD: He’s been on the phone a bit to me recently. Trying to pump me for Müller’s new U.S. identity.

RTC: Be careful of him, Gregory. He’s two-faced and does not like you. Obviously you haven’t given him the name and you never will but Thomas is so filled with his self-importance that he would never conceive that you could see through his clumsy interrogations.

GD: I really wonder why these people are after me.

RTC: Two reasons, Gregory. First off, they think you can see through them and second, you are smarter than they are and neither aspect is pleasing to them. Any of them.

GD: I have been making an effort to locate material in the files that would help the Kimmel family with their attempts to have the Admiral rehabilitated. Typical. The more favors you do for some people, the more they hate you.

RTC: I think jealousy is a key here. They have built up a mini-empire for themselves and do not like strangers around who do not worship them. Kimmel is like that. He has good looks and people who are blessed with them, live off them.

GD: And when the hair starts to go and the belly swells, who notices them?

RTC: Exactly. And to be honest, who cares about Admiral Kimmel these days? He fell down on the job and got canned. I mean to say that for the period, the one before Pearl Harbor, he was following precedent but it was a shallow one and in those days, there was no intelligence coordination. Still, he had enough warning to do more.

GD: Well, thanks for the tip off. I will cut back on digging and look into other areas of my own interest.

RTC: Also, let me tip you, Kimmel says you are arrogant and opinionated and apparently are not sufficiently impressed with his towering abilities to pay him the homage is expects.

GD: A small rat in a big barn.

RTC: Don’t tell him that. But he keeps slyly telling me what a terrible liar you are and hinting at a terrible past for you. As my dear friend, of course, he wants to keep me as far away from you as he can. I am getting tired and very annoyed with the constant drum fire of criticism about you from this clan of rats. If Kimmel keeps this up, I just might give you something negative about him that would really shut him up.

GD: Why not fill me in now? I promise not to discuss whatever it is with him or anyone else but given his positions in the intelligence community and his other connections, it might be a good idea if I had something to counter his sneaking backstabbing with.

RTC: Well perhaps just a hint. I know a good deal about all of these people but in my business it is better not to let them know you are aware of their dark secrets.

GD: And I agree but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Robert so the more I know, the more I can defend myself.

RTC: Well, the Arrow Shirt boy likes to play with other boys.

GD: In the sand box?

RTC: No, in the locker room. He likes to instruct young basketball players.

GD: Instruct them in what?

RTC: Use your imagination, Gregory.

GD: Are you going to inform me that, in the words of an off color limerick that for now his chief joy is a round bottomed boy?

RTC: Well, you said it.

GD: You wouldn’t have pictures by any chance, would you?

RTC: Jesus, Gregory, give me a break. I know what goes on. I have to for my own protection.

GD: And I as well. Is this just a glitch in his lifestyle or a long running habit?

RTC: Yes.

GD: Long running?

RTC: Oh yes.

GD: My, how the mighty have fallen, Robert. The image of masculine superiority shattered. Does he run around the house in a dress?

RTC (Laughter) I wouldn’t know about that but I would doubt it.

GD: Not a clean doorknob in his house.

RTC: You do have a twisted mind, Gregory. Such lewd talk.

GD: Not a twisted mind, Robert, but I have run group therapy sessions and I know people. These closet queens are really vicious. My sister has borderline personality disorder so I have experience with asocial types. And my sense of humor is a bit warped.

RTC: No, don’t say that.

GD: Once the FBI was looking for a sinister person in San Francisco and one of their agents whom I knew, asked me if I could help them locate this person.

I said I would and since I was the person they were looking for, why I went right out and started looking.

RTC: What had you done, Gregory?

GD: Oh nothing criminal. I was helping out a friend they did not like. Anyway, I advised this fellow that the man he wanted was a Harry Brunser.

RTC: And was there such a person?

GD: In Frisco slang a brunser is an anus.

RTC: (Laughter) And they went for it?

GD: Asked all over town and made fools out of themselves. Actually, Robert, that is unfair. I did not make fools out them but God beat me to it.

RTC: They must have been unhappy with you in the end.

GD: In the end? There you go harping on Kimmel.

RTC: Let’s change the subject here.

GD: Like changing diapers. Well, we could discuss Bach but why bother. My son wants to borrow my car in about five minutes and I have to come up with some reason to prevent this. He has a habit of backing into things or scraping fire plugs and forgetting to tell me. Good clean fun for him but huge repair bills for me not to mention dealing with hysterical old women whose cat he just ran over. I will ring you up in a bit and thanks for the tip on Kimmel. Now I can tell him randy gay jokes and really get him peeved.

 

(Concluded 9:45 SM CST)

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Conversations+with+the+Crow+by+Gregory+Douglas