TBR News May 29, 2018

The Voice of the White House  

Washington, D.C. May 29, 2018: A constant subject for the high-level intelligence people inside the Beltway is the progress of what is called ‘The Plan.’

This is a long-term program, formulated and implemented, by the far-right element in the government and eagerly supported by the so-called neo-cons.

The purpose of this program is to destabilize Russia, force Putin and his supporters out of office and replace them, as was done during the reign of the CIA-friendly Yeltsin, with persons friendly to the United States aims and, specially, friendly to US business interests.

Russia is in possession of a very large reservoir of natural resources from oil to gold and American interests very nearly had their controlling hands on all of this during the Yeltsin years but lost it when Putin got in control.

They hate his intractable nationalism and have done, and are doing, everything they can to discredit, defeat and eventually oust him.

A major part of The Plan has been to get physical control of countries surrounding Russia from the Baltic states to the ‘Stans and to ring Russia with American-oriented and friendly countries.

Putin, aware of this because of the obviousness of the plottings and also because of very high-level information leaks from Washington, responded and with deadly effect.

Georgia was run by a domestic politician who was eccentric, egotistical but in the pocket of Washington, and who allowed American troops and their military equipment to pour into the country.

But two Georgian provinces, inhabited mostly by Russians, objected to the blatantly pro-West government in Tiblisi and protested.

Georgia’s answer was to threaten force and, with full American support, to mass Georgian troops on the borders of these provinces.

Putin responded by sending a Russian military strike force into the area in support of the break-away areas and this caused a two-fold retreat on the part of American supporters. The military units rapidly evacuated west to the Black Sea and US Naval evacuation while an army of CIA personnel fled in terror to the airport at Tiblisi to avoid capture. This demarche disillusioned a number of eastern European countries who then toned down their anti-Russian rhetoric and made pacific moves towards the Kremlin.

A very high-level Polish government contingent flying into Smolensk to confer with the Russians were destroyed when their aircraft, responding to faked ground signals at the fog-shrouded Smolensk airport, slammed into the ground, wiping out the top level Poles. The Russians did not destroy the Poles but American intelligence operatives did.

This pointless slaughter was designed to teach wavering cantonists a lesson.

And the so-called “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine was entirely a CIA operation.

The government in that country was replaced with a pro-Western one and the Ukraine was then viewed in Washington as another country to stock with threatening American missiles and troops.

When the Ukrainians tired of the corruption that inevitably is attendant upon a pro-West government and eventually elected a pro-Russian president, the CIA predictably responded by fomenting civil strife in Kiev and when that appeared to be waning, had their surrogates start shooting at random into the crowd to stir up public anger.

Putin’s response was to occupy the Russian-populated Crimea, hold an election that overwhelmingly supported union with Russia and gained the important naval base at Sebastopol that the Ukraine had promised to the US Navy and, more important, the Crimean off-shore oil fields and a coastline that permitted an easier installation of the South Stream oil transmission line from Russian oil fields to southern Europe.

The fury of the balked intelligence and governmental organs in Washington has been monumental and because a restive Europe is presenting a disunited front in the dictated attacks on Russia, more pressure is being planned to further threaten and pressure Putin.

The oil-rich Arctic is a prime future battlefield selected by Washington to engage the Russians, but the latter hold most of the geo-political cards.

And attempts to economically isolate Russia can easily backfire and create economic chaos with America’s economic powers.

The Russians hold 118 billion dollars worth of US Treasury certificate and their tenative allies, the Chinese, hold one trillion dollars of the same certificates. Should these countries, against whom the United States has been conducting clandestine political warfare, ever decide to jointly dump these financial instruments, the collapse of the dollar as the leading international currency would create an economic crisis that could easily prove fatal to Washington.

When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department usually uses water.”

The Table of Contents

• Trump accuses Mueller team of ‘meddling’ in midterm elections
• Narco-Corruption, ISIS 3.0, and the Terror Drone Attack That Never Happened
• The Coming Ice Age
• Do FBI Files Prove Adolf Hitler Escaped to Argentina?

 

Trump accuses Mueller team of ‘meddling’ in midterm elections

President offers no proof for allegation about special counsel investigators and says Democrats are guilty of ‘collusion’

May 29, 2018

by Martin Pengelly and agencies

The Guardian

Donald Trump reached for a loaded term on Monday when without offering proof he accused special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators of “meddling” in the forthcoming midterm elections. The president also said only Democrats were guilty of “collusion”.

Mueller, who was appointed last year after Trump fired FBI director James Comey, is leading the investigation into Russian election interference in 2016 and alleged collusion between Trump aides and Moscow. Mueller is also investigating whether actions like the firing of Comey constitute obstruction of justice.

Four Trump associates have been charged. Three, including Trump’s first national security adviser, Gen Michael Flynn, have pleaded guilty to lying to the authorities and agreed to co-operate with Mueller. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, has pleaded not guilty on financial charges.

The US intelligence community agrees that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favour and against Hillary Clinton. The Senate judiciary committee has supported that view; the House intelligence committee, led by Trump allies, has said there was no collusion by the Trump campaign.

On Tuesday, Trump tweeted: “The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls. There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats.

“Why aren’t the 13 Angry and heavily conflicted Democrats investigating the totally Crooked Campaign of totally Crooked Hillary Clinton. It’s a Rigged Witch Hunt, that’s why! Ask them if they enjoyed her after election celebration!”

Trump has repeatedly referred to Mueller’s team as “13 angry Democrats”. Mueller is a Republican appointed by Trump’s own deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, who is himself a Republican. According to publicly available information cited by the Washington Post, 13 of Mueller’s investigators have registered as Democrats in the past and nine have donated to Democrats. The biggest donor on the team, the Post reported, also donated to Republicans.

Most polls predict a strong Democratic performance in the midterms in November, potentially producing a “blue wave” and handing control of the House and even the Senate back to the opposition party.

Trump has pursued an aggressive strategy towards Mueller in recent weeks, as talks over a possible interview between special counsel and president continue. On Sunday Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani admitted on CNN that Trump’s repeated claim there was a “spy” in his campaign were made “for public opinion … because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach or not impeach”.

Intelligence analysts and experts have rubbished the “spy” claims, saying that if an FBI informant spoke to Trump aides observed interacting with Russians, that was normal policy if a foreign power appeared to be seeking to influence an election.

“Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans,” Giuliani said, nonetheless, “are going to be informed a lot by their constituents. And so our jury – and it should be – is the American people.”

In another tweet on Tuesday, Trump said he needed to focus more of his attention on issues important to Americans and less on the Russia investigation.

“Sorry,” he wrote. “I’ve got to start focusing my energy on North Korea Nuclear, bad Trade Deals, VA Choice, the Economy, rebuilding the Military, and so much more, and not on the Rigged Russia Witch Hunt that should be investigating Clinton/Russia/FBI/Justice/Obama/Comey/Lynch etc.”

 

Narco-Corruption, ISIS 3.0, and the Terror Drone Attack That Never Happened

Pentagon Documents Detail Dystopian Dangers

May 29, 2018

by Nick Turse

TomDispatch

For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida.

But that’s a story for later. For now, let’s focus on a 2017 executive order issued by President Trump, part of his second attempt at a travel ban directed primarily at citizens of Muslim-majority nations. It begins: “It is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks.”

That sentence would be repeated in a January report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” Meant to strengthen the president’s case for the travel ban, it was panned for its methodological flaws, pilloried for its inaccuracies, and would even spur a lawsuit by the civil rights organization, Muslim Advocates, and the watchdog group, Democracy Forward Foundation. In their complaint, those groups contend that the report was “biased, misleading, and incomplete” and “manipulates information to support its anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim conclusions.”

To bolster the president’s arguments for restricting the entry of foreigners into the United States, the DOJ/DHS analysis contained a collection of case summaries. Examples included: the Sudanese national who, in 2016, “pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS”; the Uzbek who “posted a threat on an Uzbek-language website to kill President Obama in an act of martyrdom on behalf of ISIS”; the Syrian who, in a plea agreement, “admitted that he knew a member of ISIS and that while in Syria he participated in a battle against the Syrian regime, including shooting at others, in coordination with Al Nusrah,” an al-Qaeda offshoot.

Such cases cited in the report, hardly spectacular terror incidents, were evidently calculated to sow fears by offering a list of convicted suspects with Muslim-sounding names. But the authors of the report simply looked in the wrong places. They could have found startling summaries of truly audacious attacks against the homeland in a collection of U.S. military documents from 2016 obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information Act. Those files detail a plethora of shocking acts of terrorism across the United States including mass poisonings, the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and that “People’s Armed Liberation (PAL) attack on U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) headquarters in Tampa, Florida, [by] a drone-launched missile.”

That’s right! A drone-launched missile attack! On CENTCOM’s Florida headquarters! By a terrorist group known as PAL!

Wondering how you missed the resulting 24/7 media bonanza, the screaming front page headlines in the New York Times, the hysterics on Fox & Friends, the president’s hurricane of tweets?

Well, there’s a simple explanation. That attack doesn’t actually happen until May 2020. Or so says the summary of the 33rd annual Joint Land, Air, and Sea Strategic Special Program (JLASS-SP), an elaborate war game carried out in 2016 by students and faculty from the U.S. military’s war colleges, the training grounds for its future generals and admirals.

PALing Around with Terrorists

The 2016 edition of JLASS-SP was played out remotely for weeks before culminating in a five-day on-site exercise at the Air Force Wargaming Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. It involved 148 students from the Air Force’s Air War College, the Army War College, the Marine Corps War College, the Naval War College, the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, the National War College, and the National Defense University’s Information Resources Management College. Those up-and-coming officers — some of whom will likely play significant roles in running America’s actual wars in the 2020s — confronted a future in which, as the script for the war game put it, “lingering jealousy and distrust of American power and national interests have made it politically and culturally difficult for the United States to act unilaterally.”

Here’s the scene as set in JLASS-SP: while the U.S. is still economically and militarily powerful into the next decade, anxieties abound about increasing constraints on the country’s ability to control, dictate, and dominate world affairs. “Even in the military realm… advances by others in science and technology, expanded adoption of irregular warfare tactics by both state and non-state actors, proliferation of nuclear weapons and long-range precision weapons, and growing use of cyber warfare attacks have increasingly constricted U.S. freedom of action,” reads the war game’s summary.

While the materials used are “not intended to be an actual prediction of events,” they are explicitly meant “to reflect a plausible depiction of major trends and influences in the world regions.” Indeed, what’s striking about the exercise is how — though scripted before the election of Donald Trump — it anticipated many of the fears articulated in the president’s December 2017 National Security Strategy. That document, for instance, bemoans the potential dangers not only of regional powers like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, but also of “transnational threats from jihadist terrorists and transnational criminal organizations,” undocumented immigrants, “drug traffickers, and criminal cartels [which] exploit porous borders and threaten U.S. security and public safety.”

The JLASS-SP scenario also prefigured themes from that 2018 DOJ/DHS report supporting the travel ban in the way it stoked fears of, above all, a major “foreign-born” — especially Muslim — terror threat in the United States. A 2017 Government Accountability Office report would, however, conclude that, of “the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, far right-wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27 percent).”

Two years after the war game was conducted, in a time of almost metronomic domestic mass killings, President Trump continues to spotlight the supposedly singular danger posed by “inadequately vetted people” in the U.S., although stovetops and ovens, hot air balloons, and burning pajamas are far more deadly to Americans. Indeed, since 9/11, terrorism has been a distinctly low-level risk to the American public — at least when compared to heart disease, cancer, car crashes, fires, or heat waves — but has had an outsized effect on the perceptions and actions of the government, not to mention its visions of tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s Terror Today

An examination of the threats from international and domestic terror groups, as imagined in JLASS-SP, offers unique clues to the Pentagon’s fears for the future. “Increasingly,” reads the war game’s summary, “transnational organizations, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and violent extremist organizations challenge the traditional notions of boundaries and sovereignty.”

That drone-launching terror group, PAL, for instance, is neither Islamist nor a right-wing terror group, but an organization supposedly formed in 2017 in hopes of defeating “globalism and capitalism throughout the world by rallying the proletariat to orchestrate the overthrow of capitalist governments and global conglomerates.” Its ideology, an amalgam of increasingly stale leftist social movements, belies its progressive ranks, a rainbow coalition consisting of “most of the globe’s ethnicities and cultures,” all of whom seem to be cyber-sophisticates skilled in fundraising, recruiting, as well as marketing their particular brand of radicalism.

As of 2020, the audacious drone strike on CENTCOM’s headquarters was PAL’s only terror attack in the tangible world. The rest of its actions have taken place in the digital realm, where the group is known for launching cyber-assaults and siphoning off “funds from large global corporations, banks, and capitalist governments around the world.”

Even though PAL went from a gleam in the eye of its founder, the Bond-villain-esquely named Otto Cyre, to terrorist power-player in just a few short years, the pace of its operations didn’t please its hardest core members who, the war game scenario says, broke away in late 2020 to form yet another organization devoted to even more rapidly eroding “confidence in governmental and institutional bodies by staging events that demonstrate the ‘impotency’ of the establishment.” That splinter group, United Patriots Against International Government (UPAIGO) — in this war game all terror groups have Pentagon-style acronyms — concentrates on “spectacular but deniable actions,” a scattershot campaign of often botched but sometimes lethal efforts that include:

* November 2021: a cyber-attack on the Angarsk Refinery in the Russian Federation, which resulted in a two-week shutdown causing a sharp rise in the price of oil and gas just prior to the 2021-2022 winter heating season.

* April 2022: a failed attempt to assassinate, by IED, the chief of U.S. Pacific Command. Two members of the commander’s security detail and the command’s political advisor were killed in the attack while others, including civilians, were injured.

* January 2022: a failed plot to detonate a dirty [radioactive] bomb, employing medical waste and homemade explosives, at Philadelphia International Airport.

* 2023 fire season: as fires raged in the western United States, UPAIGO established relief efforts designed to compete with the U.S. government’s response, in order to “undermine confidence in government agencies.”

* June 2024: an attack, in coordination with members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), on a U.S. flagged air carrier transporting U.S. military personnel at Shannon Airport in Ireland. Militants fired two surface-to-air missiles at the aircraft, which was damaged but managed to land successfully.”

PAL and UPAIGO are, however, hardly the only terror threats facing the United States in the 2020s, according to JLASS-SP 2016. PAL’s fellow travelers, for example, include the fictional versions of the real Irish National Liberation Army and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). There’s also the Environmentalists Against Capitalists Organization, or EACO, “a lethal environmental anti-capitalist terrorist group with global connections.” Formed in 2010 (though not in our actual world), EACO, according to the war gamers, evolved into an increasingly violent organization in the 2020s, carrying out not just cyberattacks on corporations but also a full-scale bombing campaign “targeting executive board meetings of large corporations, particularly in industries such as oil, coal, natural gas, and logging.” The group even took to planting IEDs on logging roads and employing tainted food as a weapon. By 2025, EACO was implicated in more than 400 criminal acts in the U.S. resulting in 126 deaths and $862 million in damages.

Then there’s Anonymous. In the Pentagon’s fictional war-game, this real-world hacktivist group is characterized as a “loose organization of malicious black-hat hackers” that employs its digital prowess to “distribute bomb-making instructions, and conduct targeting for options other than planes, trains, and automobiles.” In the past created by the military’s imagineers, Anonymous was declared a terrorist organization after it conducted an August 2015 digital attack on Louisiana’s power grid with something akin to the Stuxnet worm that damaged nuclear centrifuges in Iran. That cyber-assault was meant to protest the state’s restrictions on online gambling — an affront, according to the fictional Anonymous, to Internet freedom. (In the real world, Louisiana lawmakers actually just deep-sixed online gambling without an apparent terrorist response.) Taking down that power grid “resulted in the death of 15 elderly patients trapped in a facility denied air conditioning as a result of the power outage.”

Also included among domestic terror groups is Mara Salvatrucha 13 or MS-13, the Los Angeles street gang, born of the American-fueled Central American civil wars of the 1980s, that was transplanted to El Salvador and has since returned to the United States. This violent American export — the product of deportations in the 1990s — has paradoxically become a key justification for President Trump’s crackdown on immigration. “MS-13 recruits through our broken immigration system, violating our borders. And it just comes right through — whenever they want to come through, they come through,” said Trump earlier this year during a White House roundtable focused on the gang. “We’ve really never seen anything quite like this — the level of ferocity, the level of violence, and the reforms we need from Congress to defeat it.”

In the real world, the U.S. branch of MS-13 operates in loose local cliques under a franchised name, dabbling in small-time drug dealing, gun-running, prostitution, and extortion (primarily of recent immigrants). Many of its crimes are committed against its own affiliates or members of other gangs. The president nonetheless baselessly claimed that MS-13 has “literally taken over towns and cities of the United States.” He also continues to portray the gang, which reportedly makes up less than 1% of the estimated 1.4 million gang members in the U.S., as a sophisticated international cartel.

And that’s precisely how MS-13 was also portrayed in the fantasy world of JLASS-SP. In that war game, Mara Salvatrucha has developed “the resources to wage full-scale insurgent campaigns in Central America and the capability to cause serious disruption in the United States and Canada,” while rumors swirl of contacts between its members and foreign militants. “If cooperation between foreign terrorist groups and MS-13 ever blossomed, the potential for terrorist attacks within the borders of the United States would increase significantly,” the war game scenario warns.

President Trump has been accused of conflating members of MS-13 with undocumented immigrants (and referring to both groups as “animals”). Regardless, there’s no question that he kicked off his presidential run in 2015 by disparaging Mexicans.  “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he infamously declared. The JLASS-SP documents reverse Trump’s formula by first noting that “most illegal immigrants crossing into the United States are just trying to make a better life for themselves,” only to suggest that the U.S.-Mexican border also “serves as an infiltration point for terrorists.”

Unlike in the real world, where such fears circulate primarily as a conspiracy theory, in the Pentagon’s future fantasy there is “substantial evidence… that terrorists from the Middle East and North Africa transit the Mexican-U.S. border.” Worse yet, radical Islamists even “camouflage themselves as Hispanics” to cross the border. The military’s fantasists point to “a flood of name changes from Arabic to Hispanic and the reported linking of drug cartels along the Texas border with Middle East and North Africa terrorism.”

That represents a Trumpian-style nightmare-cum-fantasy even the president hasn’t yet dreamed up — a Hispanic-surnamed, cartel-supported group of Islamist terrorists. But by the 2020s, according to the Pentagon’s futurists, such worries are well-founded. And this will occur at the same time that Mexican and South American drug gangs have grown so rich and powerful they can regularly buy protection from U.S. government officials.

“Popular opinion in the United States is beginning to believe the ‘Narco-corruption’ is affecting the ‘rule of law’ north of the border,” according to their scenario, with the cartels spending $20 billion in 2022 alone to buy off U.S. officials or get candidates of their choice elected. That same year, allegations of election tampering in mayoral races across the American South come to light and the number of corruption convictions of U.S. Border Patrol agents and law enforcement officials skyrockets. Perhaps most shocking is the discovery of a “vast irrigated grow site” (evidently a massive marijuana farm) tended by “a dozen Mexican farmers armed with AK-47’s” in — wait for it! — “remote areas of Illinois.”

Mexican farmers, El Salvadoran gang members, Islamists masquerading as Hispanics, eco-terrorists, and anti-globalization militants aren’t the only threats foreseen by the military’s futurists. Much-ballyhooed reports of the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, like the much-hyped defeat of its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, turn out to be premature. In the 2020s, the re-re-branded group, now known as the Global Islamic Caliphate, or GIC, draws “support from Sunni-majority regions in Syria and Iraq; refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey; and internally displaced persons in Syria and Iraq,” while continuing to launch attacks in the region.

AMeanwhile, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has grown in reach, size, and might. By 2021, the group has 38,000 members spread across Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger with bases reportedly located in Western Sahara. On May 23, 2023, AQIM carries out the most lethal terror attack in the U.S. since 9/11, detonating massive truck-bombs at both the New York and New Jersey ends of the Lincoln Tunnel, killing 435 people and injuring another 618. The bombing prompts President McGraw — you remember him, Karl Maxwell McGraw, the independent Arizona senator who rode his populist “America on the Move” campaign to victory in the 2020 election — to invade Mauritania and become mired in yet another American forever war that shows every indication of grinding on into the 2030s, if not beyond.

The Age of Terrorism

In the real world, the lifetime odds of an American dying from “walking” are one in 672. The chance of being killed by a foreign terrorist? One in 45,808. By an illegal immigrant terrorist? One in 138 million. And the odds of being killed by a “chain migration” immigrant sometime this year? One in 1.2 billion! In other words, you have a far greater chance of being killed by a dog, a shark, lightning, or the government via legal execution.

This is not to say terrorism isn’t a major threat to others around the world or that terror groups are not proliferating. Since 9/11, the number of terrorist organizations recognized by the U.S. State Department and battled by the Pentagon — from Africa to the Middle East to Asia — has grown markedly.

“States are the principal actors on the global stage, but non-state actors also threaten the security environment with increasingly sophisticated capabilities,” reads an unclassified synopsis of the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy. “Terrorists, trans-national criminal organizations, cyber hackers and other malicious non-state actors have transformed global affairs with increased capabilities of mass disruption.”

In the fictional future of the Pentagon’s JLASS-SP 2016, this menace only expands to include various hybrid threats and new homegrown groups with increasing capabilities for death and destruction.

While it may be “the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks,” as President Trump’s 2017 executive order declares, the Pentagon envisions a future in which such policies are increasingly ineffective. In their dystopian war-game future, more than two decades of fighting “them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America” (as former President George W. Bush put it in 2007) proves unequivocally futile. In this sense, the Pentagon’s fantasies bear an eerie resemblance to the actual present. In the dystopian scenario used by the Pentagon to train its future leaders, today’s forever wars have proven ineffective and future threats are to be met with new, similarly ineffective, forever wars.

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Trump declared that we’re living in the “age of terrorism.” His solution: wielding “unmatched power,” loosening the rules of engagement, and establishing an unfettered ability to detain, question, and “annihilate” terrorists.

All of these tactics have, however, been part of the Pentagon’s playbook since 2001 and, according to the military’s best guess at the future, will lead to an increase in terror groups and terror attacks while terror networks and terrorist ideologies will grow in strength, resilience, and appeal. Almost two decades in, it seems we’re still only in the opening days of the “age of terrorism” and, if the Pentagon’s war-gamers are to be believed, far worse is yet to come.

 

The Coming Ice Age

A true scientific detective story

September 1958 issue

by Betty Friedan

Harpers

How a rising of the ocean waters may flood most of our port cities within the foreseeable future — and why it will be followed by the growth of a vast glacier which may eventually cover much of Europe and North America.

This is the story of two scientists, who started five years ago — with a single radiocarbon clue from the ocean bottom and a wild hunch — to track down one of the earth’s great unsolved mysteries: What caused the ancient ice ages? Their search led over many continents and seas, to drowned rivers and abandoned mountain caves, into far-removed branches of science. It took them down through recorded history, from the stone tablets of primitive man to contemporary newspaper headlines.

These two serious, careful scientists — geophysicist Maurice Ewing, director of Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory, and geologist-meteorologist William Donn believe they have finally found the explanation for the giant glaciers, which four times during the past million years have advanced and retreated over the earth. If they are right, the world is now heading into another Ice Age. It will come not as sudden catastrophe, but as the inevitable culmination of a process that has already begun in northern oceans.

As Ewing and Donn read the evidence, an Ice Age will result from a slow warming and rising of the ocean that is now taking place. They believe that this ocean flood — which may submerge large coastal areas of the eastern United States and western Europe — is going to melt the ice sheet which has covered the Arctic Ocean through all recorded history. Calculations based on the independent observations of other scientists indicate this melting could begin, within roughly one hundred years.

It is this melting of Arctic ice which Ewing and Donn believe will set off another Ice Age on earth. They predict that it will cause great snows to fall in the north — perennial unmelting snows which the world has not seen since the last Ice Age thousands of years ago. These snows will make the Arctic glaciers grow again, until their towering height forces them forward. The advance south will be slow, but if it follows the route of previous ice ages, it will encase in ice large parts of North America and Europe. It would, of course, take many centuries for that wall of ice to reach New York and Chicago, London and Paris. But its coming is an inevitable consequence of the cycle which Ewing and Donn believe is now taking place.

The coming of another Ice Age is an event serious scientists have never been able to predict from observable Earth phenomena. For until Ewing and Donn postulated their new Theory of Ice Ages (it was first published in Science in June 1956 and a second report appeared in May 1958) the very nature of the problem seemed to defy the kind of scientific understanding which makes prediction possible.

Scientists know that the glaciers which stand quiet in the Arctic today once covered America with a wall of ice up to two miles thick — its southern boundary extending from Long Island across New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas to the Missouri River, with extensions into the western mountain country . . . that it covered northern Europe, England, large parts of France and Germany . . . that it created the Great Lakes, the Hudson and St. Lawrence Rivers . . . that it moved mountains, crashed down forests, destroyed whole species of life.

They also know that it is cold enough at the Arctic for glaciers to grow today, but almost no snow has fallen there in modern times. What caused those snows that built the Ice Age glaciers until their own height forced them to march, and what caused them finally to retreat? And why has the earth been swinging back and forth between Ice Ages and climate like today’s for a million years, when before then the entire planet enjoyed a temperate climate with no extremes of hot or cold? Scientists could answer these questions only in terms of sudden catastrophe — a volcanic eruption, the earth’s movement into a cloud of cosmic dust — and unpredictable catastrophes are not the concern of contemporary science. Few scientists had even worked on the problem in recent years.

It was only by a combination of lucky circumstance and persistent curiosity that Ewing and Donn as a team began working steadily on the Ice Age Mystery. As Director of Lamont Geological Observatory, located on top of the New York Palisades over the Hudson River, Ewing teaches theoretical geophysics and directs research in earthquake seismology, marine geology and biology, and oceanography. Donn teaches geology at Brooklyn College and directs the research in meteorology at Lamont. Since the two men live twenty miles apart and were occupied all day, they would often meet at eleven at night in a deserted laboratory at Columbia University — midway between their homes — and work into the morning on the Ice Age trail.

CLUES FROM SEA FOSSILS

The two men share the scientist’s passion for pure search, no matter where it leads. Ewing, a tall and powerful Texan who speaks in a gentle voice, was white-haired before he was fifty, a fact his friends attribute to the pace at which he has lived his life as a scientist. For a quarter-century he has been leading expeditions over the ocean, often risking his life while pioneering new methods of investigating its secrets. In the early 1930s he founded a new science by dropping charges from a whale boat and using a seismograph to identify the different layers of earth beneath the ocean. In 1955 he was given the Navy Distinguished Service Award for devising the SOFAR (Sound Fixing and Ranging) method for rescuing men from ships and planes lost at sea.

Donn, New York City bred, is a slight, wiry meteorologist, who tames tidal waves with logarithms. His mastery of the complex relationship between sea and weather complemented Ewing’s knowledge of the depths of the oceans.

The original bits of information which set the two scientists onto the trail of the Ice Age Mystery first came to light on the decks of the three-masted schooner Vema which Lamont Observatory uses for scientific exploration. In the summer of 1953, the ship traced a puzzling pattern on the ocean bottom which led from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico and into the Caribbean Sea. The Columbia-Lamont crew were working with their newly perfected “deep sea corer,” a device which can bring up primeval sediment undisturbed through as much as 4,000 fathoms of water (24,000 feet) — just as it was deposited thousands of years ago.

This “corer” is a sharp-edged steel tube, two-and-a-half inches in diameter and up to 70 feet in length. When it has been lowered from the ship to within 15 feet of the sea bottom, a trigger trips the holding mechanism and the tube is punched by a weight into the sediment. The Lamont ocean expeditions have brought up cores as long as 60 feet — nearly 2,000 of them — representing the successive deposits of thousands of years. As Ewing describes it,

“The entire record of the earth is there in the most undisturbed form it is possible to find anywhere — traces of the animals, rocks, and plants of successive ages preserved in the order in which they filtered down from the surface of the sea.”

Only recently, radioactive isotope techniques have made if possible to deduce when the sediment was deposited, and other things about the world from which it came. Scientists can now measure the radiocarbon in a sample of ocean-bottom mud — and know how long it has lain there. Radioactive carbon ceases to be replenished when removed from the atmosphere, and decays at a known rate. Chemists therefore calculate from the ratio of radiocarbon to ordinary carbon in a fossil shell whether it has been decaying for a thousand, five, or ten thousand years.

In these cores of mud from the Caribbean, the equatorial Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico that summer, the Lamont expedition kept seeing a strange sharp line. “About a foot below the floor of the ocean the sediment suddenly changed from salmon pink to gray,” Ewing said. “You could see it sharp as a razor when the cores were opened on the ship’s deck. Others had reported this same line in the North Atlantic.

“When we put these cores to paleontological laboratory tests back at Lamont, we found out what that razor-sharp line meant: at a certain time the ocean suddenly changed from cold to warm. The pink sediment contained shells of minute warm-water animals; the gray sediment, cold-water animals.”

Back at Lamont, measurement of radiocarbon showed that this sudden warming took place throughout the length and breadth of the vast Atlantic Ocean — 11,000 years ago. The cores showed virtually no change in temperature for 90,000 years — except for this one sudden increase. Donn, Lamont’s meteorological expert, was as mystified as Ewing.

“What happened 11,000 years ago to heat the ocean?” they kept asking themselves at odd moments over the next year or so. “What could change the climate of the whole ocean so abruptly?”

A JACKPOT IN ICE

Neither Ewing nor Donn can say precisely when the hunch came. The problem continued to tantalize them, as they traveled about the country attending meetings and doing field work. On the way back from Chicago, they may have watched the ice break up in the Delaware River. They recall reading a newspaper item about a big gambling jackpot on which day the ice would go out in the Yukon. The chain of thought seems obvious now: water freezing — ice going out — this is a sharp, abrupt change, the only sudden change that can happen to a body of water.

But oceans don’t freeze. Ocean currents dissipate the cold — except, of course, in the small Arctic Ocean which is almost entirely surrounded by land.

“What would happen if the ice went out of the Arctic Ocean as it does in the Yukon or the Delaware?” Ewing and Donn remember wondering, as they went over the problem again, one day at Lamont.

“Well, we figured, the Arctic Ocean would get warmer. Because water would flow more freely between it and the Atlantic, dissipating the cold. And of course, the Atlantic Ocean would get colder. But wait a minute . . . we saw it simultaneously. If the Arctic Ocean were open water, warmed by the Atlantic, warmer than the land around it, water would evaporate and fall as snow on the land. More snow on Greenland and northern Canada would make glaciers grow. Glaciers don’t grow now because there is no open water in the Arctic to provide the moisture for snow.

“And suddenly we had the startling hunch that the Arctic Ocean was open during the Ice Age. And that it froze over only 11,000 years ago. It was this freezing over of the Arctic Ocean which so suddenly warmed the Atlantic — and ended the Ice Age.”

“That rather exciting ten minutes,” they told me, “contradicted a whole lot of things we’d always taken for granted. Everyone has assumed that the Arctic Ocean, so covered with ice today, would be even colder and more completely frozen during an Ice Age.

“You get a lot of these wild ideas in our business. If one lasts five minutes you begin to take it seriously. The more we thought about this one, the more it added up. It explained so many things that have always puzzled us.

“For once you accept the radical idea that the Arctic was a warm open ocean at the time of the great continental glaciers, you can reconstruct a completely different weather pattern from the one we know today. As we worked it out, we could see a startling chain of cause and effect between the oceans and the glaciers themselves. We could see how the oceans would work as an actual ‘thermostat’ to keep the earth alternating between glacial ice ages and interglacial periods such as today.

“It all hinges on the fact that the North Pole is where it is — in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, which is almost completely surrounded by land except for a shallow ‘sill’ between Norway and Greenland opening into the Atlantic, and the insignificant Bering Strait. If the cold waters of the Arctic interchanged freely over this sill with the warm Atlantic water, the Arctic Ocean would not freeze over. Its moisture would build glaciers. (In the cold temperatures of the north, the moisture that evaporates from the open Arctic would all fall as snow — too much snow to melt in the short Arctic summer. When the rate at which snow accumulates exceeds the rate at which it melts, glaciers grow.) But as those glaciers grew, they would lock up so much ocean water that sea level would fall.

“We know that sea level was lowered between 300 and 400 feet at the peak of the last Ice Age. Now, most of that sill between Norway and Greenland is less than 300 feet deep. At a certain point the glaciers would lower the sea level so much that the Arctic Ocean would be virtually cut off from the warmer Atlantic. The Arctic Ocean would then freeze over. And the glaciers, no longer led by snow, would melt under the Arctic summer sun, restoring their water to the oceans. Then sea level would rise, until enough warm Atlantic water again flowed over that sill to melt the Arctic ice sheet, and start another glacial cycle.”

Donn worked out a weather map of the world, with an open Arctic Ocean, warmer than surrounding lands. It showed a completely different storm pattern than exists today; more rain and snow in the Arctic, a wind pattern carrying more ocean moisture inland generally. It showed violent blizzards over eastern North America which would spread more snow on the glaciers. Summers would become more like winters as the glacial wall advanced southward. Donn’s weather map with the open Arctic even showed that there would be rain in today’s deserts.

But they needed more proof for their theory. They had to track down the circumstantial evidence of what happened 11,000 years ago; they had to find geological witnesses to confirm their reconstruction of the crime.

CLUES FROM A DROWNED RIVER

They embarked on the painstaking examination of the records of past Arctic explorers. There was little relevant data. One day, going through dusty old volumes of the National Geographic, they found a photograph of an Arctic beach — a beach that could have been made only by long years of pounding waves. There must have been open sea in the Arctic to make that beach.

Ewing took to sea in the Vema again. In the Gulf of Mexico, the Ice Age trail seemed to peter out altogether in a bottomless plain of flat gray silt. The Vema took core after core below the Mississippi Delta without finding the crucial fossil lines.

“We couldn’t even get to the bottom of it with our corers,” Ewing recalls. “We were sure the Gulf must have changed from cold to warm just as the other oceans, but how could we prove it when there seemed to be no fossils at all in that endless gray layer? We suspected that the gray silt had come from the Mississippi and had spread over the floor of the Gulf by creeping along the bottom. If we could find a hill that stood well above the Gulf floor, the sediment on top of it would have come down undisturbed from the surface of the water and might contain the record of those temperature changes.”

They nearly sailed over them — a cluster of hills rising a thousand feet off the ocean floor. There, instead of puzzling gray silt, they finally found the familiar, razor-sharp layers of glacial and interglacial fossils.

And that very gray silt which had obscured their trail turned out to be further proof that 11,000 years ago was the date the Ice Age ended.

For back at Lamont, radiocarbon measurement showed that the silt stopped sliding from the Mississippi just 11,000 years ago. This meant that a great rise in sea level must have taken place at just that time. Drowned by the rising sea, the lower channels of the Mississippi River would retain their own sediment, losing the power to take it out to the deep central part of the Gulf, it was, almost certainly, the rise in sea level caused by the melting of the glaciers.

AND THE FISHBONE CAVES

As the Lamont crew were pursuing this mystery in the sea, other scientists were unearthing new Ice Age clues on land. Atomic Energy Commissioner Willard F. Libby, the scientist who originated radiocarbon dating, found fossils of a forest at Two Creeks, Wisconsin, that had been first flooded and then overridden by the advancing ice. Radiocarbon dating proved that those trees, at one of the southern fingertips of the last glacial advance, were pushed over about 11,000 years ago. (Previously, geologists thought the ice had disappeared long before that time.)

Then a series of dramatic clues were brought in by other geologists from caves in the cliffs above the dry Great Basin of Nevada and Utah. Several thousand feet above the basin are rock niches worn by the waves of glacial lakes — lakes created by the great rains that fell south of the Ice Age snows. Far below are caves, also worn by those waves, that were inhabited by man: the famous Fishbone Cave above the dry Winnemucca Lake in western Nevada and the Danger Cave above glacial Lake Bonneville in Utah.

The evidence showed that men moved into those caves shortly after the lake level suddenly dropped and exposed them. Remains were found of the nets and baskets they used to catch the fish of the now vanished glacial lakes. Radiocarbon dating showed that men were living in those caves — brought above the water when the great glacial rains and snows stopped — approximately 11,000 years ago. And the time during which the glacial lakes dropped from those niches thousands of feet above on the cliffs, to the level of the lower caves, was dramatically short — only several hundred years. It was like the sudden change Ewing and Donn had observed in the ocean. The date was now established: 11,000 years ago, plus or minus a few hundred years, the last Ice Age suddenly ended.

At the time the theory was constructed, there was no actual evidence from the Arctic Ocean itself to indicate it had ever been ice-free. Some months later Dr. A. P. Crary came back from the Arctic Ocean and sent his cores to Lamont. These cores indicated there had been minute animal life for thousands of years in the Arctic Ocean, which suddenly stopped — eleven millenniums ago. They also showed evidence of icebergs free to move in open water at the time Ewing and Donn think the Arctic was open.

BEYOND THE NORTH WIND

Could men have lived on the shores of this ocean during the Ice Age? Were there human witnesses to the open Arctic sea?

“It was only by accident that we stumbled on a vital clue in a completely different branch of science,’’ they told me. “We might have missed it altogether because of the compartmentalization of science.”

One day a colleague of Donn’s happened to remark over coffee that he’d overheard an anthropologist in the faculty room talking about some traces that had just been discovered of an ancient civilization around the Arctic.

Donn and Ewing started calling anthropologists. The evidence was uncertain, they learned, but some of it pointed strongly to well-established communities of man around the Arctic many thousands of years ago. In fact, the oldest flints showing man in America had been found recently in a band around the Arctic Circle, seldom straying south.

Anthropologists had been mystified. Even if a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska had existed then, why would man choose to use it to settle in the Arctic Circle, in the very heart of the intense polar cold, at temperature which was assumed to be even lower than today? Around that frozen Arctic Ocean, where would man have found the fish and game those flints suggested? Why would men have stayed there for centuries — unless, as Ewing and Donn now believe, the Arctic Ocean was open then, and its shores were a warm oasis compared with the glaciers to the South?

Ewing and Donn got another anthropologist out of bed late at night to question him further. He told them that, while anthropologists are still uncertain as to how and when man first came to America, they are pretty sure he suddenly started migrating south, in an explosive wave, about 11,000 years ago.

Here, perhaps, were their human witnesses to the end of the Ice Age! The people who lived “beyond the north wind’’ on Arctic shores, behind the towering wall of ice, using their flint-tipped weapons on big game and fish that could not survive in the cold Arctic temperatures of today. These men evidently came to America from Siberia when the glaciers had taken enough water from the sea to uncover the Siberian land bridge. They stayed for some centuries around the warm Arctic because the glaciers kept them from straying south. Then, 11,000 years ago, they suddenly fled. If the Arctic Ocean suddenly froze over, they couldn’t eat. Nor could they go back to Siberia because the great rise in sea level at the end of the Ice Age would once more submerge the land bridge.

And just at the time when they could no longer stay in the Arctic, paths opened in the great ice wall south of them. The melting glaciers permitted men to go south at last — in such a rapid wave that they reached the tip of South America in a few thousand years.

So anthropologists are now reconstructing their own mysteries in the light of Ewing and Donn’s Theory of Ice Ages — which California’s authority on early man, Carl Sauer, calls “a major contribution to our understanding. . . . The old, simple belief that man waited at the threshold of the New World until the last ice sheet was gone has been proved wrong.”

And, finally, human witnesses were tracked down in southern deserts. During this past year archaeologists have brought back new evidence that the Sahara desert was green and fertile and thriving with civilization when glaciers froze life in America and Europe. Ewing and Donn had deduced that an open Arctic Ocean would have caused rain in today’s deserts. Now, from the caves of the Sahara, came ancient man’s vivid drawings of the animals that he hunted on the once grassy desert.

BENEATH THE EARTH’S CRUST

One big question remained which the new theory did not seem to answer: What started off the first Ice Age cycle?

“We know that during the past million years, the world has swung back and forth between ice ages and weather like today’s,” Ewing and Donn told me. “Before then, the whole earth was much warmer. There were no zones of extreme heat or cold; palms and magnolias grew in Greenland, and coral around Iceland; subtropical plants thrived within eleven degrees of the North Pole. Why didn’t the Arctic Ocean-glacier ‘thermostat’ work then? What suddenly turned it on one million years ago?

“The answer, we believe, is chat until a million years ago, the North Pole was not in that landlocked Arctic Ocean at all, but in the middle of the open Pacific, where there was no land on which snow and ice could accumulate, and ocean currents dissipated the cold.

“The idea of wandering poles may seem fantastic. But recently-discovered magnetic evidence leads to the geological inference that the whole earth can shift its surface crust with respect to the interior. As the earth’s crustal zone ‘slides’ over the interior, different points on the surface can be at the North or South Pole.

“Such a shift in the earth’s crust, it is now believed, did take place before the first Pleistocene fee Age which began a million years ago. Before then, the magnetic record shows the North Pole in the middle of the Pacific, and the South Pole in the open southern Atlantic.

“An abrupt shift in the earth’s crust carried the North Pole into the small and virtually landlocked Arctic, and the South Pole to the Antarctic continent, where the polar cold could not be dissipated by free ocean currents. That started the greatly contrasting zones of climate we know today — and the concentration of cold which finally froze the Arctic Ocean, to start the Ice Age cycles.”

This would explain why the Ice Age glaciers have always marched from the Arctic. No ocean thermostat exists to turn on drastic glacial-interglacial cycles in the Antarctic. There, according to the theory, the Antarctic ice cap has been building up continually since the South Pole shifted to that continent a million years ago, with only minor changes caused by the slight warming and cooling of the Atlantic in the glacial-interglacial cycles. This is confirmed by evidence from elevated beaches, which seems to indicate that maximum sea level has been dropping successively lower in each glacial era.

And as long as the poles stay where they are, the Ice Age cycles must continue.

WHEN WILL IT COME AGAIN?

Ewing and Donn realized that their theory had startling implications for the future. They have the scientist’s distaste for the sensational and carefully worked out the wording of the theory’s formal conclusion: “The recent epoch can be considered as another interglacial stage.” A number of scientists have tried to disprove their theory; so far they have been unsuccessful.

As Ewing and Donn read the glacial thermostat, the present interglacial stage is well advanced; the earth is now heading into another Ice Age. Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate we may have been watching an Ice Age approach for some time without realizing what we were seeing.

Although scientists do not agree on its significance, they have observed an increasingly rapid warming and rising of the ocean in recent years. Warm water flowing north has driven the codfish off Cape Cod to Newfoundland; annual temperature has risen ten degrees in Iceland and Greenland; down here winters are warmer; the Hudson River no longer freezes over as it used to. It is part of the Ewing-Donn paradox that the next Ice Age will be preceded by such a warming of climate.

“We suspect that the ocean is already warm enough to melt the Arctic ice sheet,” Ewing and Donn told me. “For some time it has remained at the highest temperature ever reached in the four previous interglacial stages.” As climate becomes warmer, more and more glacial melt-water pours into the sea. The Atlantic has already risen 300 feet since the glaciers of the last Ice Age started to melt away. Up until twenty-five years ago the U.S. Geodetic Surveys indicated that sea level was rising six inches a century; in the past twenty-five years that rate has increased to two feet a century.

As sea level rises, more and more warm water pours over the Norway-Greenland sill, under the Arctic ice sheet. American, Russian, and Scandinavian scientists have observed a definite warming of the Arctic Ocean over the past fifty years, and a consequent thinning of the ice sheet. At an international conference on Arctic sea ice in March 1958, scientists estimated that Arctic ice covers an area 12 per cent smaller than it did fifteen years ago, and is 40 per cent thinner. A layman might surmise that if this trend continues the Arctic Ocean will be open and the Ice Age begin in another twenty years. Ewing and Dunn are much more cautious about predictions.

“The rate at which our weather has been warming in recent years could be temporarily slowed down,” they told me. “We don’t know the exact rate at which the sea is now rising. We need long-term world-wide evidence which the International Geophysical Year may give us to assess accurately the changes that seem to be taking place in the ocean and the ice.”

If the ocean continues to warm up at the present rate, Ewing and Donn think it is conceivable that there will be open water in the Arctic within about a hundred years. If they are right, tor the first time in the history of the world, the victims of an Ice Age are going to see it coming. Television cameramen will be raging all over the far north, covering the break-up of the Arctic ice sheet, looking for the first dirty summer slush. For the Ice Age will dawn, not in crashing glacial terror but in slush; as Ewing and Donn describe it, on a summer vacation up north, you will simply see a lot of dirty slush, winter’s snow that for the first time in thousands of years didn’t quite melt.

In many parts of America, at that time, the worry may not be ice, but water. Many scientists have speculated on the ocean flood that will be caused if the melting of glacial icecaps continues. Antarctic scientist Laurence Gould recently warned that “the return of only a few feet of thickness of ice as melt-water to the oceans would have serious effects in many places; and if all the ice were melted into the sea, its level would rise from 150 to 200 feet. All the world’s seaports and some of its most densely populated areas would be submerged.”

Ewing and Donn don’t know how much higher the sea is going to rise before it melts the Arctic ice sheet. They say the ocean has already risen to the point where, if certain recent storms had occurred at high tide, it would have flooded New York and Boston subways. Donn is now working at Lamont on studies of long and short period changes in world sea level.

The ocean flood that brings about the Ice Age will not resemble the flash floods that have caused havoc in the cast in recent years. It will build up slowly, and it will not flow away. The cities, industries, and military bases that are concentrated on both sides of the Atlantic may have to be evacuated. (Fortunately, Pacific coastlines are higher.)

It will probably be possible to protect New York and Washington by levees. Parts or all of New Orleans, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other cities are now protected by levees from high water, Ewing and Donn point out. Evidently, New York is in no danger of becoming a lost Atlantis, drowned under the sea. If low-lying Brooklyn, Miami, Washington, New Orleans, or Amsterdam should become ghost cities, it will be because a decision will have been made long in advance of this slow-creeping flood to evacuate rather than build levees.

“According to our theory, with the melting of the Arctic ice sheet, the rise in sea level will stop,” Ewing and Donn explained. Instead of adding water to the sea, the glaciers will begin taking it out.

For a long time after the ocean flood subsides, the only effect the Ice Age will have on us down here will be more rain. The new Arctic moisture that falls as snow on the glaciers will increase both rain and snow here, swelling rivers and watering deserts. Then, gradually, our weather will cool. Icy winds will blow from the advancing glaciers; the great snows will fall farther and farther south. In several thousand years a two-mile ice sheet may cover the United States and Europe. If man finds no way to switch the glacial thermostat, there may well be a real estate boom in the Sahara.

 

Do FBI Files Prove Adolf Hitler Escaped to Argentina?

May 20, 2016

by Brooke Binkowski

Snopes

A treasure trove of documents released by the FBI includes hundreds of unsubstantiated reports claiming that Adolf Hitler faked suicide and escaped to South America.

CLAIM: Files released by the FBI prove that Adolf Hitler escaped Germany for Argentina.

RATING: False

In May 2016, a web site called AnonHQ published a shocking story about Adolf Hitler: apparently the FBI had finally admitted, at long last, that the Nazi leader had not only fled to South America at the end of World War II, but that he had lived out his last years there in peace before finally dying of old age:

The FBI.gov website reveals the government knew Hitler was alive and well, and living in the Andes Mountains long after World War II had ended.

The world has been told for the last 70 years that on April 30 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker. His body was discovered and identified by the Soviets before being taken back to Russia. Is it possible that the Soviets lied all this time, and that history was rewritten?

With the release of these FBI documents, it certainly seems that the most notorious leader in history escaped Germany and lived a peaceful life in the foothills of the Andes Mountains in South America.

The story was permeated with links to official-looking documents and other stories, giving it a convincingly authoritative sheen. However, the links that led to the most “damning” FBI pages turned up a collection of letters, newspaper clippings, and first-, second-, and third-hand accounts that had been gathered over a period of several years after the end of World War II.

The first letter in the collection referred to a man who contacted the now-defunct Los Angeles Examiner through a friend of a friend, claiming to have proof of Hitler’s dramatic escape by submarine (the names in the scanned documents were blacked out):

[Redacted] disclosed to [redacted] that he wished to find some high government official who would guarantee him immunity from being sent back to Argentina if he told him the following information. According to [redacted] he was one of four men who met HITLER and his party when they landed from two submarines in Argentina approximately two and one-half weeks after the fall of Berlin….

[Redacted] maintains that he can name the six Argentine officials and also the names of the three other men who helped HITLER inland to his hiding place. [Redacted] explained that he was given $15,000 for helping in the deal. [Redacted] explained to [redacted] that he was hiding out in the United States now so that he could tell later how he got out of Argentina.

Alas, when the reporter tried to follow up with the source, he was unable to find him again. Additionally, police and Immigration and Naturalization Services were unable to match the man’s name with any records. The existence of this document in FBI records demonstrates nothing beyond the fact that the agency was obligated to follow up all such leads reported to them in the immediate post-war era, no matter how far-fetched they might seem.

Another site turned up a purported photograph of Hitler (by then supposedly calling himself Adolf Liepzig, because apparently he didn’t have the wherewithal to figure out that he should use a different name) posing with his girlfriend (supposedly named “Cutinga”) not long before he died of old age in 1986:

Of course, the photograph is old and grainy, making it impossible to identify any significant facial features of the persons pictured in it. However, the picture is taken as solid evidence of Hitler’s escape by Simoni Renee Guerrerio Dias, a student from Brazil who coincidentally discovered the photograph at around the same time she was trying to sell her book about Hitler.

Other documents recorded reports of similar sightings that all ultimately led to dead ends, and the collection demonstrates that the FBI actively investigated such leads for several years. Of course, the fact that the agency never turned up anything isn’t taken as evidence that there was nothing to find by the most conspiracy-minded denizens of the internet, but rather that the FBI was complicit in Hitler’s escape:

Even with a detailed physical description and directions the FBI still did not follow up on these new leads. Even with evidence placing the German sub U-530 on the Argentinian coast shortly before finally surrounding, and plenty of eye witness accounts of German official being dropped off, no one investigated.

Although there is nothing to be found in the AnonHQ article or the FBI files that comes close to contradicting the standard understanding that Hitler died by his own hand in his Berlin bunker in the closing days of World War II, these documents do highlight the fact that the types of people who forward patently fake e-mails or write hoax articles just to garner web traffic have indubitably existed in one form or another since at least the 1940s.