TBR News December 3, 2018
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8
Washington, D.C. December 3, 2018: “For some time, B.A.E. Systems has been running a series of classified, intelligence system for various American agencies, such as the CIA. BAE is a British company based at Farnborough, UK, which has extensive worldwide interests, particularly in North America through its subsidiary BAE Systems Inc. BAE was formed on 30th November 1999 with the merger of British Aerospace (BAe) and Marconi Electronic Systems (MES), the defence arm of The General Electric Company (GEC). The run a so-called “Covert Communications” network that is a highly classified blog that acts as a forum for agencies and individual employees to communicate and share information. Since 2005, over a thousand of such blogs have been instituted.
B.A.E. Systems, which runs the CIA’s blog that is hosted on IntelLINK. This has an information technology contract with the C.I.A. The IntelLINK intelligence network links information in the various classified databases of the US intelligence agencies (e.g. FBI, CIA, DEA, NSA, USSS, NRO) to facilitate communication and the sharing of documents and other resources.
There is also the ncr.disa.mil system. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) was established in Washington, D.C., as the Defense Communications Agency (DCA) with 450 employees on May 12, 1960, by Secretary of Defense Thomas B. Gates. Its mission was to manage the Defense Communications System (DCS), a consolidation of the independent long-haul communications functions of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Unfortunately for the security of this massive intrusion program, the United States has made the colossal error of informing their opposite intelligence numbers in Israel with the result that while we were sharing requested information with Israeli Intelligence, they, in turn were initiating their very own program directed against the United States. The following American financial institutions have been the subject of on-going Israeli surveillance:
- CHIPS: Clearing House Interbank Payments System
100 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004 (212) 613-0188
http://www.chips.org/home.php
CHIPS: Clearing House Interbank Payments System. An interbank payment system related to international trade, CHIPS is used for the transfer of international trade dollars. CHIPS is used by both Fedwire and S.W.I.F.T.
FEDWIRE: Operated by the Federal Reserve Board of the USA
http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedwire/
ACH: Automated Clearing House of the Federal Reserve Bank of NY
http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed31.html
The Table of Contents
- Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 96
- Trump’s Enemies review: president’s pitbulls come out brawling and bawling
- Trump’s Trade Czar, The Latest Architect of Imperial Disaster
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 96
August 8, 2018
by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief
The Toronto Star, Canada
The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected
If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.
Last updated: Aug 8, 2018
- Aug 1, 2018
“How about chain migration? One person comes in and you end up with 32 people. The person that ran down 18 people on the West Side Highway, he’s allowed to have — and I think eight died. He has 22 members of his family in the United States because of chain migration.”
Source: Interview with Rush Limbaugh
in fact: There is no evidence that Sayfullo Saipov, the alleged perpetrator of the terror attack in 2017 on Manhattan’s West Side Highway, brought 22 relatives into the U.S. Even Trump’s own aides have declined to endorse this claim, and even anti-immigration advocates say it is wildly improbable that one man with a green card could have sponsored 22 people.
Trump has repeated this claim 6 times
“And then you have the visa lottery. It’s a lottery system where you pick people out of a lottery. Well, the countries aren’t giving us their best people. They’re giving us people that they don’t want. So we’re taking people out of a lottery that the country doesn’t want. We’re getting some beauties.”
Source: Interview with Rush Limbaugh
in fact: This is, as usual, a comprehensively inaccurate description of the U.S. green card lottery. Foreign governments are not “giving” people to the lottery to rid their countries of bad apples; individuals apply of their own free will, because they want to immigrate.
Trump has repeated this claim 21 times
“And the other thing is the wall. We’ve started it.”
Source: Interview with Rush Limbaugh
in fact: Construction on Trump’s border wall has not started. When he has made this claim in the past, Trump has appeared to be referring to a project in which a 2.25-mile stretch of existing wall in California is being replaced by a taller wall. That project was proposed in 2009, and the Los Angeles Times reported that Border Patrol spokesperson Jonathan Pacheco told reporters in March: “First and foremost, this isn’t Trump’s wall. This isn’t the infrastructure that Trump is trying to bring in. … This new wall replacement has absolutely nothing to do with the prototypes that were shown over in the San Diego area.” The $1.6 billion Congress allocated to border projects in 2018 is not for the type of giant concrete wall Trump has proposed: spending on that kind of wall is expressly prohibited in the legislation, and much of the congressional allocation is for replacement and reinforcement projects rather than new construction.
Trump has repeated this claim 20 times
“But still, I have just about ended Obamacare.”
Source: Interview with Rush Limbaugh
in fact: Trump has weakened Obamacare in several ways, most notably by eliminating the “individual mandate” that required people to obtain health insurance, but the law is far from dead. Trump did not eliminate Obamacare’s expansion of the Medicaid insurance program for low-income people, the federal and state Obamacare marketplaces that allow other uninsured people to buy insurance, or the subsidies that help many of them make the purchases. Nor did he touch various Obamacare rules for the insurance market, like its prohibition on insurers.
Trump has repeated this claim 11 times
“We had Obamacare repealed and replaced, and a man — I won’t mention his name. But a man at 2 o’clock in the morning went thumbs down, and he campaigned for years on repeal and replace. We had the chance. Nobody even spoke to him about it, because it was something that was unthinkable what he did, and because of that…But that was very disappointing to me that night — and he did it because of me, probably. But that was very disappointing. That was a horrible thing he did to our country. And, frankly, it cost $1 trillion because we would have saved $1 trillion, on top of which we would have had good health care. But we’re doing it a different way. We have to go a different route. But he cost us a trillion dollars.”
Source: Interview with Rush Limbaugh
in fact: Sen. John McCain’s vote against Trump’s plan to replace Obamacare did not cost the country $1 trillion. As the Washington Post noted: “Trump’s estimate is way off. The Senate bill to repeal and replace Obamacare that Trump is talking about would have reduced the deficit by a net $321 billion over 10 years, according to a joint analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation.”
Trump has repeated this claim 4 times
“Like last night in Florida with that, you know, really massive crowd, you see the happiness and the love — and nobody left. It’s like you. Nobody turns off your show. It’s like you can’t. Nobody leaves. You know, I’ll speak for an hour and 10 minutes, hour and 20 minutes. There wasn’t a person that left that room. It was just…it was an absolute lovefest.”
Source: Interview with Rush Limbaugh
in fact: As usual, some people in Trump’s Tampa crowd left before he was done speaking, though we do not know how many. Journalist Jeb Lund specifically mentioned these people in his article on the rally for Vice: “Even the Trump fans understand that inside is boring. The rear corners of arena seating never fill; a standing room large enough to accommodate the crowd outside five times over remains empty. Fifteen minutes in, people start to exit, because this speech is like all the rest of them. A cheerful bearded man in a USA replica baseball jersey and Trump socks stops on the way out to explain to me why he’s leaving and gives the same answer as everyone else: ‘To beat the traffic.'”
“And, you know, you look at the job numbers…Asian, women, best ever.”
Source: Interview with Rush Limbaugh
in fact: The most recent unemployment rate for women at the time Trump spoke, for June, was 4.0 per cent, not even close to the “best ever.” The women’s unemployment rate was lower, 3.8 per cent, just 18 years prior. It was 2.7 per cent in May 1953.
Trump has repeated this claim 14 times
“And, you know, you look at the job numbers…Asian, women, best ever.”
Source: Interview with Rush Limbaugh
in fact: The most recent unemployment rate for Asian-Americans at the time Trump spoke, for June, was 3.2 per cent. This was higher than the rate in Obama’s last two full months in office: 3 per cent in November 2016 and 2.8 per cent in December 2016. The Asian-American unemployment rate was also lower than 3.2 per cent in multiple months of George W. Bush’s second term.
Trump has repeated this claim 9 times
“Soybeans, five years before the election, was cut in half! The price was cut in half.”
Source: Interview with Rush Limbaugh
in fact: We’ve let some of Trump’s previous claims about an Obama-era drop in soybean prices slide, but in this case he is inaccurately describing what happened between two specific dates. Between Nov. 8, 2011, five years before election day, and Nov. 8, 2016, soybean prices dropped 16 per cent, from about $12 per bushel to about $10 per bushel, according to historical data from Markets Insider and from Macrotrends.
Trump has repeated this claim 2 times
“Well, I love these people. And, you know, you probably saw last night I was in Florida and we had 9,000 seats in the auditorium. That was packed, and we had thousands outside and in these rooms all over the place. I guess they had at least 15,000, 18,000 people that couldn’t get in last night — which I hate.”
Source: Interview with Rush Limbaugh
in fact: Though some supporters were indeed turned away at the door, journalists who covered this Tampa rally tell us that “15,000, 18,000” is a gross exaggeration. A Tampa Bay Times report said “hundreds” remained outside the building during the speech. The News-Press of Fort Myers, Florida said 4,000 people watched the speech from an overflow room.
“Well, one of the big things we’ve done is the Johnson Amendment. You know, you’re free to do what you want to do now. You couldn’t — you couldn’t talk because you were afraid of a lot of bad repercussion. And we — as you know, we’ve taken that off. That’s a bad — that was a bad thing. That was a bad thing that Lyndon Johnson did a long time ago. He had to have a lot of power to get it done, but you now are free to say what you want. And when you want to support somebody, you support that. It doesn’t have to be me. Of course, I hope it’s me. But you’re free. You know, you’re the people that we respect. And you were really not able to say what was on your mind. And we want you to say what was on your mind and what is on your mind. So I think getting rid of that is a big, big factor. And at some point in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to put it through Congress. In addition to just an executive order, we’re going to put it through Congress. We’re going to get rid of it permanently because it should not be here. OK? We’re going to work on that. Thank you.”
Source: Roundtable with inner-city pastors
in fact: Immediately after boasting of “getting rid of” the Johnson Amendment, Trump acknowledged that he had not actually gotten rid of it, saying, “And at some point in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to put it through Congress.” As some Christian leaders and religion-policy experts have pointed out, his 2017 executive order did not eliminate the amendment (which prohibits churches from endorsing or opposing political candidates). The executive order merely says the Treasury Department will, “to the extent permitted by law,” not impose a tax penalty on a person or religious organization who “speaks or has spoken about moral or political issues from a religious perspective.” The government almost never imposed such penalties even before the order, and such a directive is far from complete repeal. “Trump’s Religious Liberty Order Doesn’t Answer Most Evangelicals’ Prayers; Prayer breakfast pledge to ‘totally destroy’ Johnson Amendment comes up shy,” read the headline on the website Christianity Today.
Trump has repeated this claim 4 times
“Nucor, just yesterday, opening a big one (plant) — a brand-new one — $250 million in Florida.”
Source: Roundtable with inner-city pastors
in fact: Nucor is building a rebar micro mill in Florida — but it announced this $240 million investment in March, not “yesterday.” Trump has a habit of moving up the date of good news to make it sound more recent.
“United States Steel just announced another two plants. They’re up to eight.”
Source: Roundtable with inner-city pastors
in fact: Trump initially lied that U.S. Steel was opening “six” new plants, then lied that it was “seven.” This was the first time he upped the lie-ante to “eight.” At the time he spoke here, U.S. Steel had only announced a major development at one facility since Trump introduced his steel tariffs: it said it was restarting two shuttered blast furnaces at its plant in Granite City, Illinois. Chuck Bradford, an industry analyst who follows U.S. Steel, said he was “not aware” of the company opening any other facilities. U.S. Steel told the Washington Post: “To answer your question, we post all of our major operational announcements to our website and report them on earnings calls. Our most recent one pertained to our Granite City ‘A’ blast furnace restart.”
Trump has repeated this claim 13 times
“African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates have reached the lowest levels in recorded history…Women also — 66 years.”
Source: Roundtable with inner-city pastors
in fact: Trump is correct about African-American and Hispanic unemployment, at least since data for these groups started being released in the 1970s, but not about women. This claim about women was close to true as of the previous month: the women’s unemployment rate for May, reported in June, was 3.6 per cent, the same as in 1953, 65 years prior. But it rose to 4 per cent in June, which was merely the lowest since 2017 — or, if you’re only counting pre-Trump years, the lowest since 2000, 18 years prior.
Trump has repeated this claim 14 times
“African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates have reached the lowest levels in recorded history, meaning history — the lowest levels ever. African-American and Hispanic. Asian also.”
Source: Roundtable with inner-city pastors
in fact: Trump is correct about African-American and Hispanic unemployment, at least since data for these groups started being released in the 1970s, but he is wrong about Asian unemployment. The most recent unemployment rate for Asian-Americans at the time Trump spoke, for June, was 3.2 per cent. This was higher than the rate in Obama’s last two full months in office: 3 per cent in November 2016 and 2.8 per cent in December 2016. The Asian-American unemployment rate was also lower than 3.2 per cent in multiple months of George W. Bush’s second term.
Trump has repeated this claim 9 times
“The Democrats paid for the phony and discredited Dossier which was, along with Comey, McCabe, Strzok and his lover, the lovely Lisa Page, used to begin the Witch Hunt. Disgraceful!”
Source: Twitter
in fact: The research dossier produced by former British spy Christopher Steele, which described alleged connections between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, was not the impetus for the launch of the FBI investigation Trump describes as “the witch hunt.” In fact, the Trump-endorsed memo produced by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican, confirmed that the FBI began the probe after receiving information that Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia had obtained damaging information on Clinton, before this was publicly known. “The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016,” the Nunes memo says.
Trump has repeated this claim 5 times
Trump’s Enemies review: president’s pitbulls come out brawling and bawling
Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie are snarling Trump ultras, determined to boost their belligerent ex-boss
December 3, 2018
by Lloyd Green
The Guardian
Autumn can be the cruellest season. On election day, a coalition of suburbanites, college graduates, minorities and millennials battered the president and his party. Three weeks later, neo-Confederate Cindy Hyde-Smith could only eke out a single-digit win in Mississippi, the heart of Dixie, once home to Jefferson Davis, John Stennis and James Eastland. Meanwhile, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation haunts the White House like Banquo’s ghost, and Donald Trump’s disapproval rating has again climbed above 60%.
Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie do not fault Trump for his myriad woes. Instead, Lewandowski, who preceded convicted felon Paul Manafort at the helm of the Trump campaign, and Bossie, who was deputy campaign manager, lay the blame for the president’s problems at the feet of those who oppose or otherwise fail to embrace him.
Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency, Lewandowski and Bossie’s second co-authored book, is a full-throated defense of the president. Unquestioning in their devotion to Trump and unsparing in their critiques of those who challenge their ex-boss, Lewandowski and Bossie provide a window into Trump World and an alternative narrative of how the president became so despised so soon.
As 2020 approaches, Trump’s Enemies is a preview of what to expect. These days, Lewandowski hangs his hat at Vice-President Mike Pence’s political action committee, among other places. Bossie is at the Citizens United political action committee. For all intents and purposes, the two are part of Trump’s messaging machine and campaign apparatus. Indeed, their interview with Trump is the book’s centerpiece.
In their telling, Trump’s travails are unrelated to his mien, his relentless embrace of “modern-presidential” or his disregard of what normal used to look like. Likewise, they hold the president blameless for his refusal to make even the slightest effort to co-opt the political center.
Taking their cues from Trump, grievance and resentment are the operative coins of their realm. If only those surrounding the president “let Trump be Trump”, if only the globalists inside the castle walls would vanish, if only the mainstream press would serve as an administration echo chamber. If only.
Without any sense of irony, the authors write of Trump delaying his appearance at a rally for 15 minutes “out of respect” for the “solemn” funeral procession of John McCain. Think of Trump as Richard Nixon, but devoid of the capacity to woo his adversaries for more than a single news cycle or to put country before self.
Lewandowski and Bossie extol Trump for the stock market’s highs, and thank him for bringing “a big, polished set of balls back to American foreign policy”. Looking at the stock market and America’s trade wars, the president comments favorably upon the Dow’s performance and notes: “Shows you how bad tariffs are, right?”
To be sure, all that was before General Motors announced that it planned to fire 15% of its workforce, including 6,700 factory workers, and shutter plants in Ohio and Michigan – states that voted for Barack Obama then went for Trump in 2016. Not surprisingly, Trump, Lewandowski and Bossie have little to say about the economy slowing down and America’s markets coming to mirror the turbulence of its politics.
Instead, the authors aim their firepower at the intelligence community, the Steele dossier, James Comey and Robert Mueller. Lewandowski and Bossie repeatedly reiterate Trump’s mantra of “no collusion”, embrace Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos as victims, not criminals, and denounce the Fisa court for a lack of due process. Synchronously, the book and Trump’s written answers to the special counsel dropped just days before former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about Trump and Russia.
Not surprisingly, Lewandowski and Bossie fail to explain why “lock her up” remains a suitable fate for Hillary Clinton in the absence of any charge or trial, and are silent about Trump relying upon WikiLeaks as a campaign adjunct. Indeed, for all the swirl and speculation that surrounds Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi, it was the candidate who shouted “I love WikiLeaks”. Consistency can be a nuisance.
As to be expected, Trump’s Enemies catalogs a litany of foes and sins, real and imagined. Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris, Jeff Flake and Bob Corker are name-checked, as are Democrats on the House intelligence committee. But the book also savages those ostensibly in Trump’s corner. Lewandowski and Bossie give Sean Spicer a beatdown and pummel Manafort, tagging him as a “grifter” and a “rat”.
The pair also accuse Gen John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, of wrongly treating their hero as a “tiger” that needs to be caged. And they go after Gary Cohn – Trump’s former senior economic adviser by way of Goldman Sachs who dared to denounce the far-right in Charlottesville and Trump’s tariffs – as a “dark force”, a globalist and a “limousine liberal”. No dog whistle there.
For good measure, the authors personalize the personal as they tear into Rob Porter, the disgraced White House staff secretary who was romantically linked to Hope Hicks, the former director of communications. Left unstated by Lewandowski is his own purported nexus to Hicks, a former model whom Trump reportedly referred to “the best piece of tail”, Lewandowski would ever have, according to Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s kiss-and-tell.
Trump’s Enemies contains the likely themes of Trump’s re-election bid. Although Lewandowski was forced out of the 2016 campaign, he was not banished from the kingdom. Despite his reported scuffle with Kelly within the White House, there is no indication Trump will stop talking with Lewandowski any time soon.
Nor should he. Trump is the one president who has never won, for even a moment, the approval of a majority of Americans. Like the authors, he is a brawler. The upcoming presidential race will be a war for the ages.
Trump’s Trade Czar, The Latest Architect of Imperial Disaster
Five Academics Who Unleashed the “Demon” of Geopolitical Power
by Alfred W. McCoy
Tom Dispatch
As Washington’s leadership fades more quickly than anyone could have imagined and a new global order struggles to take shape, a generation of leaders has crowded onto the world stage with their own bold geopolitical visions for winning international influence. Xi Xinping has launched his trillion-dollar “Belt and Road Initiative” to dominate Eurasia and thereby the world beyond. To recover the Soviet Union’s lost influence, Vladimir Putin seeks to shatter the Western alliance with cyberwar, while threatening to dominate a nationalizing, fragmenting Eastern Europe through raw military power. The Trump White House, in turn, is wielding tariffs as weapons to try to beat recalcitrant allies back into line and cripple the planet’s rising power, China. However bizarrely different these approaches may seem, they all share one strikingly similar feature: a reliance on the concept of “geopolitics” to guide their bids for global power.
Over the past century, countless scholars, columnists, and commentators have employed the term “geopolitics” (or the study of global control) to lend gravitas to their arguments. Few, though, have grasped the true significance of this elusive concept. However else the term might be used, geopolitics is essentially a methodology for the management (or mismanagement) of empire. Unlike conventional nations whose peoples are, in normal times, readily and efficiently mobilized for self-defense, empires, thanks to their global reach, are a surprisingly fragile form of government. They seem to yearn for strategic visionaries who can merge land, peoples, and resources into a sustainable global system.
The practice of geopolitics, even if once conducted from horseback, is as old as empire itself, dating back some 4,000 years. Until the dawn of the twentieth century, it was the conquerors themselves — from Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte — whose geopolitical visions guided the relentless expansion of their imperial domains. The ancient Greek historian Plutarch tried to capture (or perhaps exaggerate) the enormity of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul — a territory that comprises all of modern France and Belgium — by enumerating the nine years of war that “took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred tribes, and fought pitched battles… with three million men, of whom he slew one million… and took as many more prisoners.”
In his own account, however, Caesar reduced all of this to its geopolitical essentials. “All Gaul is divided into three parts,” he wrote in that famous first sentence of his Gallic Wars. “Of all these, the Belgae are the bravest, because… they are the nearest to the Germans, who dwell beyond the Rhine, with whom they are continually waging war; for which reason the Helvetii also surpass the rest of the Gauls in valor, as they contend with the Germans in almost daily battles.” When those formidable Helvetii marched out of their Alpine cantons to occupy Gallic lowlands in 58 BC, Caesar deployed geopolitics to defeat them — seizing strategic terrain, controlling their grain supplies, and manipulating rival tribes. Instead of enslaving the vanquished Helvetii as other Roman generals might have, Caesar, mindful of the empire’s geopolitical balance, returned them to their homelands with generous provisions, lest the German “barbarians” cross the Rhine and destabilize Gaul’s natural frontier.
In more modern times, imperial expansion has been guided by professional scholars who have made the formal study of geopolitics a hybrid field of some significance. Its intellectual lineage is actually remarkably straightforward. At the end of the nineteenth century, an American naval historian argued that seapower was the key to national security and international influence. A decade later, a British geographer observed that railroads had shifted the locus of global power landward into the interior of the vast Eurasian continent. In the succeeding century, a succession of scholars would draw on these two basic ideas to inspire bold geopolitical gambits by Nazi Germany, Cold War Washington, post-Soviet Russia, and even Donald Trump’s White House.
There is, in fact, a common thread in those disparate scholarly lives: in each case, the study of geopolitics seemed to change the trajectory of their careers, lifting them from the margins of society to the right hand of power. There, at moments when the empire they lived in was experiencing a crisis, their unconventional, even eccentric, ideas won influence — often in what would prove in the long term a nightmarish fashion.
Over the last century or so, while the actual application of such thinking regularly proved problematic at best and genuinely horrific at worst, geopolitics would remain a seductive concept with a persistent power to entice would-be practitioners. It would also prove an enormously elusive style of thinking, making it difficult to distinguish between the banal and the brilliant, between the imperially helpful and the imperially devastating.
Charting the interplay of land, people, and resources inside any empire, much less in a clash between such behemoths, is impossibly difficult. Admittedly, geopolitics in the hands of a grandmaster has, in the past, led to the crushing of armies and the conquest of continents. But seemingly similar strategies have also produced searing defeat and disaster. Caesar’s deft geopolitical balancing of Gaul and Germany on the fulcrum of the Rhine survived for some four centuries; Napoleon’s similar attempt lasted all of seven years.
Telling the difference, in the historical moment, is a daunting task and one that hasn’t turned out well in the last century. With that in mind, let’s now approach the careers of five modern “grandmasters” of geopolitics with an appropriate skepticism.
America’s Strategic Visionary
In 1890, as the industrial boom of the Gilded Age prepared the nation for a debut on the world stage, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, arguably America’s only original strategic thinker, published his famed Influence of Seapower Upon History. In it, he argued that naval power was the determining factor in the fate of nations. Born at West Point, where his father taught military tactics to Army cadets, Mahan came to the study of strategy almost by birthright. After graduating from the Naval Academy and having an indifferent career at sea, he became the head of the Naval War College in 1886. There, he developed novel geopolitical ideas that would revive a stalled career.
By analyzing sea power through a wide range of factors, including the defensibility of ports, national technological prowess, and the nature of good government, Mahan would produce the first serious study of geopolitics in the guise of a guide to naval strategy. In the process, he became an international celebrity, influencing admirals from London to Tokyo and inspiring leaders worldwide to join a naval arms race that would drain their treasuries to build costly battleships. The admiral who headed Germany’s navy, for instance, distributed 8,000 copies of Mahan’s history in translation and in the process won passage of the country’s first naval bill in 1898, funding his fateful challenge to British sea power.
As Europe’s empires continued to spread globally in the 1890s, Mahan’s prolific prose persuaded Washington that national defense required the creation of a genuine blue-water navy and bases in both the Caribbean and the Pacific. So important were such bases for the nation’s defense that, as Mahan gravely concluded, “No European state should henceforth acquire a coaling position within three thousand miles of San Francisco” — a distance that encompassed the Hawaiian Islands, soon to become U.S. possessions.
Like many advocates of geopolitics to come, Mahan would use seemingly precise strategic concepts to project his country’s current position into a murky future. As his geopolitical principles took physical form after 1898, they would produce an indefensible string of bases stretching across the Pacific from Panama to the Philippines.
Following his doctrine, the Navy ordered Admiral George Dewey’s squadron to seize Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War of 1898, which he did by sinking the Spanish fleet. Within five years, however, Japan’s stunning victory over the Russian fleet in the Sea of Japan forced Washington to withdraw much of its navy from the Western Pacific. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt began building a new Pacific bastion at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, not in Manila Bay, saying that the Philippines, by then an American colony, is “our heel of Achilles.” Making matters worse, the Versailles peace settlement at the end of World War I conceded the Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific to Japan, allowing its navy to block the sea-lanes from Pearl Harbor to Manila Bay — a geopolitical reality that would doom General Douglas MacArthur’s Philippine command to a searing defeat at the start of World War II.
At that war’s end, however, Washington finally resolved this geopolitical conundrum by conquering Japan and building a chain of more than 100 bases from that country to the Philippines, making the Pacific littoral the strategic fulcrum for the defense of one continent (North America) and dominion over another (Eurasia).
Sir Halford Propagates Geopolitics
Little more than a decade after Mahan wrote his influential studies of seapower, Sir Halford Mackinder, head of the London School of Economics (LSE), published a seminal article that shifted the focus of geopolitics from sea to land. Writing in 1904, as the 5,700 miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway was still being built from Moscow to Vladivostok, Mackinder argued that future rail lines would knit Eurasia into a unitary landmass that he dubbed “the world island.” When that day came, Russia, perhaps in alliance with another land power like Germany, could control Eurasia’s sprawling “heartland,” allowing “the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would be in sight.”
This path-breaking analysis came at a fortuitous time in Mackinder’s academic career. After teaching geography at Oxford for 10 years, he had failed to win a professorship and his marriage collapsed. At this low ebb in his life, he tried to establish himself as an exploratory geographer by making the first recorded ascent of Mount Kenya. Using the “moral suasion of my Mauser” rifle to force his 170 African bearers to “obey like the faithful dogs they are,” Mackinder moved through the famine-stricken foothills leading to that mountain by extracting food from hungry villages at gunpoint. Then, in September 1899, at the cost of 10 porters shot and many more whipped for “malingering,” he traversed glaciers to reach the summit at 17,000 feet. His triumph before a cheering crowd at the Royal Geographical Society in London was, however, marred not by his treatment of those bearers but by his failure to bring back significant findings or scientific specimens.
So, in yet another career change, Mackinder joined the LSE where he produced that influential article on geopolitics. At the end of World War I, he turned it into a book that contained his most memorable maxim: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”
Mackinder’s expertise in imperial geopolitics helped launch his political career, including gaining him a seat in Parliament. In 1919, amid the turmoil of the Russian revolution, Britain was shipping arms to anti-Bolshevik forces there under General Anton Denikin. At Winston Churchill’s behest, the cabinet then appointed Mackinder as a special high commissioner for southern Russia. In a unique test of his “heartland” theory, Mackinder made an abortive attempt to rally the Czarist forces by meeting General Denikin inside his railcar in the Caucasus to propose an alliance with Poland and promise a mass evacuation in the event of defeat. Upon return to London, ignoring the general’s role in slaughtering some 100,000 Jews, Mackinder recommended recognizing his government and providing aid — advice the cabinet quickly dismissed.
From that brief moment at the apex of power, Mackinder soon fell into obscurity — losing his seat in Parliament, retiring from the LSE, and settling into a sinecure as chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee. Were it not for the surprising later appeal of his ideas in Nazi Germany and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, his name would have been largely forgotten.
The Sorcerer’s Nazi Apprentice
As the Versailles peace conference of 1919 stripped Germany of its colonial empire and placed its Rhineland frontier under foreign occupation, Karl Haushofer exchanged his general’s baton for a geography professorship at Munich University. There, he would apply Mackinder’s concepts in an attempt to assure that his fatherland would never again engage in the sort of strategic blunders that, in World War I, had led to such a humiliating defeat.
While Mackinder himself was courting the powerful in postwar London, Haushofer was teaching geopolitics to future top Nazis in Munich — first to his graduate assistant Rudolf Hess (later to become the deputy Führer), and then to Adolf Hitler himself while he was writing Mein Kampf during his incarceration at Munich’s Landsberg Prison in 1924. Both Haushofer and his son Albrecht, who would train Nazi diplomats in the geopolitics of European conquest, were later rewarded with influential positions in the Third Reich. By dressing the British don’s idea of the Eurasian heartland as the pivot of world power in the local garb of Lebensraum (or “the Greater German Reich’s dazzling ascent by war… for extension of its living space”), Haushofer helped propagate an enticing logic of expansion that would send Hitler’s army on the road to defeat.
In 1942, Hitler dispatched a million men, 10,000 artillery pieces, and 500 tanks to breach the Volga River at Stalingrad and capture Russia’s heartland for lebensraum. In the end, the Reich’s forces would suffer 850,000 casualties — killed, wounded, and captured — in a vain attempt to break through the East European rimland into the world island’s heartland.
Appalled by the attack on Russia, Haushofer’s son joined the underground’s attempt to assassinate Hitler and was imprisoned. Before he was finally shot by the SS (on the day the Allies captured Berlin), he would compose mournful sonnets about geopolitical power, which he saw metaphorically as buried deep under the sea until “my father broke the seal” and “set the demon free to roam throughout the world.” A few months later, Karl Haushofer and his Jewish wife committed suicide together when confronted with the possibility that the victorious allies might prosecute him as a senior Nazi war criminal.
The Liberator of Eastern Europe
As the United States recoiled from its searing defeat in Vietnam, Zbigniew Brzezinski, an émigré Polish aristocrat and autodidact when it came to geopolitics, went from teaching international relations in New York to being President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor in Washington. There, his risky geopolitical gambits gained an attentive audience after the Soviet Red Army invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
As an intellectual acolyte of Mackinder, Brzezinski embraced his concept of the Eurasian heartland as the “pivot” of global power. But in marked contrast to Mackinder’s failure in southern Russia in 1920, Brzezinski would prove adept at applying that geopolitician’s famous dictum on the dynamic that tied Eastern Europe to Eurasia’s heartland. (In the end, however, his Afghan moves would help give rise to Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks, and the never-ending war on terror of this century.)
Wielding a multi-billion-dollar CIA covert operation in Afghanistan like a sharpened wedge, Brzezinski drove radical Islam deep into the heart of Soviet Central Asia. In the process, he drew Moscow into a debilitating decade-long Afghan war, so weakening it that Eastern Europe would finally break free from the Soviet empire in 1989. Asked about the enormous human suffering his strategy inflicted on Afghanistan and his role in creating a militant Islam hostile to the United States, he would remain coolly unapologetic. “What is most important to the history of the world?” he responded in 1998. “The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
In retirement, Brzezinski resumed his study of Mackinder’s theory, doing a better job as an armchair analyst than he had as a presidential adviser. In a 1998 book, he warned that dominance over Eurasia remained “the central basis for global primacy.” To control that vast region, Washington, he insisted, would have to preserve its “perch on the Western periphery” of Europe and hold its string of “offshore bases” along the Pacific littoral. Should these conditions change, he predicted with some prescience, “a potential rival to America might at some point arise.”
Putin’s Geopolitical Visionary
In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a Russian rightist ideologue, Alexander Dugin, would revive Mackinder’s ideas yet again to promote expansion into Eurasia. In the process, he would become “a major influence” on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was beginning to unravel, Dugin was still moving in Moscow’s bohemian circles as a dabbler in the occult and a fringe member of the “ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic organization Pamiat.” After the Soviet collapse, he became chief ideologue for an eclectic alliance of patriotic and punk-rock groups called the New Bolshevik Party, serving as its candidate for a seat in the 1995 Duma legislative elections and winning just 1% of the vote.
At this political nadir for both him and his country, Dugin recycled Mackinder’s long-forgotten writings in a 1997 bestseller, The Foundation of Geopolitics: Russia’s Geopolitical Future. As his book moved into its fourth printing and he “became a pole star for a broad section of Russian hardliners,” he began teaching geopolitics to military officers at the General Staff Academy, later lecturing on it to elite students at Moscow State University, and anchoring Landmarks, a weekly television show on the subject. In those years, Moscow bookstores even opened special sections for geopolitics, the legislature formed a geopolitics committee, and the Russian leadership began to embrace Dugin’s vision of expansionist nationalism.
Drawing on Haushofer’s German writings, he argued that Russia should become a Eurasian bastion against “the conspiracy of ‘Atlanticism’ led by the United States and NATO… aimed at containing Russia within successive geographic rings” of the former Soviet republics. To achieve the destiny envisioned by Mackinder, Russia needed, in Dugin’s view, to dominate Eurasia — annexing Ukraine, conquering Georgia, incorporating Finland, and bringing the Balkan states (Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria) under its rule as an Orthodox “Third Rome.” To advance such ideas, Dugin founded the Eurasia Youth Union of Russia in 2005, first to serve as “human shields” to fight against the Orange revolution in Ukraine and later to counter the “degeneration” caused by American cultural influence.
For the past decade, he has been a forceful advocate for Russian expansionism. During that country’s war with Georgia in 2008, he was photographed with a rocket launcher in South Ossetia and quoted in the national press calling for its annexation. After serving as “the brains behind Vladimir Putin’s wildly popular annexation of Crimea” in March 2014, Dugin embraced the Russian minority in eastern Ukraine, prodding the Russian president to openly support their separatist militia.
While advocacy of aggressive geopolitics has given Dugin significant political influence and Putin unprecedented popularity in Russia, it is still unclear whether in the long run such expansionism, in defiance of international norms, will prove a geopolitical masterstroke or a diplomatic debacle.
The Geopolitics of Trump’s Trade War
Most recently, a dissident economist and failed California politician named Peter Navarro has parlayed his hostility toward China into the role of key architect of Donald Trump’s “trade war” against Beijing. Like his Russian counterpart Alexander Dugin, Navarro is another in a long line of intellectuals whose embrace of geopolitics changed the trajectory of his career.
Raised by a single mom who worked secretarial jobs to rent one-bedroom apartments where he slept on the couch, Navarro went to college at Tufts on a scholarship and earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard. Despite that Ivy League degree, he remained an angry outsider, denouncing the special interests “stealing America” in his first book and later, as a business professor at the University of California-Irvine, branding San Diego developers “punks in pinstripes.” A passionate environmentalist, in 1992 Navarro plunged into politics as a Democratic candidate for the mayor of San Diego, denouncing his opponent’s husband as a convicted drug-money launderer and losing when he smirked as she wept during their televised debate.
For the next 10 years, Navarro fought losing campaigns for everything from city council to Congress. He detailed his crushing defeat for a seat in the House of Representatives in a tell-all book, San Diego Confidential, that dished out disdain for that duplicitous “sell out” Bill Clinton, dumb “blue-collar detritus” voters, and just about everybody else as well.
Following his last losing campaign for city council, Navarro spent a decade churning out books attacking a new enemy: China. His first “shock and awe” jeremiad in 2006 told horror stories about that country’s foreign trade; five years later, Death By China was filled with torrid tales of “bone-crushing, cancer-causing, flammable, poisonous, and otherwise lethal products” from that land. In 2015, a third book turned to geopolitics, complete with carefully drawn maps and respectful references to Captain Mahan, to offer an analysis of how China’s military was pursuing a relentless strategy of “anti-access, area denial” to challenge the U.S. Navy’s control over the Western Pacific.
To check China, the Pentagon then had two competing strategies — “Air-Sea Battle,” in which China’s satellites were to be blinded, knocking out its missiles, and “Offshore Control,” in which China’s entire coastline was to be blockaded by mining six maritime choke points from Japan to Singapore. Both, Navarro claimed, were fatally flawed. Given that, Navarro’s third book and a companion film (endorsed by one Donald Trump) asked: What should the United States do to check Beijing’s aggression and its rise as a global power? Since all U.S. imports from China, Navarro suggested, were “helping to finance a Chinese military buildup,” the only realistic solution was “the imposition of countervailing tariffs to offset China’s unfair trade practices.”
Just a year after reaching that controversial conclusion, Navarro joined the Trump election campaign as a policy adviser and then, after the November victory, became a junior member of the White House economic team. As a protectionist in an administration initially dominated by globalists, he would be excluded from high-level meetings and, according to Time Magazine, “required to copy chief economic adviser Gary Cohn on all his emails.” By February 2018, however, Cohn was on his way out and Navarro had become assistant to the president, with his new trade office now the co-equal of the National Economic Council.
As the chief defender of Trump’s belief that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” Navarro has finally realized his own geopolitical dream of attempting to check China with tariffs. In March, the president slapped heavy ones on Chinese steel imports and, just a few weeks later, promised to impose more of them on $50 billion of imports. When those started in July, China’s leaders retaliated against what they called “typical trade bullying,” imposing similar duties on American goods. Despite a warning from the Federal Reserve chairman that “trade tensions… could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global economy,” with Navarro at his elbow, Trump escalated in September, adding tariffs on an additional $200 billion in Chinese goods and threatening another $267 billion worth if China dared retaliate. Nonetheless, Beijing hit back, this time on just $60 billion in goods since 95% of all U.S. imports had already been covered.
Then something truly surprising happened. In September, the U.S. trade deficit with China ballooned to $305 billion for the year, driven by an 8% surge in Chinese imports — a clear sign that Navarro’s bold geopolitical vision of beating Beijing into submission with tariffs had collided big time with the complexities of world trade. Whether this tariff dispute will fizzle out inconsequentially or escalate into a full-blown trade war, wreaking havoc on global supply chains and the world economy, none of us can yet know, particularly that would-be geopolitical grandmaster Peter Navarro.
The Desire to be Grandmaster of the Universe
Though such experts usually dazzle the public and the powerful alike with erudition and boldness of vision, their geopolitical moves often have troubling long-term consequences. Mahan’s plans for Pacific dominion through offshore bases created a strategic conundrum that plagued American defense policy for a half-century. Brzezinski’s geopolitical lunge at the Soviet Union’s soft Central Asian underbelly helped unleash radical Islam. Today, Alexander Dugin’s use of geopolitics to revive Russia’s dominion over Eurasia has placed Moscow on a volatile collision course with Europe and the United States. Simultaneously, Peter Navarro’s bold gambit to contain China’s military and economic push into the Pacific with a trade war could, if it persists, produce untold complications for our globalized economy.
No matter how deeply flawed such geopolitical visions may ultimately prove to be, their brief moments as official policy have regularly shaped the destiny of nations and of empires in unpredictable, unplanned, and often dangerous ways. And no matter how this current round of geopolitical gambits plays out, we can be reasonably certain that, in the not-too-distant future, another would-be grandmaster will embrace this seductive concept to guide his bold bid for global power.
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
December 3, 2018
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 publications.
Conversation No. 64
Date: Monday, February 10, 1997
Commenced: 11:02 AM CST
Concluded: 11:35 AM CST
GD: Good morning, Robert. What’s going on back there on a nice cold Monday?
RTC: Not very much, Gregory, and after a lifetime of excitement, I rather like it that way.
GD: Are you still in touch over there?
RTC: Sometimes, Gregory, sometimes. A casual conversation here, a visit there. You know how it is. Gone and soon forgotten.
GD: And no memoirs, either.
RTC: No, the code of omerta is with all of us retirees.
GD: But never having worked for your people, I have no such caveat, do I?
RTC: No, you do not.
GD: But Corson never worked for you, did he?
RTC: No, not actually. He wanted to, but he never did. He has been involved in various things but only on the periphery.
GD: People love to dream and eventually, they begin to fantasize and after those take hold, begin to lie in public and later, in print.
RTC: Cruel, Gregory, but close to the truth.
GD: Do you know what really disturbs me, Robert? I mean the CIA people who do not like me writing that the head of the Gestapo worked for them. What I find bad is their utter stupidity. I can appreciate intelligence, even if it is directed towards or against me, but when your people drag up dismal failures like Wolfe who calls himself Doctor when he isn’t, and Landreth who calls himself a television producer when he isn’t. And all the pathetic and utterly predictable kindergarten games they play, trying to lure me into some kind of a trap or to find out what documents I have from a man they claim did not exist….pathetic, Robert, really pathetic. Wolfe is a second-level librarian with delusions of literary grandeur and Landreth claims to run a television company and actually runs a wino soup kitchen in Los Angeles. Can’t Langley find someone with an IQ higher than their belt size?
RTC: Now, Gregory, you are getting loquacious again. I don’t think it’s because these people are stupid, but that you are too intelligent for your own good. Certainly for theirs. You annoy Kimmel, whose middle-class morality is offended by your callous treatment of his station in life, and Bill is terrified of you. I don’t mean he thinks you are going to lure him outside on garbage can night and split his skull with an axe, but Bill is like so many other creative liars; he’s afraid someone like you will come on the scene and expose him.
GD” I don’t do this on purpose, you know.
RTC: Oh, I think there is some malice in what you do, Gregory. I don’t find you either stupid or unkind, but you have a very active streak of destruction in your nature. Why, Gregory, bother to shoot butterflies with a rifle?
GD: Point, but then I don’t put up with these morons gladly. Now, an intelligent and creative approach might get some positive reaction from me, but all of this transparent bleating just annoys me. And after I have dispatched one with withering words or, better, making a fool out of them, why here comes another one down the path, wearing the top half of a clown suit and waving a fan. Jesus wept. You know, their reaction time is marvelous, Robert. I did the first Mueller book in ’95 and just now they are starting to leak negative stories about me. Do they sleep in refrigerators at night? Slow on the draw, Robert. In the Old West of blessed fiction, they would be full of holes. I wonder what sort of attack they will try next? There never was a Heinrich Mueller? I am really a practicing vampire? I misspelled a name once so I can’t be right about anything? Do you think some broken-down academic who teaches animal husbandry at an Arkansas community college will come forward and produce a book showing that Mueller was eaten by Stalin? They did a story like that once about Mueller living in Panama but it turned out to be a huge joke. Then some senile Czech intelligence person’s son claimed his father said Mueller was shot in Moscow. Of course, when the press tried to talk to the father, he was too far gone to do anything but wet himself.
RTC: I don’t think a book, Gregory. And after what you did to that Hungarian Jewess in London, I doubt if any reporter will dare to attack you again.
GD: Fear is a wonderful deterrent, Robert. Pick the loudest of the pack, stick a knife in them and gut them in front of everybody and the rest of the piebald apes run back to the security of the deep forest.
RTC: Well, you don’t fit the mold, Gregory. You were supposed to turn all of Mueller’s highly incriminating material over to that jerk from Time magazine and then they would be done with you. I don’t think the boobery understands that hiring General Mueller, bringing him over here and putting him to work was a very, very sensitive business. After all, FDR’s propaganda machine depicted Mueller’s Gestapo as pure evil…
GD: Which they were not…
RTC: No, just professionals. But necessary targets. And in light of the propaganda, how could we dare to hire the man who personally shoved millions of Jews into the enormous gas chambers that could have been seen from the moon? No, a very private matter indeed. That’s why Jim Critchfield is terrified of you and wants to kill you. If it ever got into the Jewish and far left community…
GD: The same thing…
RTC: Yes, and if it did, Jim would be toast. Therefore, you lie like a rug and no one should ever listen to you. Of course, given your volatile and creative personality, such jabber only gets you angrier and that results in more very ugly mischief. Not to be impudent, Gregory, but how much money have you skinned these people out of?
GD: About a hundred and ten thousand, give or take a few cents. Book advance fees, television rights, outright bribes and so on.
RTC: And what did they ever get for all the taxpayer’s money?
GD: A number ten shoe in their scrotum, Robert.
RTC: It seems that way. Well, I don’t know what their next move will be, but I have seen this all before. The usual method of dealing with people like you, aside from the convenient heart attack or car accident, is to hire worthless but hungry scribblers to submit articles to obedient newspapers, marginalizing you, misspelling your name and, in general, treating you like someone on ticket of leave from a nut house. And then on to other, more important, matters. You know, we have an entire department that invents news stories to feed to our toadies in the press in order to disguise something very bad we just pulled off. We kill the head of the UN and then start a story going about the Yeti being seen in downtown Detroit.
GD: That’s a familiar pattern. How controlled is it?
RTC: Gregory, the US government owns the press, the newspapers, the magazines and the television. They print what we tell them to and they ignore that which we wish them to ignore. We wanted to get rid of Nixon, who was becoming a loose cannon, so the press obliged by daily attacks. We kill Kennedy and suddenly, legions of conspiracy nuts emerge from under their damp rocks with tens of thousands of books filled with more shit than a Christmas turkey.
GD: Are they on the payrolls?
RTC: God no, Gregory. Most of these slime merchants are on their own and we would never dare to pay them…at least not directly. But what we do accomplish is to get their cloaking nuttiness published and distributed through our friends in the media. You know, big New York publishing house does a book that Kennedy was only shot by Oswald, number one on The New York Times book list, even though they only sold three copies, talk show babbling on friendly TV networks and on and on. And the more the literary nut fringe sees and hears others braying like donkeys in public and, very important here, getting attention, they go at it again by proving some Secret Service agent was hiding in the trunk of Kennedy’s car and shot him through the trunk lid.
GD” (Laughter)
RTC: No, don’t laugh. They’re armies of the ignorant out there who believe such crap. You know that.
GD: Yes, I do. And since we’re on the topic, how much of all this insanity is planned?
RTC: Oh, we start it, that’s for certain, but there are many who carry on the good work quite for free. Actually for free. Most of them are pathetic losers and they lust after attention…for recognition…for something other than their bleak and unrewarding existence. They become keepers of great secrets, Gregory, and smug in their inner knowledge.
GD: They delude themselves.
RTC: Yes, but they also delude the public which is often very important.
GD: Why must the CIA, or the Pentagon, or the White House, use such garbage to advance their evil ends?
RTC: I never said we didn’t need rubber gloves and Lysol, dealing with our sources, Gregory. But these twits have produced so much silly garbage about the Kennedy business that our worries are over.
GD: I recall a cartoon in Playboy. A bunch of ancient Hebrews were standing around at the base of a mountain and down the path came a man with a long beard and a little bottle in his hand. One of those below had his head turned to his neighbor and the caption said, as I recall it, ‘Our headaches are over. Here comes Moses with the tablets!’ It said Aspirin on the little bottle.
RTC: (Laughter) Naughty boy, Gregory.
GD: Here, I never did see the cartoon. I’m just commenting on it. All of this reminds me of a scenario. A small child sees a stallion mounting a mare in a pasture and points to it. ‘Mommy, what’s the big horsy doing to the little one?’ ‘Oh,’ said the shocked mother, ‘just look over there, Jimmy! See the nice donkey?’ ‘Why,’ said the entranced child, ‘what’s the donkey doing to cousin Muriel?’ Ah well, Robert, in seeking to avoid Scylla, we fall upon Charybdis.
RTC: Pardon?
GD: A classical Greek nautical problem, Robert.
Concluded at 11:35 AM CST