British Prime Minister Andy Burnham boldly accusing Russia of “interference” in the June 2016 Brexit referendum reignited largely forgotten controversy around potentially malign foreign influence on the vote’s outcome. Over many years, intelligence-adjacent media players including Carole Cadwalladr built careers promoting and probing this allegation, raising hopes among EU supporters of overturning the result, only to uncover nothing of substance. By contrast, potentially impactful, likely illegal and self-evidently sinister meddling linked to Saudi Arabia today remains unknown, uninvestigated, and unpunished.

From February 2017, openDemocracy began publishing explosive investigations exposing how a shadowy political campaign group donated an extraordinary £425,000 to Occupied Ireland’s pro-Brexit Democratic Unionist Party, with the vast sum spent on ‘Leave’ campaigning efforts across the ‘mainland’. Loopholes in British electoral law permitted the cross-Channel propaganda blitz, while Occupied Ireland’s own allowed for anonymous donations. Only in response to enquiries by openDemocracy did the DUP admit its dark money source was the hitherto obscure Constitutional Research Council.

CRC had no website or internet footprint, wasn’t registered as a company or charity anywhere, and who and/or what ran and funded the enterprise was unknown. Scottish politician Richard Cook, former Conservative Friends of Israel representative, told openDemocracy he led CRC, claiming it bankrolled “constitutional pro-Union causes.” The DUP’s Leave campaigning was one example, a post-referendum personal donation to then-Brexit minister Steve Baker another. In 2013, Cook founded Five Star Investment Management with Prince Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz.

Registered at Cook’s Glasgow home, CRC never filed accounts and was dissolved in December 2014, nine months before Abdulaziz’s death. He led Riyadh’s General Intelligence Directorate, intimately linked to 9/11 as a CIA “proxy”, September 1st 2001 - January 2005. His eldest, megayatch-owning son Mohammed bin Nawwaf served as Saudi Arabia’s British ambassador January 2005 - December 2018. Wealthy Saudis, including many members of the country’s ruling dynasty, had much to gain from Britain leaving the EU.

For one, it was openly reported Gulf investors were planning to exploit an inevitable post-Brexit collapse in the pound’s international value to bulk purchase British real estate and commercial assets at unprecedented discounts. Riyadh moreover well-understood London’s pursuit of deepening economic, military and political ties with non-European allies could produce favourable trade deals, while chilling condemnations of human rights abuses. Then as now, Saudi Arabia was leading a genocidal assault on Yemen, with legal battles against Britain’s integral material sponsorship of the conflict ongoing.

As ambassador to London, it’s inconceivable Abdulaziz’s son was not simultaneously involved in intimate, high-level discussions with British officials about their future relations on every score. Following Theresa May’s installation in Downing Street in the referendum’s aftermath, she and other key ministers began prominently meeting representatives of authoritarian regimes, seeking increased investment and offering expanded arms sales, under the bombastic banner of “Global Britain”. In London’s neoimperial post-Brexit world vision, Saudi Arabia loomed large.

‘Competitive Age’

In all, 56% of Occupied Ireland voted ‘Remain’. However, only £10,000 of the DUP’s £425,000 dark money campaigning budget - the largest political donation in Occupied Ireland’s history - was targeted locally. The rest was spent across Britain, financing sponsored social media posts, Leave-themed garments, and a variety of display adverts, including lavish wraparound ads in a widely-read London freesheet newspaper two days before the referendum. Serendipitously, the DUP’s spending spree commenced at a highly sensitive juncture for the wider Leave effort.

Two months prior to the referendum, Matthew Eliot, chief executive of Vote Leave - the official cross-party pro-Brexit campaign - wrote excitedly in an email to his senior staffers that the DUP had a £700,000 referendum spending limit, “which can be spent nationwide!” At that point, the DUP hadn’t even formally registered as a referendum participant. The party did so in late May 2016, and began spending with the plebiscite two weeks away - right when Vote Leave had almost maxed out its permitted campaign budget.

The DUP seemingly assisted Vote Leave in circumventing election spending limits, and thus British law, although both denied the charge. Funding of the respective Brexit campaigns almost precisely mirrored the referendum’s result, with 54% of donations flowing to Leave versus 52% of the vote. While Vote Leave and Leave.EU were later both fined for campaign finance breaches, in May 2017 the Electoral Commission declined to investigate CRC’s donation to the DUP. The investigations of openDemocracy also didn’t register at all in British newspapers.

Having to pay the sum back would’ve bankrupted the DUP. However, after Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority in the June 2017 General Election, she cut a “confidence and supply” deal with the party to hang onto power. A lack of political will to probe the DUP’s blatant dark money meddling in the Brexit referendum, with apparent Saudi involvement, was assured. Fittingly, the Prime Minister inaugurated triggering Article 50 - the legal mechanism by which member states can leave the EU - with high-profile trade talks in Riyadh.

Were the House of Saud in any way responsible for compelling Britain’s departure from the EU, it was a cloak-and-dagger gamble that spectacularly backfired for all concerned. Neoimperial illusions unleashed by the June 2016 referendum reached their pinnacle with the much-hyped March 2021 ‘Integrated Review’. It signalled a comprehensive overhaul of London’s “security, defence, development and foreign policy.” Titled “Global Britain in a competitive age,” the document outlined a comprehensive strategy by which the country would reclaim its superpower status post-Brexit.

Britain’s “thriving relationships in the Middle East and the Gulf,” especially with Saudi Arabia, were to be intensified, and leveraged as part of a wider impending push into the Asia Pacific. Meanwhile, the Integrated Review called for London to “deploy more of our naval assets across the world to protect shipping lanes and uphold freedom of navigation.” It boasted how the Royal Navy would “continue to ensure the flow of trade in the Gulf” from HMS Juffair, Britain’s Bahraini naval base.

‘Years Ahead’

Fast forward to this January however, and London quietly withdrew its last ship from HMS Juffair, effectively abandoning the installation with no apparent intent or ability to return after 46 years, ending permanent British military presence in the Gulf dating back centuries. This occupation assisted Saudi Arabia’s very creation, and British power projection through the Gulf and West Asia more widely. Now though, London lacks meaningful influence in the ever-increasingly volatile region, raising obvious questions about the longevity of its local proxies and puppets.

This impotence can be traced directly to a geopolitical convulsion well-beyond Britain’s control, far more revolutionary than Brexit. In late August 2021, the US finally departed Afghanistan. Over preceding weeks, British officials desperately pleaded with Washington to reverse course, and even considered maintaining Kabul’s occupation by leading an alternative ‘coalition of the willing’ of their own. Their fantasies shattered upon first contact with reality, forcing London to reconsider its neoimperial delusions in every area. A “furious” British minister reportedly remarked privately:

The Integrated Review was duly withdrawn, and a formal “Refresh” published in March 2023, radically dampening its original ambition. Gone was deranged discussion of China as a “strategic competitor”, and London’s intended Asia Pacific “tilt”. Saudi Arabia was briefly mentioned twice, in the context of supporting London’s “future energy security.” The Gulf generally barely featured, save for vague references to the allegedly “rapid increase in the depth and quality” of Britain’s ties with the region since 2021, forecast to further strengthen “in the years ahead.”

Again, events quickly intervened to sabotage even this much-reduced vision. The Gaza genocide and all that followed has placed the West on a war footing with the Resistance, in which militarily irrelevant Britain can barely manage a walk-on role. Meanwhile, Riyadh’s existence hangs precariously in the balance. In keeping with chaos theory, the litany of catastrophe and misguided hubris that dragged Britain and its Saudi client to this sorry state could lead back to a dark money donation to the DUP, over a decade ago.

After 23 years, US-led occupation forces are formally leaving Iraq. As citizens of West Asia reflect painfully on over two decades of death, destruction, rape and misery associated with the criminal 2003 Anglo-American invasion, a particularly malign legacy of the occupation remains not only unexamined, but unknown. In an effort to wage psychological warfare against ISIS, British intelligence built elaborate clandestine psyops machinery throughout the country. Leaked documents reveal Baghdad’s youth-oriented “social activism” platform Yalla is a flagship component of Britain’s covert Iraqi propaganda apparatus.

Ostensibly launched by young local journalists in 2015, Yalla is one of Baghdad’s largest news and social media platforms, boasting millions of followers within the country and wider region. Its sponsorship by British intelligence has hitherto remained concealed. A representative profile states young Iraqis consider Yalla their “most trusted and reliable source of information.” In a perverse irony, repeated reference is made to how Yalla “differs from other Iraqi media platforms” by being editorially and financially independent, and the challenges this supposed autonomy poses:

In reality, leaked files reveal Britain’s secret outlay is massive, with £4,300,000 sunk into Yalla in 2019/20 alone, and a further £4 million allocated for the next year. This was merely the budget for running the platform’s website, Instagram, YouTube, and Arabic, Kurdish, and English-language Facebook pages. Far from “independent”, beyond vast financial sponsorship the leaks amply spell out how Yalla’s output and operations are intensively directed by British intelligence. Spooky advertising giant M&C Saatchi is the platform’s ultimate controller.

In submissions to the Foreign Office, M&C Saatchi boasted of its “significant experience…implementing sensitive unattributable programming for government clients.” To conceal its role, the firm has a patented formula, including establishing “a separate business entity” as a public front company, while using “reliable” secret contacts to “build in-country networks” of influencers, journalists, and other content creators. “Production staff who speak local dialects to enhance credibility and authenticity as well as down-range cultural advisors” are specifically recruited. In the Iraqi context, M&C Saatchi pledged:

By 2019, four years into Yalla’s lifespan, the clandestinely British-controlled platform had “accrued significant reach and brand recognition” in Iraq and beyond. M&C Saatchi sought to exploit the platform’s soaring popularity and reach for the purposes of a “far-ranging influence campaign,” intended to “promote a sense of personal agency and increase community cohesion” in territories once occupied by ISIS. Yet, average citizens throughout the country and West Asia were also in the crosshairs.

‘Behaviour Change’

M&C Saatchi pledged to bombard target audiences with expansive multimedia psyops, intended to highlight and encourage “personal agency, community cohesion and national unity” among Iraqis young and old. Yalla’s online assets, the “primary means of influencing the audience’s attitudes and behaviours, by exposing them to positive content in partnership with a network of trusted influencers,” were to be conduits for new forms of psyops. The objective was to “create a user experience which is similar to mentoring or life-coaching programmes”:

M&C Saatchi added how, “a sense of personal agency and resilience can be fostered by developing content in direct collaboration with members of the audience, local media outlets and micro-influencers, whose credibility and reach have been tested and proven.” The intelligence cutout pledged to work with “youth psychologists and training experts to develop a range of evergreen modules, each comprising a series of social videos and interactive graphics that live across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube and that users can consume at their own pace.”

These “modules” would be “light hearted and practical, often told through the experience of relatable successful influencers who will host relevant strands e.g. ‘10 things I did to become a…’.” For example, “in order to frame the multiethnic history and heritage of Iraq as a potential source of political and economic strength, the creative team will develop a travel series with three comedians from the South, the North and from Baghdad”:

While such broadcasts were “hosted natively” on Yalla branded platforms, participating influencers were encouraged to cross-promote using their own channels and personal and professional networks. Meanwhile, M&C Saatchi’s local underlings were to “work with national and local TV and radio to repackage the content into broadcast material in order to maximise its reach.” The intelligence cutout had cultivated “relationships with a wide range of media outlets across the country,” and anticipated leveraging this contact “to good effect”:

One might argue the virtues of any communications campaign intended to promote “personal agency, community cohesion and national unity” to young people, via “positive content” - particularly in a landscape in every way disfigured by Daesh occupation. However, on top of Yalla’s audiences being entirely unwitting about its output being effectively authored by the same elements that both masterminded the criminal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and actively helped create ISIS, the scope for the platform’s abuse was and remains self-evidently massive.

‘Sustained Messaging’

M&C Saatchi’s project was intended to be deeply personally invasive for all concerned. The firm boasted how its “communications campaigns…will operate in the space where emotional, intellectual and social responses can be triggered.” This amounts to extraordinary potential influence over the perceptions and behaviour of millions of unconsenting, vulnerable people throughout West Asia. Moreover, M&C Saatchi’s “targeting strategies” were reportedly so granular, dedicated “audience segments and even specific individuals” could be identified, then blitzed by British intelligence-approved psyops via Yalla.

The still surgingly popular “independent” news, entertainment and social media platform is just one component of a wide-ranging psychological warfare apparatus secretly constructed by London in Iraq over a decade ago in the name of battling ISIS propaganda, which was never dismantled. Underpinning this cloak-and-dagger infrastructure is a British intelligence “Target Audience Analysis”, conducted in 2015. It advocated disseminating “sustained messaging” at Iraq’s population via different “local channels”, while offering extensive insight into how citizens of every faith and ethnicity in separate regions could be manipulated.

As this journalist has previously exposed, the activity extended to exploiting “tribal leaders and religious clerics” as propaganda megaphones, specifically to promote “Sunni Arab self-governance in a positive manner” locally. Strikingly, M&C Saatchi also managed the operation. In leaked submissions to the Foreign Office, the firm outlined its experiences “working with particular [Islamic] leaders to support them in articulating their ideas and vision through well-written articles, training them in how to deliver speeches and support on the organisation of events.”

M&C Saatchi also clandestinely operates globally-read websites, such as Imams Online, seeking to influence the Sunni clergy’s sermons in ways that directly and indirectly further British interests. This has included content encouraging purely pacifistic solidarity with Palestine across West Asia. Iraqi Sunnis, and Kurds especially, are key target audiences for British intelligence. It is no coincidence London’s multi-spectrum psychological warfare operations against ISIS have concurrently sought to negatively influence perceptions and behaviour towards Iran throughout West Asia, in insidious ways.

For example, this journalist has previously revealed how “within hours” of Iranian Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani’s January 2020 assassination, MI6 cutout Global Strategy Network activated its Aleppo-based network of citizen journalists and media production facilities to produce a video depicting residents of Atarib “handing out sweets in celebration.” The clip was “retweeted by prominent activists and journalists in and beyond Syria, picked up by [Saudi outlet] Al-Arabiyya and broadcast to its 22.5 million followers, and retweeted by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.”

Global Strategy’s stunt was part of a wider psychological effort, whereby the cutout “significantly shifted the ongoing conversation around Syria and Iran,” to the Islamic Republic’s detriment. Such context is vital to consider, given London’s 2015 Target Audience Analysis identified Iraqi citizens who believed “Iran has too much influence in Iraq” as a constituency to potentially barrage with psyops. Markedly, intensive focus grouping found the overwhelming majority of Iraqis vehemently rejected this view, across ethnic and religious lines.

In all, 54% of respondents said the anti-Iran proposition “made no sense at all,” with only 18% agreeing. However, 68% of Sunnis surveyed, many of them Iraqi Kurds, concurred. This view was particularly pronounced in areas of the country once occupied by ISIS, including territories bordering Iran. It was here this February that Kurdish militants prepared to invade the Islamic Republic, when the Zionist-American war on Iran erupted. Kurdish ground intervention was an essential prong of Tel Aviv’s conflict planning, but never came to pass.

It was possible to mobilise them because, as British intel’s 2015 Target Audience Analysis found, certain Iraqi Kurds believe their country’s borders “should be changed,” and support seizure of Iranian territory by force. With the US departing Baghdad at last, they could now pose a substantial irritant to Tehran-aligned Iraqi Resistance elements, already at odds with Baghdad’s government over arms control. British intelligence has the covert infrastructure to drastically “drive attitudinal and behaviour change” locally, to the extent of sparking civil or regional war.

It’s rather forgotten today how Washington’s post-9/11 imperial adventurism was not restricted to military intervention. A core component of the Bush administration’s “Freedom Agenda” - under the auspices of which calamitous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere were waged - was overt sponsorship of civil society-led coups throughout the former Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia. Citizens of these regions, and the world, live with this meddling’s destructive consequences to this day. The seemingly never-ending - and ever-escalating - Ukraine proxy war is a particularly visceral legacy.

The 1983 creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, a US state entity avowedly concerned with executing overtly what the CIA once did covertly, ushered in a new era of “spyless coups”. Working in close conjunction with USAID and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, NED ever after provided funding, training and material assistance to NGOs, ‘independent’ media outlets, opposition groups, and other initiatives in service of regime change, across every corner of the world.

Come 9/11, NED and its confederates had devised a supremely cunning, cost-effective template for toppling troublesome governments - be they left-wing, nationalist, or even former US puppets who’d stepped out of line. The previous October, longtime Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic was brought down in what the Washington Post dramatically dubbed “an extraordinary US effort to unseat a foreign head of state, not through covert action of the kind the CIA once employed in such places as Iran and Guatemala, but by modern election campaign techniques.”

At the anti-Milosevic effort’s forefront was Otpor! (Serbian: Resistance!), a rebellious NED-funded youth activist group. Through a mix of civil disobedience, non-violent resistance, rock concerts, street theatre, and graffiti, they fomented mass public opposition to the Yugoslav President. When election day came and official results pointed to Milosevic’s victory, an NED-funded “parallel vote tabulation” purported to expose major fraud, sending millions to the streets of Belgrade to peacefully demand the President’s resignation. Milosevic duly capitulated, in the face of seemingly overwhelming people power.

The supposedly heroic struggle of Otpor! and other US-supported anti-Milosevic groups was immortalised in a slick ‘documentary’, Bringing Down A Dictator. Milosevic’s fall provided a precise blueprint for future ‘color revolutions’ - so-called because frequently, the Empire-supported activists who led these mob putsches prominently adopted specific colours for their banners, branding and logos. Initially, US officials eagerly associated themselves publicly with this upheaval. Meanwhile, the mainstream media routinely published remarkably illuminating post-mortems of the revolts, extensively exposing Washington’s guiding hand and oft-enormous financial outlay.

Nonetheless, politicians, pundits and journalists alike universally framed colour revolutions as ultimately spontaneous uprisings by liberal, progressive elements with legitimate grievances, who yearned for democracy and freedom. In reality, they almost invariably produced corrupt, repressive governments that ruled via intimidation and brutality, including political assassinations. Post-colour revolution regimes also typically conducted sweeping privatisation and other ravaging ‘reforms’, destroying living standards for average citizens by prostrating their countries to the EU, IMF, NATO, World Trade Organization, and other mechanisms of Western economic, military, and political subjugation.

Slobodan Milosevic’s NED-orchestrated ouster is nicknamed the ‘Bulldozer Revolution’, due to iconic scenes during the upheaval of a wheel loader helping anti-government agitators occupy state buildings. However, its driver quickly turned against the “Revolution”. Subsequent “shock therapy” decimated Yugoslavia’s mixed market economy, causing his successful independent business to fail, and him to go bankrupt. He subsisted until his dying day on meagre state welfare payments. For most participants, subsequent colour revolutions were similarly an object lesson in being careful about what one wishes for.

‘External Shove’

In February 2005, President George W. Bush gave a swaggering address in Bratislava, Slovakia. He hailed how “in recent times, we have witnessed landmark events in the history of liberty.” This included Georgia’s November 2003 Rose Revolution, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution the next year, and Iraq’s Purple Revolution a month prior. “The advance of freedom is the concentrated work of generations,” Bush declared. He looked ahead to Moldova, and “inevitably” Belarus, “someday proudly [belonging] to the country of democracies [sic]”:

Moldova’s forced transformation into a staggeringly corrupt effective EU-US colony took many years. Belarus conversely remains stubbornly resistant to “freedom’s promise”, as defined by Brussels, London, Washington, and other centres of imperial power. Still, President Bush’s confidence was well-founded. Since he took office, waves of insurrectionary unrest unleashed by his government’s “Freedom Agenda” had systematically swept away designated enemy governments one by one annually. Indeed, within weeks of Bush’s speech, Kyrgyzstan’s insufficiently pro-Western leader fell victim to yet another colour revolution.

He would not be the last. Prior colour revolutions had enthusiastically emphasised the importance of techniques of nonviolent resistance. Many of them were crafted by Gene Sharp, who was intimately enmeshed within the US military and intelligence establishment for much of his life. However, Kyrgyzstan’s NED-created regime change army, KelKel - directly modelled on Otpor! - attacked police, torched government buildings and even carried out bombings. Their ferocity was actively encouraged and promoted by US-funded TV stations locally. Such belligerence subsequently became a colour revolution calling card.

That colour revolutions represented a formal weapon of war in the Empire’s post-9/11 arsenal was enthusiastically spelled out by arch-neoconservative Max Boot in late December 2004. He gushed how Ukraine’s Orange Revolution days earlier, which brought a pro-Western government to power, was “one of the most inspiring events” of that year. Boot declared the “triumph” and “miracle” of the revolution “should dispel the quaint notion still prevalent in many Western universities and foreign ministries that democracy is a luxury good suitable for rich countries”:

Boot boasted how Washington had “spent $58 million on democracy promotion in the last two years” in Ukraine. He proposed Kiev receive “expedited NATO and European Union membership,” to finish off the Orange Revolution. “In the meantime, we need to apply elsewhere the lessons of Ukraine” Boot demanded, suggesting “an obvious candidate for a similar transformation is Iran.” He explained, “it’s hard to think of a higher priority than the overthrow of the mullahs,” encouraging the Bush administration to formally assist “liberating Iran” via colour revolution.

‘USAID Help’

Such was the time’s insurrectionary fervour, in January 2006 USAID went to the extraordinary extent of publishing a glossy magazine, Democracy Rising, revealing in detail Washington’s central role in fomenting “grassroots” rebellions as far afield as Afghanistan, Gaza and Lebanon. Dedicated sections on colour revolutions to date were replete with stunningly forthright passages. A section on Georgia’s November 2003 Rose Revolution described how NED had financed regime change training for local “lawyers, judges, journalists, members of parliament, NGOs, political party leaders, and others.”

The purpose was to give Georgians “a sense that they should regulate the government.” The Rose Revolution was avowedly" “the climax of these efforts.” One recipient of US financial support remarked, “without foreign assistance, I’m not sure we would have been able to achieve what we did without bloodshed.” Meanwhile, several pages were dedicated to the Orange Revolution. It noted how thousands of Ukrainian journalists were given training in “investigative reporting”, bankrolled by NED and USAID.

An alumni told Democracy Rising this sponsorship “created a feeling that others stood with them ‘in the trenches’.” Concurrently, NED-affiliated Freedom House flooded the coffers of NGOs “that sponsored voter education, mobilized voters to get to the polls and observed elections.” These organisations “also held meetings, youth dances, rock concerts and karaoke to attract young voters,” and “ran public service ads on TV stations, informing people about their right to vote.” Meanwhile, “democracy trainers from Serbia, Slovakia, Russia and Croatia” were flown into the country.

In the second round of Ukraine’s presidential election, NED-financed NGOs claimed to have been inundated with tens of thousands of reports of fraud from voting stations all over the country, while exit polls they produced pointed to widespread rigging having denied pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko landslide victory. Vast protests, combined with opposition-organised general strikes, widespread civil disobedience and occupations of government buildings forced a rerun. A US-funded think tank apparatchik asserted:

Yet for all the hype and self-assurance of Democracy Rising, its publication came at a time when colour revolutions were increasingly being viewed with hostility and suspicion at a state and public level throughout the Global South. In every case, the radical outcomes promised by colour revolution leaders and advocates failed to materialise, while US rhetoric about the commitment of resultant pro-Western regimes to democracy and freedom was a perverse fraud.

In Ukraine, US-installed Yushchenko implemented economic austerity, slashed regulations and social spending, bailed out criminal banks, broke open state industry and natural resources for foreign plunder, attacked the rights of Russian speakers, and began preparing the country for locally-feared NATO membership. Within just nine months of entering office, his coalition government - comprised of Orange Revolution activists - collapsed due to deeply corrupt battles with feuding Ukrainian oligarchs over control of key media and industrial assets.

Yushchenko was summarily booted out in the January 2010 presidential election, finishing fifth in the first round with just 5.5% of the vote. As imperial house journal Foreign Policy lamented years later, the Bush administration’s much-vaunted colour revolutions all turned out to be “terribly disappointing.” Each and every time, “elite corruption still continued apace” and “promises of far-reaching change never really materialized.” Damningly, “maladies that typified the preceding regimes quickly came to describe” the governments created by colour revolutions themselves.

‘Revolution Business’

That’s quite some euphemism. In Georgia, longtime Soros acolyte Mikheil Saakashvili granted himself unilateral power in key policy areas, before brazenly exploiting his position to harass and jail business and political rivals. Saakashvili’s targets would be raped and/or tortured in prison, their ordeals filmed for primetime broadcast on local TV networks. Grave questions abound over his personal involvement in several suspicious deaths, including government ministers’. He was voted out in October 2012, despite NED’s best efforts.

Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 Tulip Revolution installed Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who proceeded to run the country as his personal fiefdom for five years. Bakiyev’s relatives profited exorbitantly from legally questionable privatisation of state industries. For example, his family signed a highly controversial $1.8 billion deal to supply fuel to a local US military base, close to Kyrgyzstan’s total GDP in 2003. Elsewhere, Bakiyev’s brother oversaw Bishkek’s security apparatus - arbitrary detentions, bogus convictions, torture, and murders of opposition activists, journalists, and politicians became commonplace.

Bakiyev was himself chased out of not only the presidential palace but Bishkek itself in April 2010, following a massacre of anti-corruption protesters in which up to 100 were killed and at least 450 wounded. Thereafter, Kyrgyzstan was plunged into economic and political chaos for a decade, with numerous governments collapsing along the way. The freest and most stable Central Asian state prior to the Tulip Revolution, it is only since 2020 - following another Anglo-American coup - the country has regained some semblance of stability.

A key player in that upheaval was British ambassador Charles Garrett. He arrived in Bishkek from Macedonia, where as this journalist has revealed from April 2016 he steered what was known as the “colorful revolution”. Illegally obtained, deceptively edited wiretaps seemingly implicating government officials in shocking crimes produced huge protests, featuring widespread arson attacks and brutal clashes between demonstrators and police. Garrett distributed cash to NGOs and activists involved in the unrest from his diplomatic pouch, encouraging them to cause mass havoc.

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, NED, and USAID were also colorful revolution participants. Some protesters even proudly wore “Soros Army” shirts. Despite a huge public counter-revolutionary fightback, the tumult paralysed the Macedonian economy and state, leading to the installation of a doggedly pro-Western, dangerously dysfunctional administration that engaged in industrial scale graft, jailed political opponents on bogus charges, and changed the country’s name despite near-unanimous public opposition. Meanwhile, existing economic problems, including crippling brain drain, were gravely exacerbated.

The unfailingly disastrous results of colour revolutions surely contributed to White House officials abruptly and firmly distancing themselves from the entire enterprise, before the Bush administration’s second term was even over. Publicly, the “Freedom Agenda” was quietly forgotten. The President - who in October 2004 openly mandated financial assistance to Belarusian opposition activists, and once bombastically praised the Rose Revolution as an example to be followed throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia - went so far as to deny the US was in the “revolution business” at all.

‘Alternate Reality’

Colour revolutions have continued apace ever since, with the same strategies being recurrently applied the world over, to varying degrees of success. All along, non-Western governments - in particular China, Iran and Russia - have become increasingly vocal in their condemnation of and opposition to colour revolutions, in some cases passing legislation seeking to curtail the operations of foreign funded organisations on their soil. Yet, the mainstream media long ago adopted a rigid Omertà on Washington’s culpability for civil society-driven destabilisation overseas.

In a striking example of this paradigm shift, in November 2004, before the Orange Revolution was over, The Guardian published a revealing report exposing the “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev.” The outlet stated unambiguously the revolt was “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.” NED, the State Department and USAID were all fingered as unabashed culprits.

Fast forward to July 2015 however, and a Guardian article on Russia’s banning of NED under foreign agent laws quite amazingly relied on a brief quote pulled from the Endowment’s official website to describe its operations. In the intervening time, the Maidan Revolution overthrew Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, setting Kiev on the warpath with Moscow. Washington’s irrefutable involvement was strenuously denied at the time by the mainstream media, and has been ever since.

Following the Ukraine proxy war’s February 2022 eruption, The New York Times took vigorous aim at independent journalists for spreading the “conspiracy theory” Maidan was US-orchestrated, dubbing the proposition an “alternative reality” and “Russian disinformation”. This is despite every prominent Maidan actor - including the individuals who started the demonstrations - receiving NED or USAID funding, leaders of US-bankrolled organisations in the country advertising their intention to overthrow Yanukovych years prior, and the Endowment spending $20 million in Ukraine in 2013 alone.

After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, NED removed its grant records on Ukraine, listing its investment in a panoply of initiatives in the country over many years - a preponderance of which ultimately targeted Russia, one way or another. In mid-2024, the Endowment undertook the unprecedented step of purging its grant records for the entire world. Today, brief entries on different geographical regions describe in vague terms the Endowment’s specific aims locally, and overall sums being spent. The crucial questions of where, and on what, aren’t clarified.

NED going underground makes the task of tracking and exposing contemporary colour revolutions difficult, but not impossible. In September 2025, mass rioting ignited in Nepal. Major news outlets without exception reported the fiery agitation as an organic burst of righteous anger by the country’s disaffected “Gen Z”, motivated by corruption, unemployment, and state censorship of social media. Publications barely acknowledged demonstrators committed serious crimes, including torching Nepal’s parliament and the Prime Minister’s official residence, which sent occupants fleeing in helicopters.

Based on publicly available information, the clear insinuations of a colour revolution could be discerned. An NGO that organised the protests, Hami Nepal, had clear links to organisations known to be in receipt of NED funding. Subsequent leaks amply demonstrated the Endowment and USAID expended substantial sums over the years preceding the coup training young Nepalese citizens how to protest, found NGOs and political parties, and “advocate concerns” publicly on issues including corruption. This included the very individuals now in power in Kathmandu. Evidently, the post-9/11 “Freedom Agenda” never actually ended.

On September 16th, The Hague’s Kosovo Specialist Chambers found former Kosovo Liberation Army chief Hashim Thaci ⁠guilty of cruel treatment, arbitrary detention, torture and the murder ⁠of 96 people during the 1998/9 Kosovo War. The verdict stunned his supporters and detractors alike, but neither believe he will ultimately be convicted, with good reason. Thaci is but a sacrificial lamb, defendant in a purely symbolic show trial secretly orchestrated by British intelligence - who once considered the KLA leader their bosom ally.

Given this background, that Thaci ended up in The Hague at all seemed nothing short of miraculous. After being indicted in April 2020, he resigned as Kosovo’s President. A longstanding KLA high-ranker, Thaci was at the forefront of the group’s outreach to Western governments and intelligence agencies throughout the 1990s, as it waged ever-escalating guerrilla war on Yugoslav security forces. When NATO’s 78-day-long bombing of Belgrade erupted in March 1999 in support of the KLA, Thaci proclaimed himself prime minister of Kosovo’s “provisional government”.

Categorised as a “terrorist” entity by the US State Department, the KLA was known by Western governments to be an organised crime faction, funded by the drugs trade and states such as Saudi Arabia, with ties to extremist factions including Al Qaeda. This was no impediment to the CIA and MI6 providing the KLA with substantial financial and material support for years. Once NATO’s bombing was complete and Kosovo fell under alliance occupation, Thaci was instrumental in consolidating the group’s total takeover of the statelet.

As his criminal and political rivals were systematically executed, the KLA conducted a concomitant province-wide purge of non-Albanians, reducing Kosovo’s population by hundreds of thousands. As a Western diplomat told the Washington Post in June 1999, “Thaci’s ruthless tactics are legendary in the region.” Despite high-level cognisance of such tendencies, Thaci and his fellow KLA warlords were actively assisted in their reign of terror by occupying NATO KFOR and UNMIK forces. A Kosovo Albanian lamented in 2001:

In July that year, the Washington Post reported how Kosovo’s UN-constructed courts were proving incapable of prosecuting KLA officials for atrocities committed in the wake of NATO’s occupation, let alone before the alliance’s arrival. A Swedish jurist serving as Kosovo’s “first Western judge” detailed “several cases in which UN and KFOR senior officials opposed or blocked prosecution” of KLA leaders. NATO and UN officials allegedly feared they “would put their lives at risk” by pursuing prosecutions of certain figures - including Thaci, presumably.

‘Essentially Untouchable’

A leaked March 2019 British intelligence appraisal of “rule of law issues” in Kosovo is absolutely scathing, specifically naming the KLA’s enduring influence locally as a key problem castrating the would-be country’s laughable legal system. “In common with much of the rest of the Balkans, Kosovo has high levels of state capture; limited reconciliation between ethnic communities; and the system carries a heavy legacy of unresolved war crimes issues,” the study reported. Of particular concern to London:

Moreover, “state capture furthers the economic interests of elite groups but increasingly is focused on preventing challenge through subverting rule of law.” Resultantly, “rule of law processes are not strengthened, but are subverted and circumscribed.” In other words, the effectively lawless mafia-dominated system constructed in ‘independent’ Kosovo with NATO and UN help post-NATO bombing endured untrammelled two decades later. The British highlighted “particular issues in the prosecutorial process - both the management of investigations and the creation of indictments.”

The execution of civil and criminal judgments in Kosovo was also cited as a “specific problem,” while sentencing was found to be “inconsistent” - “in particular in relation to corruption and serious crimes, sentencing can be very light.” It was extremely common for cases to be initiated against known criminals, then remain unresolved for years. Questions abounded over the “competence of judges and prosecutors” - “it is generally acknowledged that the quality of legal training at university is poor and…the Bar Exam sets a very low hurdle.”

Even then, Kosovo authorities “did not select the highest performing candidates, but often those with links to those in positions of influence.” Small wonder “public expectations of the rule of law sector” were found to be “very low” throughout the would-be country. Citizens not only had “no real experience of rule of law,” but there was “an ingrained lack of trust of rule of law systems” among the wider population. Yet, the British were determined to counter this perception - if only for public relations purposes.

At that time, London had been running a dedicated “rule of law portfolio” in Kosovo for several years. It consisted of “three separate strands.” They spanned “monitoring the judiciary” and Pristina’s “prosecutorial functions - trials, verdicts and the behaviour of judges and prosecutors in corruption and organised crime cases.” Four British-approved “Kosovan legal experts” were furthermore embedded “in key posts” in Pristina’s Ministry of Justice, and London took charge of “recruitment and appointment of judges and prosecutors.”

This covered “improved disciplinary procedures; performance appraisal; and ways of increasing accountability.” Along the way, “young judges and prosecutors” in Kosovo were mentored, enjoying “study visits” to Britain and unadvertised “support on real life cases.” In light of Thaci’s conviction, it’s striking the British embassy in Pristina professes to place a “strong emphasis on achieving results in the investigation and conviction of high profile individuals in corruption cases, and on making a visible impact in such cases”:

‘Valuable Leverage’

In service of this objective, a dedicated Foreign Office project “to change the culture of the Kosovo justice system to one in which judges, prosecutors and others are willing to fearlessly challenge entrenched interests” was also quietly launched in 2018. Leaked files show the effort was outsourced to notorious British intelligence cutout Adam Smith International. Markedly, it operated until March 2020 - one month before Thaci was indicted by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers.

ASI was explicitly concerned with the “enforceability” of KSC prosecutions. Specifically founded in 2016 to prosecute high-profile war crimes cases against KLA officials, ASI acknowledged the KSC was of no concern to Kosovo Albanians. “Whilst senior politicians may be indicted by the Specialist Chambers…Kosovo’s young population aspires to follow its neighbours in making progress to stronger relations with Europe and prosperity at home, which promises to be a driver of reforms,” the cutout observed.

Nonetheless, ASI was tasked with helping the KSC appear to be serious about fulfilling its purview, due to growing concerns among ‘independent’ Pristina’s Western sponsors “about Kosovan capacity to process case volumes, to protect witness identities, and to handle complex cases,” combined with well-founded suspicions the KLA was insulated from prosecution. ASI consciously designed its legal ‘reform’ program “to fit this context of conflict legacies, competing stakeholders, political tensions and uncertain commitment to international standards”:

It was under these highly politicised auspices ASI’s intimate ‘assistance’ to Kosovo’s criminal justice systems was provided, and Thaci’s KSC indictment drawn up. At every stage, the cutout coordinated closely with Foreign Office headquarters in London, producing “bi-weekly updates on notable [legal and judicial] developments” related to Kosovo, quarterly reviews “of trends within the institutional and political environment,” and “longer term ‘look forward’ reports anticipating events in the coming three months.”

ASI boasted how its “international advisers” were deployed to Kosovo “on rotations,” ensuring “continuous team presence” locally, with at least one staffer “always ‘on the ground’ and on call” for the Foreign Office. This would help the cutout “build and maintain relationships with direct Kosovan counterparts and wider stakeholders continuously,” and “monitor political dynamics to ensure that project decisions are politically-informed and conflict sensitive.” With such intensive behind-closed-door bonds between London and Pristina, successful prosecutions of KLA officials remained unlikely.

Still, in order for Pristina to make “strides towards closer ties with Europe,” ASI understood the necessity of challenging mainstream conceptions of Kosovo as “a country formed through a conflict that shaped its political parties and legitimised their power, to one where rule of law has primacy and state institutions win public confidence by demonstrating their adherence to international standards for professionalism and transparency.” In this context, simply indicting Thaci became in and of itself substantial, regardless of the outcome, or his trial’s actual legitimacy.

It’s unsurprising Thaci and his supporters firmly believed his acquittal to be inevitable, and still do. The Foreign Office project managed by ASI drew upon a variety of “international subject matter experts”, among them several veteran British judges with experience elsewhere in the Balkans, including Albania and Macedonia. They were led by Jonathan Ratel, formerly head of Kosovo’s EU-funded Special Prosecution Office, and “deputy chief prosecutor”. In this capacity, Ratel personally rubbished widespread, EU-endorsed allegations of KLA involvement in organ trafficking.

Thaci’s trial didn’t explore the issue, he was acquitted of all crimes against humanity, and a right to appeal his 25-year sentence was clearly codified in the KSC’s judgement. Serbian leaders have condemned the ruling as too lenient. Thaci - dubbed Pristina’s “George Washington” by Joe Biden - remains held at The Hague. Meanwhile, KFOR has at last begun withdrawing from Kosovo, due to a supposedly “improved security situation” in the aspiring country - where, no thanks to Britain, “those in power, and their associates, are essentially untouchable.”

On September 12th 2001, chaos reigned supreme. Yet, as governments the world over struggled to make sense of the previous day’s catastrophe, and before a motive was established, any perpetrators identified, or other basic facts ascertained, the US Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation into potential insider trading by unknown figures with apparently precise foreknowledge of 9/11. The evidence seemed overwhelming. Mainstream reporters openly mocked the implausibility of numerous deeply abnormal stock market trades immediately prior to the attacks being pure coincidence.

For one, several companies prominently impacted by the event were abruptly ‘shorted’ at inexplicable levels over the preceding weeks. In other words, investors bet certain stocks would perform poorly in the near future, and sought to profit accordingly. Just five days before 9/11 over 2,000 shorts were placed against United Airlines - 90 times more in a single day than over the entirety of August. The company’s share price collapsed following the attacks, turning $180,000 in shorts into $2.4 million.

Meanwhile, substantial investments were serendipitously made in private security, intelligence and defence firms that benefited enormously from the 9/11 attacks and ensuing ‘War on Terror’. On September 10th, purchase of shares in major US defence contractor Raytheon surged sixfold. Just one week later, as the Pentagon began bulk purchasing Raytheon’s flagship Patriot and Tomahawk missiles in preparation for invading Afghanistan, the firm’s shares rocketed 37%. Other major defence stocks, including Boeing and Lockheed, also experienced abnormal trading pre-9/11.

Purchase and shorts of dozens of stocks in almost every conceivable industry that one way or another profited, or was harmed, as a result of 9/11 incongruously spiked in the weeks before the fateful day. The evidentiary trail was literally globespanning, with major financial authorities in several Western countries launching their own investigations. Numerous officials in European capitals alleged the trading was definitively indicative of 9/11 foreknowledge, and “terrorists” were responsible.

For example, commenting on Italian securities regulator CONSOB’s investigation into the suspicious market activity on September 17th 2001, Italian foreign minister Antonio Martino boldly declared “terrorist states and organizations [were] behind speculation on the international markets.” One week later, German central bank president Ernst Welteke asserted his researchers had uncovered “irrefutable proof of insider trading.” He and his team were certain “people connected to the terrorists must have been trying to profit from this tragedy”:

Welteke declined to release further information, pending consultation with European and US regulators. However, the 9/11 insider trading scandal quickly faded from public consciousness thereafter. In July 2004, the SEC announced the end of its grand investigation - conducted in conjunction with the Department of Justice and FBI - having “not [developed] any evidence suggesting that anyone who had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks traded on the basis of that information.” Which, rather than closing the case, begs the obvious question of who did.

Declassified records of one suspicious pre-9/11 trade probed by the FBI sheds potential light on why US and other authorities may have decided to leave the entire issue alone. From September 6th - 10th 2001, a total of 56,000 Stratesec shares were purchased by a single investor. The company provided security systems to several airports, including Wasington DC’s Dulles from where one of the hijacked planes departed, and the World Trade Center. Its share price almost doubled in the attacks’ wake.

The shady trades were traced back to Wirt D. Walker III - a distant relative of the Bush family and business partner of Marvin Bush, then-President George W. Bush’s brother. The FBI reportedly uncovered “no ties to terrorism or other negative information” regarding Walker, so didn’t even interview him before concluding his lucrative transactions were innocent happenstance then closing the investigation. Apparently, the evident possibility Walker III possessed foreknowledge of 9/11 via other means than “ties to terrorism” wasn’t worth exploring.

Still, this sleight of hand granted the Bureau, Department of Justice and SEC an extremely effective “out”. The 9/11 Commission likewise summarily dismissed any suggestion of “unusual pre-9/11 trading activity” on the basis investors involved “had no conceivable ties to Al Qaeda.” Such specious reasoning was sufficient to kill the scandal dead in the mainstream. Nonetheless, ever since numerous peer reviewed academic papers have contrarily concluded insider trading did occur, and was motivated by 9/11 foreknowledge.

In 2006, University of Illinois professor Allen Poteshman authored a well-cited study focusing on suspicious pre-9/11 trading activity in airline stocks. He concluded this shorting was “unusually high”, and “terrorists or their associates traded…on the basis of foreknowledge of the impending attacks.” Similar findings were reached by a 2011 Multinational Finance Journal paper, which identified highly abnormal market movements in numerous key industries, including insurance and reinsurance stocks directly impacted by 9/11. This was “consistent with insiders anticipating” the attacks.

While the media failed to report on these studies, they were academically impactful, and cited as precedents in a December 2023 paper tracking peculiar Israeli stock market activity in the days preceding Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th that year. Authored by two US scholars, they found a “significant spike” in the shorting of publicly listed Israeli companies days prior to that world-changing strike on the Zionist entity. This activity was “consistent with informed traders anticipating and profiting from the Hamas attack.”

The authors found shorting of Israeli companies listed on the Tel Aviv stock exchange “increased dramatically” before October 7th. Israeli stocks on major US exchanges also experienced a “sharp and unusual increase” during the same period. Shorting of publicly traded Zionist entity firms on October 2nd “far exceeded” levels of shorting witnessed at the start of COVID19 pandemic, which triggered a temporary global stock market collapse. No wonder the paper concludes it was “extremely unlikely the volume of short selling…occurred by random chance.”

“Random chance” seems an even less plausible explanation when one considers “similar patterns” of shorting Israeli stocks were also identified in early April 2023, right when Hamas was planning to conduct a comparable attack to Al-Aqsa Flood during Passover. In the immediate aftermath of October 7th too, a flurry of mainstream media reports exposed how Zionist Occupation Forces had numerous advance warnings of an impending Hamas attack for months prior. This included a detailed “point by point” battle plan, outlining Al-Aqsa Flood.

Fast forward to today, and Haaretz reveals UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed personally warned Benjamin Netanyahu 10 days prior to October 7th Hamas intended to wage a major offensive, but Israel’s premier failed to act. This disclosure comes at a time the mainstream media finally acknowledges the need for a critical reevaluation of what happened on 9/11. Any objective investigation must focus on the insider trading angle - ascertaining who knew what, when, and why, could unravel the entire conspiracy.

In the leadup to 9/11’s silver anniversary, it was widely reported a forthcoming New York District Court civil case brought against notorious Saudi government operative Omar Bayoumi would deliver “smoking gun” proof tying Riyadh directly to the attacks. Compelling evidence Saudi Arabian intelligence not only managed several hijackers as agents, but did so as a “proxy” for the CIA, has lain unexamined in plain sight for years. Yet, the Agency’s sinister shadowplay remains eerily absent from media consideration, despite mounting recognition of Riyadh’s role.

Bayoumi has long-been accused by major news outlets and US officials of maintaining an intimate and suspicious relationship with hijackers Nawaf Hazmi and Khalid Mihdhar, immediately upon their arrival to the US in January 2000. A subsequent FBI investigation, dubbed Operation Encore, ruled there was a “50/50 chance” Bayoumi - and the House of Saud by extension - had detailed advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. This explosive finding was not publicly divulged until March 2022.

However, the media remained steadfastly silent a year later when a bombshell filing from the Office of Military Commissions - the legal body overseeing prosecutions of 9/11 defendants - was released. The document summarises classified government discovery disclosures, and private interviews conducted with anonymous high-ranking US intelligence officials. Its contents shed unprecedented light on how the CIA recruited at least Hazmi and Mihdhar if not others who participated in the 9/11 attacks, “via a liaison relationship” with Riyadh’s General Intelligence Directorate (GID).

The same document elucidates how the 9/11 Commission was deliberately sabotaged by its chief Philip Zelikow, who personally endeavoured “to blunt” inquiries “into Saudi involvement with the hijackers.” Concurrently, senior FBI officials tasked with investigating the attacks were prohibited from interviewing Saudi nationals, despite “many” leads pointing directly to Riyadh’s Washington DC embassy. No wonder - probing those connections would’ve amply revealed how the GID was acting as a “cutout” for the CIA, in all its clandestine dealings with the 9/11 hijackers.

High-ranking FBI officials quoted in the filing discuss how the GID was a longstanding CIA “proxy”, exploited by the Agency whenever it was “unwise or not practical…to undertake an operation directly.” This need was particularly pronounced in the context of cloak-and-dagger CIA connivances conducted “on US soil.” After 25 years, it appears Riyadh could finally take the fall for a dastardly CIA operation that one way or another resulted in 9/11. As planned, there is little chance of the Agency itself landing in the dock.

‘CIA Team’

Among the court filing’s most dynamite excerpts is the insider testimony of an FBI special agent, who was posted to Alec Station - the CIA’s Al Qaeda tracking unit, ultimately responsible for recruiting Hazmi and Mihdhar as assets. When in January 2000 the special agent learned the pair - known Al Qaeda operatives under intensive CIA and NSA surveillance - had multi-entry visas to the US, they produced a report warning Bureau headquarters. Its dispatch was blocked by an unnamed CIA analyst.

The same analyst not only directed the GID to make contact with Hazmi and Mihdhar upon their arrival, but falsely claimed to subsequent US government inquiries into 9/11 they had personally informed the FBI about the pair’s presence in the US. The FBI special agent personally witnessed CIA director George Tenet and Agency operations director James Pavitt bragging about how they “conspired to obstruct the 9/11 Commission,” by concealing the analyst’s activities and identity from investigators.

In the process, an extraordinary, hitherto unreported component of Riyadh’s relationship with the hijackers remained determinedly unexplored. The FBI special agent alleged Hazmi and Mihdhar were explicitly provided US visas by the American consulate in Jeddah, “to facilitate the operation run by the Saudis’ GID and the CIA team.” This disclosure is all the more tantalising given 14 of the 19 hijackers all received their visas from the same consulate. In many cases, the paperwork shouldn’t have been granted at all.

Adding to the mystery, 12 of the 14 visas were approved by a single consular official, named Shayna Steinger. Almost immediately after being appointed to the Jeddah consulate in July 2000 with zero diplomatic background, she began rubberstamping applications of future 9/11 hijackers. At the time, the consulate’s approach to issuing visas was strict, specifically due to local “terrorism” concerns. Internal guidelines stated applicants - particularly young male Saudis - should always be interviewed in person, and have clear grounds for travel.

However, Steinger personally took it upon herself to reverse this policy. Moreover, she issued visas to future 9/11 hijackers despite their applications frequently being incomplete or error-strewn, based on forged documents, and their contents giving ample grounds for suspicion. Steinger nonetheless interviewed Hani Hanjour, who purportedly piloted Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon. Afterwards, she rejected his application for a three-year US visa, due to apparent doubts over his stated purposes in the country. Nonetheless, Steinger approved Hanjour’s renewed application two weeks later.

In ensuing official investigations, she offered wildly contradictory accounts of why the hijackers’ visas were granted. In Hanjour’s case, Steinger initially claimed he provided requested supporting documentation. She subsequently admitted he actually hadn’t, but Hanjour’s “middle class” background purportedly led her to conclude he was trustworthy. Thanks to the court filing, we know in reality future 9/11 hijackers were granted entry to the US so they could be recruited by the CIA upon arrival, suggesting Steinger was acting on Agency orders.

‘Local Dissidents’

Once Hazmi and Mihdhar touched down in Los Angeles in January 2000, almost immediately they crossed paths with Omar Bayoumi at an airport restaurant. FBI reports cited in the court filing indicate a witness who observed their meeting saw Bayoumi “dropping a piece of paper” near the pair’s table, “then striking up a conversation with them” in a manner that appeared “unnatural.” The witness relayed this account to the Bureau in 2002, but it was never publicised.

In interviews with Operation Encore investigators years later, Bayoumi maintained his meeting with Hazmi and Mihdhar was pure happenstance. The extraordinary assistance he gave them immediately thereafter - including finding them an apartment, cosigning their lease, setting them up bank accounts, and gifting them substantial sums towards their rent - was simply charity for fellow Muslims who could barely speak English and were unfamiliar with Western culture, Bayoumi asserted. But the filing offers numerous striking insights into the dark reality of his contact with the future hijackers.

For example, it appears Bayoumi was secretly instructed to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles, by extremist cleric and Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs official Fahad Thumairy. The filing cites evidence indicating Bayoumi was himself in California “to spy on local dissidents” of Saudi extraction. He was seen with the two 9/11 hijackers “on numerous occasions,” at one stage organising “a social gathering for the hijackers.” We can only guess who may also have been in attendance.

Another stunning exposure in the filing concerns Hazmi and Mihdhar lodging with longtime FBI informant and asset Abdussattar Shaikh from September 2000 onwards. That Shaikh failed to provide their surnames to his handler despite being asked has been known for many years. The joint congressional and senate intelligence committee probe into 9/11 ruled the pair’s stay with Shaikh was “the [US] intelligence community’s best chance to unravel the September 11 plot.” Insulating Hazmi and Midhar from Bureau scrutiny may have been his explicit objective.

The filing indicates Shaikh himself “was receiving funds” from Riyadh, while simultaneously serving as an FBI informant. “Prominent” Saudis “would stay at Shaikh’s boarding house while visiting California,” it states. His mission was “to monitor the activities of [Saudi] citizens while they were abroad.” Hani Hanjour also lodged with Shaikh alongside Hazmi, after Mihdhar returned to Saudi Arabia in late 2000. It appears at every stage Stateside, the hijackers were in intimate proximity with figures connected to Saudi intelligence.

Given the GID was acting directly on the CIA’s behalf, this contact raises the obvious prospect the Agency - via its Riyadh “proxy” - was directly monitoring the movements of Hazmi, Midhar, and Hanjour if not other Saudi-born hijackers from the moment they entered the US at the Agency’s direction, until 9/11 itself. The extent to which the CIA could’ve influenced their actions, behaviour and movements throughout is unknown, but the scope was self-evidently massive.

‘Saudi Involvement’

All along, Alec Station deliberately concealed the presence of Hazmi and Mihdhar in the US from the FBI, until it was too late. The filing records how in June 2001 Station representatives showed senior Bureau officials photographs of three Al Qaeda operatives, including Hazmi and Mihdhar. However, the CIA refused to answer questions about the individuals in the photos, or provide identifying information. Had they done so, the FBI could’ve readily found Hazmi and Mihdhar’s names and addresses listed in San Diego’s local phone directory.

This was a flagrant dangle, obviously intended to gauge the Bureau’s cognisance of the identities of the individuals pictured, and their presence in the US. The filing also indicates the FBI conducted a dedicated counterintelligence investigation into Omar Bayoumi prior to 9/11, due to suspicions “he was operating as an intelligence officer.” Yet, when the Bureau contacted the CIA for information on Bayoumi, they were told the Agency “held no files” on him at all - a “falsehood”.

In reality, the CIA maintained plentiful “operational” records on Bayoumi, which were “never passed to the FBI.” Such brazen stonewalling persisted long after 9/11. Upon learning tens of thousands of dollars had been sent from Haifa bin Faisal, wife of Saudi ambassador to the US Bandar bin Sultan, to Bayoumi’s wife, the Bureau attempted to subpoena their financial records from Washington DC’s Riggs Bank. Per the filing, “officials at Riggs thwarted the FBI’s efforts to obtain the records for a year.”

Riggs Bank - which counted US Presidents and CIA-installed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as clients - collapsed amid major money laundering scandals, in 2005. Post-9/11 investigations identified financial improprieties in accounts held by several wealthy Saudis - including a lack of required background checks, and consistent failure to alert regulators over large transactions violating federal banking laws. Riggs’ downfall precisely mirrors the unceremonious end of many confirmed CIA front banks past, such as Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which assisted criminal cloak-and-dagger connivances including Iran/Contra.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the filing records how “diplomatic pressure” was exerted on the FBI not to investigate Riyad’s myriad connections to 9/11. Bureau agents testifying to the joint inquiry into the attacks were moreover “instructed not to reveal the full extent of Saudi involvement with Al-Qaeda.” Senior officials at FBI headquarters knew “of both Bayoumi’s affiliation with Saudi intelligence and…the existence of the CIA’s operation to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar,” but “suppressed investigations” into these burning matters.

The filing concludes by noting Bayoumi was subsequently arrested in Britain on immigration charges immediately after 9/11, with authorities finding “extremist literature in his apartment.” The significance of this disclosure has gone entirely unnoticed, since 2022. Only now, as a result of the New York court case, has the media acknowledged how within days of the attacks, “game-changing” evidence directly implicating Bayoumi in 9/11 was seized from his British home by counter-terror police, then shared with the FBI, which actively buried the information.

Quite unbelievably, the incriminating haul supposedly included a phonebook listing over two dozen Saudi government officials in the US and Saudi Arabia; flight simulator software; tickets and travel documents; and a notepad featuring a sketch of an aircraft. An accompanying note from a British counter-terror officer stated of the latter: “contains handwritten notes mathematical calculations re height of planes.” A member of the 9/11 families’ legal team behind the court action boldly informed the BBC, “it’s the mathematical calculation of the [Pentagon] crash.”

By September 22nd 2001, this seemingly incontrovertible windfall was in the Bureau’s possession. So too highly illuminating home video tapes of Bayoumi roaming around Washington DC in 1999, highlighting security measures in place at the Capitol building, openly discussing nearby Reagan National Airport, and referencing an unspecified “plan” on camera. Other tapes feature Bayoumi in close quarters with senior Al Qaeda figures such as Anwar Awlaki, assassinated in a September 2011 US drone strike.

While British detectives apparently believed they possessed “more than sufficient evidence” to extradite Bayoumi to stand trial, Washington ordered him freed, and he returned to Saudi Arabia. US authorities’ resistance is understandable, given the overwhelming abundance of evidence pointing ineluctably to the CIA at the very least actively facilitating the 9/11 attacks, if not carrying them out, using the Saudis as scapegoats. Media determination to avoid mentioning how Bayoumi et al provably acted as “proxies” for the CIA shows the coverup continues today.

Exploiting academic institutions as a cover, between 2017 - 2021 the German government surreptitiously funnelled millions into a highly discriminatory project facilitating expansion of Zionist settlements in the occupied West Bank. Under its auspices, public money and knowledge production were committed to an inherently unlawful, immoral enterprise in flagrant breach of Berlin’s international legal obligations, and domestic restrictions on academic research efforts. The unknown scandal is just one component of how, in plain sight, Germany covertly assists Zionist settlement expansion and Palestine’s total erasure.

These are the shocking findings of a collaborative investigation by a triumvirate of German student Palestine solidarity organisations, including Not In Our Name, Academic Opposition, and Academic Boycott Campaign Germany. Their report is a groundbreaking effort, critically examining German state-sponsored water research in conjunction with Zionist entity academic institutions. It’s a silent conspiracy vast in scope, involving multiple state and quasi-state entities in Berlin and Tel Aviv financing academic research in seemingly innocuous fields, which directly abets Zionist ethnic cleansing and land seizure throughout Palestine.

The investigation focuses on a single project to emerge from the dark alliance between German and Israeli academia, known as MedWater. For four years, Berlin funded a consortium coordinated by the Technical University of Berlin, alongside Göttingen and Würzburg universities, to the tune of €1,818,348. Their successfully fulfilled objective was to develop a tool modelling the impact of adding or removing water wells. That feature was defined in direct conjunction with Israel’s water authorities, with the finished product transferred to Tel Aviv’s national water company.

The tool identifies ideal areas for construction of new wells, in a territory where Palestinian water sources are systematically demolished, and Palestinians are refused permits to drill new ones. Known as the Western Mountain Aquifer, it’s the largest and most productive groundwater body shared between Israel and the occupied West Bank. Palestinians were completely absent from working sessions convened in illegally occupied Jerusalem related to MedWater, and there is no apparent way in which Palestinians will, or even can, benefit from the effort in any way.

This is despite the consortium openly stating in submissions to German state ministries their tool sought to advance the UN’s sixth Sustainable Development Goal: “By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all.” The completed MedWater system was unveiled in October 2020, at a Berlin conference. Its public demonstration included calculating the impact of adding four new wells to the West Bank’s Hebron Governorate. Only Zionist settlers could realise that vision on-the-ground, of which the consortium was well-aware.

Even more damningly, at the project’s end the tool was contracted to Israel’s national water company Mekorot, which manages wells in Zionist settlements throughout the West Bank. By contrast, the Palestinian Water Authority, initially named as a MedWater partner, was not provided a subcontract and is not publicly listed among its beneficiaries today. Unreported at the time, and tacitly concealed from view ever since, it’s just one way Germany has been unaccountably supporting a genocidal Zionist enterprise begun back in 1967.

‘Near Impossible’

In its July 2024 Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice ruled unambiguously all states are obliged “to distinguish, in their dealings with Israel, between Israeli territory and the territory occupied since 1967, and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining that situation.” A decade earlier, Berlin seemingly enshrined a codified commitment to this principle in its dealings with Zionist entity academic institutions. Under the Territorial Clause, Germany theoretically won’t fund, and Tel Aviv won’t solicit, research projects outside the entity’s pre-1967 borders.

However, when asked how Mekorot’s MedWater contract was remotely compatible with the Clause, Berlin’s ministry of research argued its terms merely limit where research partners may be headquartered. As Mekorot is based in Tel Aviv, there was in fact no legal, regulatory or apparent ethical impediment to the project’s German government funding, despite the company’s well-documented criminal conduct in the West Bank since 1982. Then, Zionist Occupation Forces handed management of all local water infrastructure it controlled in the territory to Mekorot.

The Territorial Clause is evidently replete with gaping loopholes, which have been shamelessly exploited to provide arm’s length German state sponsorship to completely illegal Zionist settlement expansion all along. Strikingly, this ambiguity is in itself in contravention of the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion. The Court specifically honed in on the Zionist entity’s life-threatening restriction of Palestinian water access within the Occupied Territories, as inconsistent with Tel Aviv’s obligations under international law. This may explain why MedWater, while formally undisguised, remained effectively secret for so long.

To get to the bottom of the project, investigators drew on a diverse corpus of information. This included MedWater reports filed with Germany’s research ministry - some not intended for public view, and released in redacted form - presentation materials from numerous project conferences throughout its development, since-memoryholed websites, and peer-reviewed publications by German and Israeli participants. No mainstream outlet has hitherto reported not merely on MedWater, but any illegal German state investment in academic research projects expediting Zionist settlement expansion.

An initiative to better manage water resources may seem benign, anywhere in the world. But MedWater was born in a context of methodical, longstanding Zionist denial of Palestinian access to water, and a segregationist legal apparatus directly assisting Jewish settlement, particularly in regard to vital natural resources. In August 1967, two months after the West Bank’s occupation began, Zionist Occupation Forces issued Military Order 92, seizing total control of water resources in territory they illegally controlled.

Three months later, Military Order 158 further prohibited Palestinians throughout the West Bank from constructing new water installations and/or associated infrastructure, without first securing a permit from the ZOF. Amnesty International judges such permissions “near impossible to obtain.” Deliberately intended to deprive Palestinians of water, Zionists are of course not subject to equivalent constraints. Concurrently, Mekorot has over the past four-and-a-half decades deliberately sabotaged Palestinian wells, while tapping occupied West Bank springs to supply the entity, and criminal Jewish settlers, with water.

This in itself produces an apartheid in daily water consumption. Zionists, including settlers, use an average of 247 litres of water a day per person - three times that of Palestinians in the West Bank, at 82.4 litres. Palestinian water consumption collapses to just 26 litres per capita on average daily, in communities unconnected to the territory’s water grid. Such consumption is comparable to active disaster zones. Mekorot also routinely shuts off supply to Palestinian communities when reserves run low, such as during summer.

‘European DNA’

The Zionist strategy is gruesomely simple - neutralise Palestinian control over the West Bank’s water resources and progressively diminish their access, creating an environment in which their lands become literally uninhabitable and they’re forced to leave. Research jointly published by the UN and Germany’s federal institute for geosciences and natural resources indicates 212 million cubic metres of water flows from the West Bank to Israel annually. The report also records how since 1967, Palestinians “have not been authorised to drill a single well” locally.

All along, discriminatory laws and ratcheting settler land grabs have increasingly deprived Palestinians of access to other basic fundamentals of existence too. An ever-expanding network of ZOF checkpoints and roadblocks, combined with prejudicial, arbitrary restrictions on movement, vandalism and demolition of farming machinery, greenhouses, and roads, and savage Occupation Force and settler violence makes it progressively dangerous if not impossible for farmers to tend crops or rear livestock. Palestine’s agricultural industry is all but decimated, with Zionists literally harvesting the pestilential spoils.

That these genocidal machinations have persisted untrammelled over decades is a testament to the total impunity with which Israel is permitted to act by its international proxy sponsors - Germany being a particularly perverse example. Proudly, it is the only country to make public remembrance of its criminal past the cornerstone of its collective national identity. But Berlin’s much-vaunted “memory culture” invariably entails atoning for historic sins by encouraging and undergirding comparable contemporary crimes, as long as they’re committed by the Zionist entity.

WaterMed is a minor fragment of an unspoken, wider infrastructure of German state-supported repression and erasure of Palestinians, sustained via little-known partnerships and joint research efforts with Zionist entity-based universities and institutions. A new initiative, Academic Complicity, exposes how dozens of German higher education facilities have over many years conducted deeply dubious projects large and small one way or another justifying and aiding Palestine’s neverending erasure. One would hope this might trigger accountability and consequences for Berlin, given her unambiguous domestic and international legal obligations.

However, the bonds between Germany and the Zionist entity are so deep and cohering, they transcend trivial considerations of law, or ethicality. In October 2025, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo made a number of highly revealing disclosures on how his personal and professional experience has convinced him “Germans are committed to Israel.” He explained, “our DNA is much closer to the European DNA than the American one,” as “most of the Jews who settled in Israel came from Europe…not North America”:

Over the past two decades, hardline Ukrainian ultranationalists have waged an ever-escalating war on history at home and abroad, with dramatic, world-changing consequences. In the country itself, a highly repressive legal apparatus is increasingly enforcing dangerously skewed narratives of Kiev’s near and distant past, with excessive criminal penalties even for those who unwittingly fall foul of the law. A brazenly politicised battle, it has become turbocharged since the Ukraine proxy conflict’s eruption. Despite widespread opposition, Kiev’s aggressive ultranationalist offensive on history is only intensifying.

These are the grave findings of an extraordinary paper by Ukrainian academic Georgiy Kasianov, “To discipline and punish”: A punitive turn in the memory politics in Ukraine, 2006–2025. As the author notes, the weaponisation of law in service of memory politics is common in Central and Eastern Europe. At least nine countries in the region boast legislation prohibiting public displays of Communist and Nazi symbols, which underpins local ultranationalist efforts - eagerly endorsed by the EU - to perversely conflate the two ideologies as comparable totalitarianisms.

Moreover, in many cases - especially the Baltics - these laws are components of wider cultural and legal ecosystems glorifying Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators as heroic freedom fighters, while strictly limiting discourse about World War II to conceal local culpability for macabre crimes. As such, Kasianov writes, Ukraine’s “punitive model of memory politics” fits into “a broader post-Communist pattern of state-enforced historical narratives.” Yet, “in its severity, selectivity, ideological and bureaucratic instrumentalization,” Kiev’s war on history “represents a particularly radical and revealing case.”

Today, Ukraine “leads Europe in the number of judicial decisions concerning violations of criminal statutes specifically designed to prohibit certain historical symbols,” with criminal penalties for breaching “memory laws” being the continent’s “most severe.” Kasianov traces this state of affairs to the mid-2000s, when Western-installed President Viktor Yushchenko’s government sought to implement laws “institutionalizing” the Soviet Union’s 1930 - 1933 famine as a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians specifically engineered by Joseph Stalin. It is known within Ukraine, and increasingly internationally, as “Holodomor”.

While the famine and resultant mass death was produced and exacerbated by catastrophic human errors combined with adverse natural factors, few historians consider the horror to have been intentional. Markedly, Kazakhs and Russians also perished in vast numbers. As of November 2022, just 23 UN member states have recognised Holodomor as a genocide - most being Kiev’s close allies, post-Maidan. Nonetheless, prominent Western sources state axiomatically the famine was deliberately inflicted, part of a wider ongoing Russian and/or Soviet effort to erase Ukraine.

Meanwhile, ultranationalist claims of how many Ukrainians were supposedly killed by the famine have grown ever-wilder, with some sources placing the figure as high as 10 million. This is several times the multiethnic death toll typically accepted by scholars, conveniently framing the so-called Holodomor as a greater targeted crime against humanity than the Holocaust. Yuschenko’s foray into memory politics contributed significantly to this warped contemporary informational climate. Still, 2006 legislation formally designating Holodomor as genocidal didn’t include punitive measures for denying or questioning that characterisation.

Kasianov documents how over the next 14 years, 13 separate attempts were made to criminalise “Holodomor denial” by ultranationalist Ukrainian elements within and without government and parliament. Each effort sought to impose “a state-sanctioned historical orthodoxy” around Holodomor, while “[constraining] scholarly debate and freedom of expression.” None received approval from parliament’s “legal analytical department”, but ultranationalist memory politics ultimately prevailed on a cultural and political level locally, and beyond. Notably, many of these initiatives were sponsored by the openly Neo-Nazi political party Svoboda.

‘Political Repression’

Svoboda played a substantial role in the Western-orchestrated 2014 Maidan coup, which not coincidentally “created a fertile environment for reframing memory politics as an instrument of state security and ideological consolidation.” The government of Petro Poroshenko justified the “rapid passage of a package of laws aimed at condemning [Communism] and institutionalizing a nationalist historical narrative” as a “necessary defensive measure” and “nation-building project,” countering supposed “external aggression” from Russia. This led to the adoption of hitherto unthinkable legislation in April 2015.

These hastily passed laws equated Communism with Nazism, prohibiting the public display of symbols associated with both ideologies. Yet, Kasianov notes the legislation “also granted legal and moral rehabilitation” to mass-murdering, Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian nationalist factions heavily implicated in the Holocaust. This included Stepan Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, and its armed Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) wing. Moreover, despite the law’s formal dual condemnation of Communism and Nazism, Kasianov details how “its implementation and symbolic focus reveal a stark imbalance.”

Approximately 90% of the legislation’s text “is dedicated to defining and enumerating Communist symbols, while Nazi symbols are addressed in relatively minimal and largely perfunctory terms.” Nazi-related prohibitions are “limited to the most universally recognized insignia of the Third Reich, such as the swastika.” By contrast, “the law offers an expansive and detailed catalog of banned Soviet insignia, ranging from the hammer and sickle to red stars and Soviet-era street names.” This “obvious asymmetry” extends even further.

Symbols associated with local Neo-Nazi groups, or formal World War II-era collaborationist Ukrainian military units such as SS Division Galicia, are spared from proscription entirely. “Legal and policy experts and Ukrainian and international human rights organizations” have all expressed concerns over the law’s “vague definitions,” and “potential misuse for political repression.” The Ukrainian Rada’s own “expert department” found the legislation conflicted with Kiev’s established constitution, and numerous existing domestic laws.

Disproportionately harsh punishments for infringements, with offenders facing prison sentences of up to five years along with property confiscation, also drew widespread criticism. A lawyer and lecturer at Lviv National University strikingly compared the penalties involved to “using a guillotine to treat a headache.” A damning open letter signed by a welter of academics and policymakers dubbed the legislation “an instrument of ideological purification, selectively targeting the symbols and narratives associated with the political left while allowing for the implicit valorization of radical nationalist traditions.”

These devastating indictments were dismissed by the law’s advocates as “Kremlin propaganda”, if not outright treason. Kasianov reveals how “principal architects” of Poroshenko’s “Decommunization” agenda were a coterie of ultranationalist “memory activists”, drawn from the Lviv-based Center for Research on the Liberation Movement, and Youth Nationalist Congress. Both maintain “close ideological and organizational ties” with, operating as “facade organizations” for, the Banderite OUN. The pair have long-served as “conduits for nationalist reinterpretation of 20th century Ukrainian history and strong anti-Communist and anti-Russian policies.”

‘Memory Regime’

Post-Maidan, “several leading figures from this milieu assumed influential positions within state institutions, shaping historical policy.” This included extensive infiltration of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (UINP), the state body charged with implementing memory laws. Then-Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych of Neo-Nazi Svoboda appointed OUN-linked figures to influential positions within UINP. Not coincidentally, Sych cofounded the fascist, pro-Maidan Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, an OUN-B “political facade”. Once their long-sought anti-Communist legislation was enacted, enforcement came thick and fast.

From November 2015 - spring 2016, almost 52,000 toponymical objects, 32 cities, 955 villages and settlements, and 25 administrative districts were renamed, with 2,389 monuments and memorial plaques to “totalitarian leaders” dismantled. In all, 1,320 were Lenin statues. Between 2015 and 2021 too, Ukrainian police and the general prosecutor’s office registered 334 criminal cases against citizens related to the display of “totalitarian symbols” - “the vast majority of which concerned Communist imagery.” Details were almost invariably farcical.

In May 2017, a student narrowly avoided jail for posting Lenin quotes on Facebook. Under his plea deal, he publicly expressed “sincere remorse”, while his personal copy of Karl Marx’s Capital was destroyed. In June 2019, an unemployed man received a one year suspended prison sentence for wearing an old T-shirt featuring the Soviet coat of arms while washing windows. In March 2021, a Lviv resident was sentenced to one year’s probation after being “detained by politically vigilant local citizens” for wearing a USSR emblem.

In the meantime, further legislation was passed by Kiev sacralising ultranationalist historical narratives. Lack of political pushback was in no small part assured by Ukraine’s Communist party being banned in December 2015. The same openly fascist and Neo-Nazi elements behind Poroshenko’s “Decommunization” push successfully sponsored laws granting OUN and UPA genocidaires official combatant status and veteran benefits. Now insulated from legal consequences for any atrocities they committed, Ukrainian state sources universally describe them as “heroes” who fought for their country’s “independence”.

The volume of cases brought under “Decommunization” laws, and severity of the punishments involved, ratcheted significantly following the Ukraine proxy war’s eruption. Authorities were handed an ideal rationale for further assaulting history, while waging war on enemies within, under the guise of “derussification and decolonization.” In keeping with the “near-absence of prosecutions for Nazi-related offenses” pre-conflict, in over 300 criminal cases brought to trial 2022 - 2025, fewer than 10 involved Nazi symbols. The vast majority “concerned the dissemination of prohibited [Communist] symbols on social media platforms.”

Today, even simply liking social media posts featuring Soviet symbols can land Ukrainians in court. Kasianov notes how “case materials” have “indicated the emergence of specialized investigators…focused on monitoring digital communications and online content,” within the ranks of both police and the SBU security service. Concomitantly, there has been an ever-rising growth in “vigilant citizens” reporting acquaintances, coworkers, and neighbours to authorities for breaching Kiev’s stringent memory laws. “Overwhelmingly”, individuals “from marginalized and impoverished segments of the population” have been targeted.

Ever since Maidan, Kiev’s “punitive memory regime” and “nationalist identity project” has been wholeheartedly embraced and promoted by her Western proxy sponsors. No wonder - the legally-enforced, distorted narrative Ukraine is fighting a battle for its very existence, and ultimate liberation from “Russian imperialism”, ensures the war will continue in perpetuity. All along, distorted “memory politics” becomes more entrenched and rabid at the country’s highest levels, leaving Ukraine’s population - and the wider world - at the mercy of a dangerous and deranged ultranationalist clique.

Independent journalist David Hundeyin has exposed the Pentagon’s new psychological operations unit targeting Africa, “Drongo Company”. Tasked with “expanding the military’s ability to influence foreign audiences” across the continent, its heavily hyped launch occurs against a backdrop of dramatically and irreversibly waning Western influence and power in every sphere across the continent. As Africans steadily rid themselves of unwelcome foreign occupiers and oppressors, the US is forced to rely on strategies of manipulation to stem the tide, which have already failed spectacularly. They will surely misfire yet again.

Based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina - home to AFRICOM - Drongo Company’s nickname is inspired by a bird native to Africa, known for precisely imitating other species’ warning calls, and using other deception tactics to drive other animals away from food. The Pentagon reportedly “selected the name to reflect the unit’s focus on influencing perceptions and behavior.” Fittingly, a May 2014 Science paper found the drongo can mimic other species’ sounds and manipulate adversaries with unparalleled, almost human sophistication.

Task & Purpose notes Drongo Company’s creation “comes amid a shift in US military strategy in Africa,” which is quite an understatement. Washington is on the run across the continent, with combat units and occupation forces being withdrawn from multiple countries over recent years. In September 2024, over 1,000 soldiers departed Niger, while a $100 million drone base was abandoned. An anti-ISIS mission in Nigeria controversially launched this March was abruptly terminated in July, due to a cataclysmic inability to achieve its objectives.

Drongo Company is an attempt by the Empire to reassert narrative dominance over Africa, as its military capabilities across the continent and beyond constantly shrink in size and potency. An official US Army report openly states, “the art of psyops relies on persuasion rather than physical force.” This entails the exploitation of “mental factors…to evoke specific emotions, attitudes and behaviors.” The ultimate goal “is to persuade enemy, neutral and friendly nations and forces to take favorable actions toward the US and its allies.”

An AFRICOM factsheet on psyops claims local campaigns are targeted at militant groups, such as Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and ISIS. Parenthetical mention is also made to “malign state actors” being targets, in the context of advancing “US interests.” As a Military.com report acknowledges, this is a reference to “competition with foreign governments.” Specifically, “Russia and China have expanded their political, economic and security activities across Africa” in recent years, which the Empire has been singularly unable to counter via military force.

Drongo Company is thus being deployed for “an information contest that extends beyond conventional battlefields.” The Pentagon is extremely sensitive, however, to “skeptical audiences” seeing through their psyops. Military.com further notes while AFRICOM claims its psychological operations adhere strictly to US law and Pentagon policies prohibiting targeting US citizens, these prohibitions only apply to intended audiences. There are no mechanisms in place preventing Stateside spectators being deluged - theoretically illegally - with Drongo Company’s sophisticated, clandestine military psychological warfare offensives, especially online.

Quite some informational assault is planned. Drongo Company will wage its psyops campaigns via “both established and emerging communication technologies…[including] print media, radio broadcasts, text messaging, direct engagement, television programming, social media platforms, and online resources.” These information sources will be blitzed with “persuasive messages intended to change how selected audiences think or act.” The need to “ensure targeted audiences consider…messages credible” is of paramount importance. After all, “adversaries or skeptical audiences” will reflexively dismiss obvious “American propaganda”:

‘Role Players’

Strikingly, Drongo Company is formally part of the US Army’s notorious 7th Psychological Operations Battalion. The Pentagon’s premier psychological warfare unit, since May 2022 7th POB has released a series of disturbing, abstract recruitment videos. In the first, dramatic, rapid cut scenes are interspersed with eerie, monochrome cartoon clips, backed by an aggressive soundtrack. All along, text on the screen proclaims:

Despite such ominous hype, Drongo Company’s activation suggests a longstanding, initially much-vaunted 7th POB unit previously “forged for Africa” operational from 2017 onwards fell far short of its bold objectives. In February that year, the US Army published an essay celebrating the new psyops division’s launch. It revealed how the unit’s operatives were deployed “into the gray zones of Africa where alliances can be fluid and the people are as diverse as the many landscapes,” following elaborate training exercises in Florida:

Hence, training saw 7th Psychological Operations Battalion operatives deployed to simulated environments in the fictional African nation of Conch Republic. Under the exercise’s auspices, “the government of Conch had requested support from the US Embassy” to combat “a bevy of societal problems from drug trafficking to domestic terrorism.” It featured live-action components, in which US police, Navy operatives and African “civic leaders” were “role players”, with detailed characters.

Their roles included “local radio disc jockeys, roving reporters, and even the police” in the fictional African country, who “would ambush teams in broad daylight and attempt to gain information, curry favor, or even solicit a bribe to make a tough situation disappear.” A synthetic local social media infrastructure was also constructed - “a dynamic, reactive and proactive environment…with analogs to Facebook, Twitter, and even Craigslist.” Through this online nexus, the Battalion could “affect and inform” different Conch Republic audiences.

The social media simulation reportedly “provided an invaluable feedback mechanism that showed which messages were heard and to what extent they were understood.” Elsewhere, “the unit broke new ground…through the use of new communications equipment and series development software,” utilising a variety of “information transmission devices…useful in influence campaigns.” Resultantly, 7th POB operatives could supposedly “hit the ground” when deployed to Africa, delivering “cogent, impactful” psyops “aimed right at the heart of the population”:

‘Indigenous Approach’

The US Army essay on 7th POB’s then-new African assignment revealed, “there’s a saying in the PSYOP community” - “[Army Special Operations Forces] makes change happen. PSYOP makes change last.” A senior military advisor to the division boasted how 7th POB’s activities represented the apotheosis of US psychological operations - “a place where science and technique blend.” The essay bombastically concluded by characterising psyops as “the long game, where changes in behavior are measured not over a deployment, but often over years.”

Judged by this metric, the “long game” played by 7th POB throughout the continent over the past decade has been decisively lost. In May, AFRICOM commander Dagvin Anderson laid bare in Congressional testimony how a “75% reduction” in US military and intelligence “posture” regionally during this time - “coupled with a drawdown of allies in the region” - has produced an imperial “black hole” in Africa. He lamented at length how this gaping chasm in Western dominance has been rapidly filled by China, Iran and Russia.

Beijing’s “aggressive investments” in Africa’s “mining, infrastructure, and transportation sectors” have supplanted Western control over “critical minerals and strategic infrastructure.” On top of major profit hits and supply chain disruption, China’s increasing domination in industrial fields reliant on these resources - ranging from “electric vehicles, consumer electronics, and advanced military technologies” - represents “a structural vulnerability for the US Defense Industrial Base.” Meanwhile, Russia’s rising economic and military footprint on the continent is “undermining US influence and limiting NATO’s reach on its southern flank.”

Anderson claimed Russian paramilitary forces “insulate and protect regimes” in Africa with which Moscow has close relations, “under the guise of counter-terrorism operations.” However, the AFRICOM chief contradictorily acknowledged the threat of extremist militancy throughout the region Russian military advisors seek to deter is very real. In particular, Anderson cited how Al Qaeda-affiliate JNIM aims to destabilise the revolutionary governments of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, to the “extent of securing the resources and trappings of a nation state” in the manner of ISIS.

AFRICOM’s commander neglected to mention how France and Ukraine have heavily supported JNIM’s counter-revolutionary activities in the Sahel. An April essay published by Militarnyi, Kiev’s most prominent military news site, makes clear the objective of these military and intelligence machinations is out-and-out regime change, explicitly in service of furthering the Empire’s interests in Africa. Drongo Company must be understood as the psychological warfare component of this proxy assault on the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), and continent more widely.

Evidently, Africans must remain vigilant. Counter-revolutionary forces seen and unseen are perpetually on the offensive, determined to shatter national and continental unity, strangle sovereignty, and ensure the region remains dominated by pliant and brutal puppet regimes facilitating untrammelled Western economic rape and pillage. Yet, 7th POB’s supposed “cultural training, language proficiency, and indigenous approach” from 2017 onwards soundtracked an absolutely extraordinary collapse in the Empire’s clout throughout Africa. Drongo Company’s repeat attempt may terminate with Washington’s final, long-overdue retreat from the continent entirely.

Donald Trump entered the July 7th/8th NATO summit having recently condemned the alliance as a “paper tiger” over its collective failure to abet the calamitous Zionist-American war on Iran, repeatedly threatened to withdraw US forces from Europe, with reveries of Greenland’s annexation still abounding. He left boasting of the intense “love” and “unity” within NATO, while praising member states for their reaffirmed commitment to spending ever-increasingly vast sums on ‘defence’. Meanwhile, the Ukraine proxy war’s world-threatening continuation appears assured for potentially years to come.

As such, the NATO summit signifies a significant triumph in Britain’s neverending battle to exploit the US Empire to further her own objectives. Highly revealing leaked files amply spell out how the alliance is a key mechanism by which Washington’s “interest” in Europe and West Asia is insidiously maintained, via London’s covert and overt machinations. NATO provides an invaluable “umbrella”, by which Britain projects economic, intelligence, military, and political power throughout these regions and the wider world, while countering competitors.

The documents were authored in March 2021 by Chris Donnelly, a veteran British military intelligence apparatchik who masterminded NATO expansion into the former Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s. Now an influential Ministry of Defence advisor guiding London and Kiev’s escalatory strategies in the proxy war, he writes in the leaks of Britain’s perpetual struggle to retain the “security” provided by “US military power.” This, combined with access to Washington’s globe-spanning intelligence network, “underpins our own position in the world.”

From Britain’s perspective, “the political solidarity between member nations” within NATO, and “the permanent political and military mechanisms that enable collaboration between its members and with its partners,” are as vitally important as the alliance’s capacity for “collective defence and security.” For example, “interoperability” between NATO members is considered “both a political and a military asset” and “valuable product”, enabling countries “with vastly different political and military systems to operate together.” That includes “[undertaking] complex and stressful military activities,” and other joint functions.

This makes NATO “a civilian-led political organisation…whose main tool is armed force,” intimately entrenched within its 32 members. Lacking any democratic structures internally and accountable to none externally, the alliance exerts enormous, often unseen influence over members’ constituent governments, security and intelligence services, militaries, police forces, and more. These “extensive political collaborative mechanisms” mean states can be corralled into adopting policies or taking actions regardless of local public will, or whether such moves actively harm their safety and/or national interests.

Background Briefing On Nato's Evolution And Current Challenges

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“Without the US, there is no NATO,” Donnelly notes. Hence, to “keep the US interested” in the alliance - and Europe by extension - Washington “must see a return on its (still very large and disproportionate) investment.” The 2026 NATO summit ended with European leaders pledging to plunge tens of billions into US-made military equipment for Kiev over this year and next, a prospect offering Washington quite some “return”. But the British have other means of encouraging and maintaining US hegemony, for their personal profit.

‘Symmetrical Exchange’

Elsewhere, Donnelly writes of the “special relationship” - the “political/military/security/intelligence” alliance between Britain and the US, “which has existed since World War II.” He notes how from inception, Washington was driven “by how much the US needed something from the UK to help the US develop and maintain its superpower status.” In other words, “what the UK could provide the US…the US could not itself produce.” Accordingly, London “traditionally contributed” its historical “knowledge and experience” to Washington’s crusade for global domination.

Restoring The Special Relationship

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This frequently entailed “intelligence-gathering and analysis; technical expertise, especially inventiveness, ideas and scientific information; the experience of having dealt with a situation new to the US.” Meanwhile, “political and military support” was provided by London “wherever this supported US policy interests and to help the US get what it wanted in the world.” While Britain’s methods in every regard have evolved significantly over time, these ultimate underpinning and overriding objectives in so many matters military, intelligence, foreign and even domestic have not changed:

Donnelly frames this concord as a perpetual “barter deal” - not a “symmetrical exchange” or “issue of cost and payment”, as “if the US can buy what it is deficient in on the world market, then there is no basis for the ‘special relationship’.” He references Britain’s consistent “willingness and ability to deploy a significant contingent of effective army…to reinforce US military operations…readiness to share casualties…[and] continued readiness to host US forces on UK soil or on overseas dependencies” as historic pull factors.

Britain can also “employ other kinds of power to achieve an effect which supports US policy or interests.” This includes “economic power, political influence, a technical ability, such as cyber-warfare, or a civilian state-building or humanitarian relief capability.” Accordingly, files leaked by Edward Snowden indicate British signals intelligence agency GCHQ is acutely aware it “must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight” by its NSA ‘partner’, to reap vast US funding for elaborate foreign spying operations. Donnelly concludes:

‘Defense Capabilities’

On the subject of renewal, Donnelly lamented how London’s utility to the US Empire had been “significantly diminished” over recent years. This resulted from the British Army’s “indifferent military performance in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the “run-down of our intelligence capability,” and “the perception (on the part of the US and other allies) the UK is no longer investing sufficiently in its military to be able to play the leading role it used to do in Europe, both as an operator and as a technical innovator.”

Donnelly moreover noted Britain “used to be at the cutting edge of some aspects of military thinking,” but had in many respects “lost this edge.” For example, “we can no longer instruct the US on how best to conduct counter-insurgency operations.” Furthermore, the “special relationship” was “put under pressure” by President Barack Obama’s “reorientation of US strategy to focus on China.” Instituted in 2011, this “pivot to the Pacific” was sustained under subsequent administrations, with varying degrees of intensity.

Donnelly cheered how “the Ukraine and Syrian conflicts have reawakened US interest a little” in Europe and West Asia, meaning “Russia can no longer be ignored” by Washington. Nonetheless, he warned “we have not yet turned the corner.” Unmentioned by Donnelly was his personal role in disrupting Washington’s “pivot” towards China by inflaming the Donbass civil war, to ensure the Empire didn’t “ignore” Russia. He openly articulated this malign mission while testifying to a British parliamentary defence committee in July 2014.

Donnelly proposed establishing a permanent British “standing force” in the Baltics, to conduct military exercises on Russia’s border, while serving as a “tripwire” to “dissuade and deter” Moscow. He believed it “very important” for London to pursue this strategy, as “Britain’s leadership…will encourage the Americans to take a greater interest in NATO and reinforce their support of the organisation.” He added, “we have an important role to play in bringing the Americans in more,” as “US eyes” had recently been directed “away from Europe.”

Resultantly, London provocatively dispatched thousands of soldiers to Russia’s periphery. Moreover, Britain took the lead in training Ukrainian forces - including notorious Neo-Nazi paramilitary factions such as Azov Battalion. At the time, Washington adhered to the “Obama Doctrine”, which stipulated the US should avoid escalation against Moscow, and prohibited provision of “lethal aid” and other military assistance to Kiev. A February 2015 Kyiv Post report on Britain’s training program quoted Donnelly at length, suggesting his central involvement in its delivery:

As Donnelly predicted in his defence committee testimony, Britain’s tutelage of Ukrainian forces had the desired effect of “bringing the Americans in more.” In July 2015, it was announced the US would formally begin training Kiev’s military by the end of the year. Still, a State Department spokesperson stressed the effort was merely “small unit training...to help strengthen Ukraine’s internal defense capabilities.” They firmly asserted Washington’s focus in the country remained on “nonlethal aid” and “there is no plan to change that.”

Fast forward to December 2017, and Trump greenlit provision of weaponry to Kiev. It was among a number of hostile acts during his first term that ratcheted tensions between Washington and Moscow, placing Ukraine firmly on the warpath with Russia. The recent NATO summit, and subsequent pledges by the US to assist Ukraine directly with drone and patriot missile production, shows the Empire has “turned the corner” at last. US “interest” in Europe is assured, for at least as long as the proxy conflict endures.

In recent years, the Palestinian Civil Defence has been presented by Western media and rights groups as a vital volunteer emergency service, operating out of Lebanon’s myriad refugee camps. First on the scene of major disasters, including the officially unsolved August 2020 Beirut blast, the group has provided news outlets with first-person disaster footage, while apparently winning hearts and minds among the country’s diverse population. But behind the PCD’s noble facade lurks a sinister British intelligence project, exploiting local Palestinian resistance to neutralise Hezbollah.

The PCD has invited comparisons with Syria’s notorious White Helmets, and this is no coincidence. ARK, a ubiquitous British intelligence contractor founded by MI6 veteran Alistair Harris, was behind the creation of both groups. An entry on ARK’s website outlining the firm’s experience of creating “search and rescue teams” overseas notes the Syrian White Helmets’ success directly inspired the PCD’s 2014 founding. The Western state-funded “programme” that created the Syrian ‘humanitarian’ group was “expanded” specifically to repeat the exercise, in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps.

A little-remembered controversy over the White Helmets related to its formal name, Syrian Civil Defence, being indistinguishable from the country’s established civil defence force. On the ground reporting from Vanessa Beeley indicated extremist groups murdered the state’s emergency and medical workers, before stealing their equipment, uniforms and ambulances to found the White Helmets. Beirut’s PCD similarly emulates the long-established Palestinian Civil Defence’s name, a rescue group operating in both Gaza and the West Bank. Is this similarly a malicious attempt to falsely conflate the pair?

Like the White Helmets, Lebanon’s PCD aims to be an alternative, quasi-state structure, advancing regime change objectives. The PCD very visibly provides parallel services to those proffered by Hezbollah. The Resistance group’s Islamic Health Organization, Risala Scout Association and civil defence units are typically responsible for rescuing civilians from rubble, extinguishing fires, and other emergencies. Such provision has significantly bolstered Hezbollah’s support across Lebanon’s multifaith society, problematically for Western powers - including Britain - which desperately want the Resistance faction crippled politically and militarily.

Medics and rescue workers tied to Hezbollah’s healthcare and civil defense wings have been deliberately targeted unrelentingly ever since Tel Aviv’s October 2024 invasion of Lebanon. Much of the country’s south remains cut off from emergency services following Israel’s latest incursion and occupation. The Zionist entity and its Western puppetmasters have made withdrawal from Lebanon contingent on Hezbollah’s neutralisation. While debates about the practicality and plausibility of disarming the Resistance group abound throughout the West, the PCD stands ever-primed to supplant Hezbollah’s frontline duties.

‘Offering Hope’

An October 2020 MERIP puff piece reports how when the Beirut blast occurred two months earlier, PCD operatives bolted from their refugee camps to immediately respond to the crisis. They were thereafter supposedly “celebrated as heroes in Lebanon” for their humanitarian efforts. This included rescuing civilians from rubble created by the historically devastating eruption, which killed at least 218 people, injured 7,000, displaced 300,000, and inflicted property damage estimated at $15 billion.

The PCD’s establishment was traced by MERIP to “the international community’s humanitarian response to the Syrian refugee crisis,” which provided a vast budget for civil society projects in affected countries, particularly Lebanon. The PCD was reportedly “the most ambitious” of the efforts resultantly launched. The group not only “[filled] an important gap by offering disaster relief in areas abandoned by the state,” but was also intended to blunt purportedly “rampant factionalism” in Lebanon’s refugee camps, and society more generally.

MERIP hinted at the variety of “factionalism” the PCD was ostensibly set up to counter. The outlet noted the group was active in refugee camps that served as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s “primary base” for “armed struggle against Israel,” and remained dominated by anti-Zionist elements. The Beirut blast serendipitously planted the “non-factional” PCD on the map. Having been outfitted with ambulances and a fire truck by ARK well in advance, the group was perfectly positioned to “pick up wounded in the city center.”

However, the PCD reportedly ran head-first into a “cold reception” from a “hostile bureaucracy”. Their status as refugees and lack of identification papers meant Lebanese authorities on the scene did not welcome their presence, ordering them to leave. Undeterred, the group’s leader Hussein Dimasi made urgent calls to state officials. “A line of contact” between Beirut’s General Directorate of General Security and the PCD was established, “which put Dimasi in charge of the rescue mission.” This connection granted the group state approval ever after.

The PCD’s MI6 veteran founder, Alistair Harris, effusively cheered his creation’s practical, political, and propaganda success in a November 2020 article for emergency industry journal Crisis Response. After being praised by the UN for its “pivotal role” tackling Lebanese wildfires the year prior, and the PCD’s ranks having “swelled with Palestinian youths” following the Beirut blast, the group had by then “reset their sights on tackling the Covid-19 public health emergency.” This included producing and distributing free facemasks, with funding from Britain’s Beirut embassy.

Harris fawned how the group’s blast response was “extraordinary and heartening, helping to shatter long-held prejudices with acts of selflessness and offering hope for the future.” The PCD reportedly “grabbed their boots and helmets and ran towards the chaos” without fear. Their recording equipment wasn’t noted, although Harris gushed over how the group’s rescue of “one survivor in particular” was rewarded with “international attention.” In September 2020, the BBC produced a slick package on this rescue, watched by hundreds of thousands on Facebook.

‘British Inspectors’

At this time, a vicious blame game over responsibility for the Beirut blast had ignited. Numerous sources within Lebanon, including state officials, claimed without evidence the detonated ammonium nitrate belonged to Hezbollah, which the Resistance group failed to securely store over the six years it was impounded in the Port of Beirut. The US made similar allegations, wildly linking the explosion to alleged Iranian-supplied weapons supposedly provided to Hezbollah and secretly stored not just throughout Lebanon, but across Europe.

Israel likewise consistently blamed Hezbollah for the blast, while claiming the group had assassinated Lebanese activists, journalists and customs officials “because they knew more than they should have about the Beirut Port explosion.” By contrast, Hezbollah levelled no charges publicly, and supposedly ruled out Tel Aviv’s involvement, despite the incident being openly celebrated by Zionists. Today, it remains unpunished. We are left to ponder whether British intelligence played any role. Given the White Helmets’ Syrian activities, the PCD’s instant post-blast presence is deeply disquieting.

As White Helmets co-chief Emma Winberg, an admitted MI6 officer, explained in a June 2018 talk convened by the NATO-connected Atlantic Council think tank, the group - like Lebanon’s PCD - was equipped with cameras to capture “rescue footage of the bombing of civilian areas.” This allowed for “distribution of content right at the scene of incidents,” and documentation of “potential” International Humanitarian Law violations. After all, as “first responders” the White Helmets were “naturally at the event,” each and every time.

From 2015 onwards, Winberg revealed, the White Helmets began collecting evidence on behalf of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Footage and physical evidence captured by the group of purported nerve agent and chlorine attacks informed the outcome of OPCW investigations, which invariably convicted the Syrian government. It was a position ripe for abuse. When OPCW investigators personally visited the site of an alleged March 2018 chemical attack in Douma, they found ample evidence the entire event had been staged by opposition elements.

However, the OCPW’s official report concluded the alleged chlorine strike was very real, and Bashar Assad’s forces were responsible. These findings were based exclusively on witnesses, photos, videos, and chemical samples provided to the organisation directly by the White Helmets and their leader, James Le Mesurier, Winberg’s husband and an ARK veteran. Politico has revealed how he once “hand-delivered unexploded chemical weapons ordnance in the trunk of a rental car to British inspectors.” Le Mesurier died in Istanbul in strange circumstances, in November 2019.

Markedly, the PCD’s typically highly active, British intelligence-constructed social media channels have remained largely silent since Israel’s avowedly genocidal March invasion. Despite vast numbers of Lebanese civilians killed and injured, over a million displaced, apartment blocks horrifically flattened, and Palestinian refugee camps deliberately targeted, the PCD apparently hasn’t seen fit to run to the rescue this time round. No wonder - despite purportedly being “first responders”, the PCD was not founded by ARK to document, let alone intervene against, the Zionist entity’s unspeakable, manifold crimes.

Syria’s White Helmets now not only comprise the occupied country’s national emergency services, but are being deployed overseas on supposed “international humanitarian operations.” In Lebanon, an identical regime change apparatus has been constructed, hidden in plain sight, awaiting an anti-Hezbollah administration in Beirut sufficiently servile from the perspective of London, Washington and Tel Aviv. The Resistance shows no sign of backing down against renewed Zionist-American aggression. The PCD and their British intelligence sponsors are surely waiting for a day that will never come.

On June 27th, a plane ferrying a “specialized” team of “highly trained search and rescue specialists” flew into Venezuela from Damascus. Dispatched at putative Syrian leader Ahmad al-Sharaa’s direct order, the 15-strong group is assisting disaster efforts launched by Caracas in response to devastating twin earthquakes. Among them are members of the notorious White Helmets. A bogus humanitarian group constructed by MI6, they played a central role in Britain’s protracted coup of Bashar Assad. Are the White Helmets similarly in Venezuela to assist regime change?

State news agency Sana enthusiastically promoted the White Helmets’ arrival, celebrating “Syria’s first overseas humanitarian search-and-rescue deployment in modern history.” The expedition reportedly represents a “significant step” in the country’s “evolving humanitarian role” globally, underscoring “its growing capacity to contribute to international disaster response efforts.” The deployment is explicitly intended to “position” Damascus “as a contributor to international humanitarian operations,” capable of dispatching “search-and-rescue expertise” overseas to support “other nations in times of crisis.”

Sana highlighted the “exceptional field experience” of the White Helmets sent to Caracas, who reportedly acquired “advanced expertise in dealing with complex rubble and the extraction of trapped survivors” throughout the West’s dirty war against the now “deposed regime” of Assad. This “accumulated experience” has reportedly “enabled Syrian rescue specialists to participate in international emergency response missions,” with Venezuela being their debut. While Damascus provides “experienced rescue personnel,” key dirty war sponsor Qatar supplies “heavy machinery and specialized equipment required for field operations.”

The White Helmets will “work in close coordination” with international rescue units in shattered Caracas for up to 10 days, “with the possibility of extending the mission depending on operational requirements and developments on the ground.” An “operational requirement” of the rescuers may be assisting in the construction of quasi-state structures in Venezuela, ala Syria, ensuring Western powers have the requisite people, organisations and structures in place locally to take over when the embattled interim government of Delcy Rodríguez finally collapses.

As CNN has reported, “Rodríguez’s Venezuela is in such dire straits she can’t afford to reject aid from either friends or foes.” The White Helmets are a self-evident menace. The group was established in 2014 by ARK, a shadowy British intelligence cutout founded by MI6 veteran Alistair Harris. Over the subsequent decade, operating in areas controlled by foreign-backed extremists, the White Helmets played a major propaganda role in the dirty conflict against Assad.

Even more insidiously, the group and other ARK-created quasi-state structures shored up the dominance of Jahbat al-Nusra, which subsequently rebranded as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, before violently taking power in Damascus in December 2024. By providing state-like rescue services in HTS-occupied areas, the extremist faction’s credibility as a governance actor with local Syrians was significantly enhanced, to the extent HTS became “synonymous with opposition to Assad.” Leaked documents show British intelligence well-knew these activities assisted HTS’ “growing influence”, in the years leading up to Assad’s ouster.

Since then, the White Helmets have become Syria’s emergency services under al-Sharaa’s illegitimate rule. Meanwhile, fellow ARK construct the Free Syrian Police, with which the White Helmets worked hand-in-glove, has been anointed the country’s national police force. Separate leaks show this was Britain’s plan all along, with Damascus’ post-war “recovery” providing a beachhead for local MI6 assets to “[expand] into newly liberated territory” before all-out regime change. Venezuela’s recently-arrived planeload of White Helmets could represent a new, insidious front in the West’s long-running war on Chavismo.

‘Extremist Groups’

Leaked documents trace the White Helmets’ inception to a secret British program launched July 2013. Once constructed, the so-called Syrian Civil Defence enabled “direct and public linkages between donor funding and support to the Syrian opposition,” while “[enhancing] the legitimacy of local governance actors.” The group had strong links to, and worked in intimate conjunction with, Western-backed extremist groups, and foreign-created anti-Assad civil society and media operations. The White Helmets were a perfect conduit for opaquely funnelling aid and financial assistance to opposition-occupied territory.

Accordingly, the White Helmets were at the forefront of Britain’s covert push to create parallel state structures, in advance of the day Assad was finally ousted. A leaked file refers to how in April 2015, ARK mobilised its networks of Syrian opposition actors of every stripe, including the White Helmets, to gather information at the British government’s request on “the situation in Idlib city following its liberation.” This included insights on “humanitarian conditions and service provision, as well as the evolving governance and security space.”

With British, Japanese and US funding, and in close coordination with the Qatar-created Syrian National Coalition, ARK sought “to galvanise international attention on the issue of protection of civilians,” while “mobilising social media, the international press, global advocacy partners and private entrepreneurs” to promote the White Helmets. In 2014, ARK produced a documentary about the White Helmets, Digging for Life, which racked up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and elevated the group to international stardom.

In leaked files, ARK boasts about the “impact” such propaganda had within and without Syria. One film the intelligence cutout produced “on the indefatigable spirit of a struggling female protestor” prompted “the eruption of anti-regime protests” in Idlib in 2013 - “protestors chanted her name.” The same ARK staffer behind Digging for Life also produced a “documentary profile” of the Free Syrian Police. Like the White Helmets, the FSP was much-venerated by the Western media, and promoted by ARK via “posters, booklets and broadcast products.”

As with the White Helmets too, the reality of the FSP was considerably darker than what emerged in major news outlets - at least initially. From 2012 onwards, the force operated in close tandem with violent militant factions, and courts punishing residents of opposition-occupied territory under obscenely strict interpretations of Sharia Law. However, a March 2017 BBC profile of the FSP repeatedly stressed the force didn’t “carry weapons in order to administer law and order in the country,” or “cooperate with extremist groups.”

Nine months later though, the FSP’s intimate relationships with multiple ultra-violent militant sects, including HTS-forerunner Jabhat al-Nusra, were publicly revealed. This extended to assisting in the execution of women who disobeyed al-Nusra’s theocratic codes. These disclosures led to the suspension of British funding for the FSP, but this was reinstated within mere weeks as the force’s sinister alliance with extremist elements was “already known” to the Foreign Office. Indeed, the FSP’s entire purpose was assisting HTS and affiliated armed cliques in unseating Assad.

‘Service Delivery’

When the FSP’s true nature was publicly exposed, management of the project had been passed to British intelligence cutout Adam Smith International. Leaked ASI files from 2016 refer to the necessity of the FSP and other British ‘humanitarian’ initiatives supplanting “pre-2011” Syrian institutions, as part of a wider “expansion into newly liberated territory.” The White Helmets, FSP et al could “take advantage of systems and structures already in place…[demonstrating] the continuity of service delivery by the opposition rather than the regime,” the documents state.

The FSP formally absorbing Assad-era security infrastructure ensured “consistency between emerging police forces across opposition Syria, facilitating their future integration at the right moment.” More generally, it “[prepared] Syrian institutions for a peace agreement and transition.” The FSP could “inform as well as respond to the political process” - in other words, regime change. Meanwhile, it was forecast that “presenting a functioning yet consistent model in Syria’s liberated areas will strengthen the opposition and be the basis for a new civilian-led and accountable state security architecture”:

In January 2019, HTS took power outright in north west Syria. The FSP was instantly dissolved, its members continuing their activities under the al-Nusra successor’s banner. Leaked documents testify to how HTS was “less likely to attack” British intelligence-created “moderate opposition” entities, including the White Helmets, which “demonstrably [provided] key services” to the local population. After all, residents of HTS-occupied territory increasingly supported the militant group, precisely due to “receiving services” under HTS’ chaotic rule.

As MI6-conceived “moderate” service providers flourished under HTS, British intelligence cutouts produced slick propaganda for national and international dissemination, providing audiences with “compelling narratives and demonstrations of a credible alternative to the [Assad] regime.” A particular target were Syrians who may once have supported regime change in Damascus, but believed the “revolution is dead” in the wake of Assad declaring victory in December 2018, fighting effectively ceasing outright, and HTS- and Kurdish-dominated enclaves being left to their own devices.

Of course, the West’s insurrectionary assault on Syria was far from over. In lieu of kinetic conflict, brutal sanctions ensured what remained of the country’s once prosperous economy stayed shattered after almost a decade of grinding proxy war, while deliberately preventing reconstruction of its eviscerated industry, infrastructure, previously excellent public education and health systems, and much more besides. Conversely, with the help of British intelligence “service provision”, HTS ever-strengthened not merely within territory it occupied, but the country more widely.

Come December 2024, Damascus was so crippled HTS easily sent the Syrian Arab Army scurrying - with MI6’s constellation of ‘humanitarian’ groups ensuring “continuity of service delivery.” In Venezuela, authorities have been enfeebled by decades of US-led economic warfare, leaving them unable to respond vaguely adequately to the recent earthquakes. Collapsing the decayed vestiges of Caracas’ revolutionary system wouldn’t require military action, but an influx of foreign “service providers”. Syria’s MI6-installed government has the necessary experience to finish Delcy Rodríguez’s administration permanently, via “international humanitarian operations.”

On June 15th, two young Ukrainians were found guilty of conspiring to carry out arson attacks on two homes and a vehicle intimately connected to former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Curious details of the trial unreported in the mainstream, and a post-conviction propaganda blitz led by the BBC blaming Russian intelligence actors for directing the pair’s incendiary crimes, raise a number of ominous questions about precisely what happened, and why. The scandal is rendered all the more bewildering by Starmer’s June 22nd resignation.

On May 8th 2025, a Toyota car previously owned by the Prime Minister was set ablaze in north London, not far from where he’d previously resided. Three days later, flats in Islington Starmer managed years previously were similarly put to the torch, then on May 12th a home where he once resided now leased to his sister-in-law was also set ablaze. That same day, 22-year-old Ukrainian national Roman Lavrynovych was arrested by British police over the arson.

Despite the Prime Minister being personally targeted in a highly organised, repeated and potentially lethal manner, major news outlets within and without Britain exhibited bizarrely muted interest. Starmer describing the incidents in parliament on May 14th that year as “an attack on all of us, on democracy and the values that we stand for” - condemnation Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians echoed - elicited some headlines. However, basic facts about the case, and discussion of its obvious potential national security implications, remained stubbornly unforthcoming.

This seeming omerta endured when on May 17th, 26-year-old Ukrainian-born Romanian national Stanislav Carpiuc was arrested at Luton airport for his role in the attacks, attempting to flee. Four days later, 34-year-old Ukrainian national Petro Pochynok was arrested, accused of conspiring with Carpiuc, Lavrynovych, “and others unknown to damage by fire property belonging to another.” The names and nationalities of two further individuals arrested in the case - a 48-year-old on June 2nd that year, and a 19-year-old in January 2026 - were never released.

Police investigations into these anonymous suspects were eventually dropped, without fanfare. Who they were, why they became subjects of interest, and the grounds for their elimination from enquiries, hasn’t been revealed and wasn’t discussed at trial. There were apparently no “others unknown” with whom Carpiuc and Lavrynovych colluded after all. Pochynok was acquitted, successfully arguing he was “deceived” by the pair and had no idea they intended to start fires with his help. Notably, all three were charged with mere arson, not national security offences.

This is striking, given when the trial commenced on April 28th, prosecution lawyers immediately declared the trio’s arson assault was directed by a Russian-speaking Telegram user, for cash. The December 2023 National Security Act grants British authorities sweeping powers to severely punish people who break the law at the behest of “hostile states”. Repeatedly since the Starmer-linked attacks, British citizens have been jailed under the legislation after being recruited to commit crimes, including arson, via Telegram by supposed Russian actors.

All along, alarm has been sounded about Iranian intelligence using Telegram for similar purposes, in particular “[hiring] anyone who can harm Israeli interests or individuals” in Britain. Yet, a coordinated criminal conspiracy targeting the Prime Minister, which required access to sensitive private information on Starmer not readily available to average citizens, allegedly orchestrated by a malign foreign actor, mysteriously didn’t qualify as national security-related. Moreover, jurors and the public alike were strictly prohibited from learning anything about the group’s alleged recruiter.

‘Wholly Irrelevant’

On the trial’s first day, after dropping the bombshell that Lavrynovych was “recruited, instructed and promised with payment for the fires that ​he was told to start” by a Russian-speaking source known as “EL Money”, the lead prosecutor promptly ordered jurors to leave the entire issue alone. It was “no part of your considerations ​to decide who ‘EL Money’ is and what reason he might have had to coordinate the actions of ​these defendants,” they forcefully asserted, before adding:

As such, the trial centred solely around the extremely limited question of whether the three accused committed arson. All other avenues of inquiry weren’t up for discussion or investigation in open court. While the financial motivation of the defendants was explored, the identity, connections and motives of the individual - or individuals - who commissioned and directed the attacks on Starmer was effectively inadmissible. This was despite Lavrynovych’s defence hinging on claiming to have felt intimidated by EL Money, and therefore acting under duress.

The BBC reports how in the jury’s absence during the trial, Lavrynovych’s lawyers applied for prosecutors to hand over wider information held by authorities on EL Money. This included whether the user was associated with intelligence services or a state informant, and where it was based. They argued the actions of EL Money were “redolent of tradecraft” - in other words, cloak-and-dagger techniques employed by spies. But the judge flatly rejected the application, inexplicably ruling these burning queries to be “wholly irrelevant” to issues before the jury.

Nonetheless, it did emerge at the trial that EL Money sent messages to Lavrynovych on May 12th, following the final arson, notifying him “there is news, you’ll get crypto” and “you need to throw away the clothes.” Subsequently, EL Money warned him “you attacked the home of a very high-ranking person in Britain,” and “you need to leave the city.” Lavrynovych was arrested hours later, implying he was already in law enforcement’s crosshairs by this time. How he came to police attention isn’t clear.

Apparently, EL Money’s central role in the attacks on Starmer wasn’t ascertained until long after Carpiuc and Lavrynovych were in custody, with legal proceedings well-underway. At a pretrial hearing in late May 2025, prosecution lawyers said the arrested Ukrainian pair’s conspiracy was “unexplained”. A contemporary Financial Times report noted counter-terror cops leading the probe were “keeping an open mind about motive.” Nameless government officials stressed “many different versions of the events” remained under investigation, “and nothing had been ruled out at this stage.”

‘No Evidence’

How prosecutors settled on the “version of events” they dramatically presented in court, before directing jurors to disregard considerations of EL Money entirely, is likewise unknown. Only a small number of messages the user exchanged with Lavrynovych - in which EL Money notably communicated in “perfect” Russian and Ukrainian - were presented in court. However, within just hours of the pair’s conviction, the BBC released a dedicated Panorama documentary, and accompanying 3,500-word long-read, on the Starmer-linked arson’s “Russian connection”.

Miraculously, “using open-source tools,” Britain’s state broadcaster was able to crack the case to an extent police purportedly couldn’t. The BBC named EL Money as a young “Russian diplomat, schooled in information warfare by spies and propagandists, who is close to the highest levels of power in Moscow.” Posing as EL Money, the 23-year-old supposedly sought to bribe many Ukrainians in Britain into perpetrating a variety of criminal acts, via dedicated local jobs groups, while also oddly deploying “deeply offensive Russian terms for Ukrainian people.”

“Messages from the [EL Money] account in various Telegram channels show him glorifying [Vladimir] Putin and Russia, attacking the Ukrainian people and promoting Russian narratives,” the BBC claimed. Its investigation acknowledged the trial of Carpiuc, Lavrynovych and Pochynok “was strange, mainly because the true author of the drama was never revealed,” with the conundrum of EL Money’s identity “deliberately avoided.” Speculation can only abound as to why the British state broadcaster unravelled this crucial riddle, rather than courts and/or law enforcement.

Even more suspiciously, the BBC quoted a senior British counter-terror police chief as saying while the aim of the attacks on Starmer’s properties was “to intimidate and create fear for the Prime Minister and to attack the UK,” law enforcement had “not been able to prove the identity of [EL Money] or who he was working for.” They categorically declared: “we’ve got no evidence to suggest this was a state-backed threat.” But the BBC is somehow better informed than the police.

“Sources have told us that authorities in the UK and in Ukraine have privately concluded Russia was behind the arson attacks,” the British state broadcaster boasted. One might reasonably enquire why Kiev has apparently taken it upon herself to solve a British criminal case, although Ukraine’s SBU is certainly an authority on recruiting chaos agents via Telegram, and other messaging apps. The heavily CIA and MI6-infiltrated agency has over many years exploited this technique to blackmail and bribe Russians into perpetrating serious crimes at home.

These scandalous activities have been universally ignored by the Western media. By contrast, numerous major news outlets instantly seized on the BBC blaming Russia for the arson attacks. The Financial Times published a slick investigation the same day, replete with photos, videos, and graphics, documenting EL Money’s contacts with and payments to Lavrynovych. Shady Bellingcat-linked investigative website The Insider went so far as to release extensive biographical information and photos of the 23-year-old Russian named by the BBC as EL Money.

Other outlets have produced quotes from Lavrynovych’s trial testimony, in which he states EL Money “wanted to see [the arson] on the news.” Of course, the attacks barely registered in the media contemporaneously, while the overwhelmingly majority of what was said at the trial by all parties went unreported, with only select excerpts emerging immediately afterwards. In all the post-trial political and media rush to convict Russia too, not a single source mentioned British police avowedly possess “no evidence” indicating the arson attacks were sponsored by any state.

‘Useful Idiot’

Having diligently attempted to follow “every piece of evidence” in court throughout the 21-day-long trial, independent journalist Crispin Flintoff was “furious” when the duplicitous BBC-led blame Russia game erupted. A fascinating personal account of his first-hand experiences spectating the trial reveals much about what was said by defendants, prosecutors, and defence lawyers no major outlet has reported. His insider observations only intensify suspicions about a concerted state coverup to conceal inconvenient truths, and misdirect the public as to what was established in court:

By the time the trial was over, none of these queries had been satisfactorily addressed, let alone answered. The court’s almost empty public gallery, virtually total lack of ‘journalists’ in attendance, and pronounced lack of wider media interest in the trial - particularly “if this really was a Russian operation directed at the Prime Minister” - was palpable to Flintoff at every step of proceedings. The lead prosecution lawyer also “seemed keen to tell the judge what those of us in the public gallery could or could not report.”

Meanwhile, “the judge repeatedly warned the public gallery that anything said in court while the jury were not present could not be reported and that doing so could amount to contempt of court and even lead to imprisonment.” Intriguingly, this included any and all mention of EL Money, beyond the prosecution’s initial announcement “he” spoke Russian. That EL Money was also versed in Ukrainian - a language barely spoken in Russia - appears to have first emerged accidentally.

Flintoff reports how an interpreter revealed “some of the Telegram messages” sent by EL Money were in Ukrainian. The media-unfriendly judge “rebuked her, saying it was ‘not for the translator to give evidence.’” Strikingly too, later in the trial Lavrynovych claimed he “could not tell where EL Money was from because messages were in both languages.” Subsequently, he described El Money as “they”, while under cross-examination expressing his belief at least one woman was involved in his recruitment and handling.

Lavrynovych referred to EL Money stating “my husband” was checking up on the Toyota car owned by Starmer. He speculated “possibly more” women, “as well as two or three men” could’ve also been involved. This explosive point wasn’t explored further, save for when a defence lawyer in summing up described EL Money as “this person, or people.” However, EL Money - whoever they might be - ultimately wasn’t in the dock, despite the judge describing Lavrynovych as their “pawn”, and “useful idiot”.

‘Proxy Attacks’

Flintoff doesn’t “claim to know the truth of what happened,” but is certain “the BBC’s story is a fictional conspiracy theory that doesn’t tally with the evidence heard in court.” In a bitter irony, mainstream publication of the names, ages, and photos of Carpiuc, Lavrynovych and Pochynok created a fecund environment for ‘conspiracy theorising’. Social media users large and small easily identified profiles of Carpiuc and Lavrynovych on modelling websites. Fleetingly, they were even referred to as “models” by certain outlets.

Several sources - including prominent figures ranging from independent broadcaster George Galloway to Zionist agitator Tommy Robinson - speculated, partially tongue-in-cheek in many cases, the Ukrainians might be sex workers with whom Starmer incurred unpaid debts. The BBC long-read repeatedly took aim at “far-right anti-Islam activist” Robinson and “accounts based in Russia” for posting “lies about the motive for the arson attacks.” The British state broadcaster firmly asserted: “they were not sex workers.”

Meanwhile, on June 15th - not long after the trial’s verdict landed - The i Paper declared, “Starmer was targeted by sex worker conspiracy straight from Putin’s playbook.” The outlet convicted the Kremlin not only of the arson attacks, but the proliferation of “a conspiracy theory falsely claiming that the arsonists were male prostitutes seeking revenge on the Prime Minister.” Markedly, The i Paper teamed up with the highly controversial Center for Countering Digital Hate to reach its findings.

CCDH was created by Labour Together, a shadowy ‘think tank’ tied to right-wing Labour figures and Zionist tycoons, which played a central role in Starmer’s deeply corrupt - if not outright criminal - rise to power. Throughout its existence, the Center has carried out brazenly politicised, reputationally devastating attacks on individuals and organisations purportedly disseminating “disinformation”. For example, one of CCDH’s first responsibilities post-launch was to “destroy” popular, independent pro-Jeremy Corbyn news site The Canary, in order to neutralise the then-Labour leader’s support base.

CCDH recently claimed trillionaire Elon Musk was “instrumental” in stoking violent, racist rioting in Occupied Ireland. Local monitoring groups beg to differ, branding the charge a “fallacy” intended to distract from the unrest being orchestrated by Loyalist paramilitary groups, which maintain clandestine relations with the British state today. This begs the obvious question of who or what might have tasked CCDH with investigating alleged “disinformation” relating to the ever-mysterious arson attacks targeting Keir Starmer.

An answer might be provided by a June 17th press conference on the G7’s sidelines. Starmer refused to comment on BBC and other mainstream reports linking the arson to Russia, while conversely claiming an “aggressive” Moscow was responsible for “proxy attacks” on Britain and “across Europe”. He added, “some of the evidence that came out of trial speaks for itself.” But of course, this is a lie. By design, no such evidence emerged, while many leads pointing away from Russia were shut down, and unmentioned by the media. Ask yourself why.

The May 11th resignation of Christian Schmidt, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s High Representative, has elicited little mainstream interest. However, his departure is an absolutely seismic development, which could shatter the brittle peace that has endured in Sarajevo since November 1995, when the Dayton Agreement was inked. Schmidt’s abrupt exit raises urgent questions about the future of Washington’s ongoing occupation of Bosnia, which has provided a beachhead for EU and NATO penetration locally for three decades. It could prove an extinction event for Western hegemony as we know it.

Dayton imposed upon Bosnia a highly discriminatory constitution, enshrining ethnic division. Much of its contents have been successfully challenged in the European Court of Human Rights. Additionally, Bosnia boasts a mindbogglingly Byzantine political system, frequently described as the world’s most complex. The country is split between Bosniak and Croat-majority Bosnia and Herzegovina - representing 51% of Bosnian territory - and Serb-majority Republika Srpska, encompassing 49%. Both have their own governments and parliaments, with their own powers.

Bosnia also has three Presidents, representing the country’s Bosniak, Croat, and Serb populations. Passing legislation at a national level requires unanimity, which seldom happens. Sarajevo’s High Representative is truly in charge. They neither have fixed terms in office, nor are nominated or elected by Bosnia’s population. They aren’t even Bosnian, but Europeans appointed by the 55-country-strong, Dayton-created Peace Implementation Council. Their power is extraordinary. Veteran British politician and former MI6 officer Paddy Ashdown was known as “Viceroy of Bosnia”, while serving as High Representative May 2002 - January 2006.

Ashdown regularly dismissed state officials - including elected politicians - and barred them from holding office, if they refused to adopt a Western-directed agenda in all matters domestic and foreign. In June 2004, 60 Serb officials were defenestrated en masse. That December, Republika Srpska’s Prime Minister and most Serb representatives in Sarajevo’s national government were likewise sanctioned, after unified Bosnia was rejected from NATO’s “Partnership for Peace” program, typically considered a precursor to fully-fledged alliance membership.

The Wall Street Journal contemporaneously framed Ashdown’s actions as “overruling voters to save democracy.” As the BBC now reports, “subsequent holders of the office were far more low key.” Washington’s focus during this time was directed away not just from Bosnia but the wider Balkans, having established Europe’s biggest military base in Kosovo for use in the “War On Terror” against West Asia. Bosnia’s leaders were granted a significant degree of autonomy. This newfound freedom threatened unified Bosnia’s continued existence.

Quickly, Republika Srpska moved towards independence. Per the BBC, “failure” of Ashdown’s successors to push back against Bosnian Serb secessionism resulted in Schmidt taking a “more activist role” as High Representative, from 2021 onwards. After battling Trump-supported Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik throughout his term, Schmidt has capitulated. Republika Srpska could now move determinedly for independence, potentially precipitating a cataclysm for which Europe isn’t remotely prepared. Yet, the US was always going to leave eventually.

‘Peaceful Separation’

Dayton was forged in the aftermath of an August 1995 NATO bombing campaign, which ended the Bosnian war after three-and-a-half horrendous years. Afterwards, the US and Western allies constructed a pliant colonial administration in ravaged Sarajevo. Tens of thousands of military alliance troops dismantled what remained of Bosnia’s socialist-era economic and political system, at literal gunpoint. Meanwhile, the Agreement specifically allocated billions in US ‘aid’ spending for over 20,000 foreign NGOs to assist in reconstruction. As a 1998 report on the foreign influx observed:

At this time, many mainstream outlets sounded alarm over the culture of forced dependency being imposed upon Bosnia via NATO occupation. Nonetheless, that year a high-ranking US diplomat in Sarajevo reported how he had informed American officials in the country and back in Washington to “forget about exit strategy,” as there wasn’t one. Western allies - including Britain, Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey - duly expanded their own influence locally, under the umbrella of US suzerainty. Washington had seemingly bedded down in unified Bosnia in perpetuity.

However, in the NATO bombing’s leadup, behind-closed doors Bill Clinton’s administration was not only preparing for a short-lived engagement in post-war Sarajevo, but considered Republika Srpska’s eventual secession inevitable. Clinton made the Bosnian conflict a central component of his 1992 Presidential election campaign, and the administration spent much of its first term in office mooting outright intervention against the Serbs. Nonetheless, US officials had little concern for their Bosniak allies or a unified Bosnian state in the long-run.

The bombing was intended to strengthen Sarajevo’s negotiating position in subsequent peace talks, rather than entrench a unified Bosnia. A declassified July 1995 US National Security Council paper stressed the importance of impressing upon the Serbs pre-Dayton “the amount of autonomy their republic would have” within a divided post-war Bosnia, and their ability to maintain a “parallel special relationship” with neighbouring Serbia subsequently. Moreover, Washington’s Bosniak allies would be lobbied to contemplate their state’s future dissolution:

Strikingly, this perspective was also secretly shared by notoriously hawkish Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a highly divisive figure in the Balkans due to her centrality to NATO’s bombing of Bosnia, and 1999 attack on Yugoslavia. In a little-known early August 1995 memo, Albright covertly proposed “significant alterations” to the NSC-approved peace plan that was to be pitched to the warring parties, following the bombing campaign. Specifically, she suggested Sarajevo’s post-war settlement “could be more forward-leaning on the Serbs’ right to secede peacefully from Bosnia.”

‘Political Crisis’

Elsewhere in the memo, Albright robustly dismissed as “simply wrong” any suggestion a “multinational force with a US component” occupying Sarajevo would entail “open-ended American commitment.” Under the NSC peace plan, Washington was committed to providing training to Bosniak forces until they could militarily “act themselves,” during a “transition period”. This effort was intended to ensure “minimum exposure” for the US, while serving “as a magnet for European participation.” The NSC - and Albright - foresaw the training lasting just six months to one year.

Elsewhere, she lamented “the failure of our European allies to resolve the Bosnia crisis.” Albright seethed how this had “exposed the bankruptcy of their policy” towards the former Yugoslavia, and “caused serious erosion in the credibility” of NATO and the UN. “Worse,” she lamented, Washington’s “continued reluctance to lead an effort to resolve a military crisis in the heart of Europe has placed at risk our leadership of the post Cold War world.” Today, a peaceful, unified Bosnia isn’t fundamental to US global “leadership”. An “exit strategy” could thus finally impend.

In announcing his resignation, Christian Schmidt warned of Bosnia’s “silent deconstruction”, while pledging to remain in position until a successor is selected. Yet, the Office of the High Representative’s longevity, and the Bosnian state’s in turn, is now in serious doubt. At a May 12th UN Security Council session, US Deputy Ambassador Tammy Bruce echoed the private sentiments of Clinton administration officials, stating firmly the OHR “was never intended to be permanent.” Washington expects whoever replaces Schmidt to take a largely ceremonial role, and “begin transferring responsibilities to local leaders.”

Selecting Schmidt’s successor has proven deeply problematic. A June 3rd/4th meeting of the Peace Implementation Council ended with the US and Europe unable to reach agreement on who should fill the post. Washington rejected France’s West Balkans envoy - endorsed by most European countries, including Britain and Germany - in favour of an Italian career diplomat. With the OHR still effectively leaderless, subsequently the US Embassy in Sarajevo ominously announced:

Such words should not be diminished as a hollow threat, designed to strong-arm European governments into greenlighting a US-approved candidate for High Representative. The unipolar world anointed by the Dayton Agreement is no more, and the Empire’s complete pullout from Bosnia is a very real possibility. There is little indication the “international presence” in Sarajevo can be sustained in its present form, without the guarantee provided by US occupation for three decades. Türkiye Today has already warned of a looming, “dangerous vacuum”:

It’s rather forgotten how Washington’s total pullout from Afghanistan after 20 years caught not only its Kabul puppet government, but fellow NATO occupiers, completely off-guard. British officials initially mulled staying. Their delusions shattered within a day. A similar lack of preparedness on the part of US ‘allies’ is evident in Bosnia now. While the unified state created by Dayton may not collapse as precipitously, Republika Srpska is moving inexorably towards independence, as the Empire always planned. That’s a war in the making, with no guarantee European powers have the ability to “act themselves,” in Madeleine Albright’s phrase. Watch this space.

A bitter row has erupted between Kiev and Warsaw, after Volodymyr Zelensky renamed a Ukrainian military unit the “Heroes of the UPA”. The UPA - Ukrainian Insurgent Army - was an ultranationalist faction heavily implicated in the Holocaust, which slaughtered up to 100,000 Polish civilians during World War II. In addition to commemorating the mass-murdering militant group, the corpse of Andriy Melnyk, leader of UPA parent the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), was reburied in Kiev. At a grand accompanying ceremony, Zelensky declared:

The unspeakable horrors inflicted upon Poles - and Communists, Jews, Romani and other “undesirables” - by Melynk and his fellow Nazi collaborators were of course unmentioned. So too that the genocidal nationalism practiced and preached by Melynk was covertly promoted and sponsored for decades by Anglo-American intelligence, within and without Ukraine. The ongoing proxy conflict is a direct product of this little-known spectral meddling, which was specifically concerned with promoting cultural and ethnic difference, and enmity, between Russians and Ukrainians globally.

As this journalist has previously revealed, in August 1957 the CIA secretly drew up elaborate plans for a US special forces invasion of Ukraine. Intended to collapse the wider Soviet Union, the Agency’s conspiracy depended heavily on recruiting local fascists as footsoldiers. A significant stumbling block to the Agency’s plot, however, was much of Ukraine’s population actually harbouring “few grievances” against Russians or Communism. “Points of conflict” between Russians and Ukrainians, which could be exploited by the CIA to foment a mass uprising, were scant.

The Agency lamented how “the long history of union between Russia and Ukraine, which stretches in an almost unbroken line from 1654 to the present day,” had resulted in “many Ukrainians” having “adopted the Russian way of life.” Moreover, the similarity of their “languages, customs, and backgrounds,” and the “great influence” of Russian culture in Ukraine, meant the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians felt “little national antagonism.” Yet, the CIA believed “important grievances exist,” and “under favorable conditions” Ukrainians would assist US invaders.

Unmentioned in the invasion planning documents, the CIA had since 1949 been covertly striving to create those “favorable conditions.” A key Agency asset used for the purpose was OUN-B chief Mykola Lebed. In 1943, he proposed to “cleanse the entire revolutionary territory” - today’s western Ukraine - of its Polish population, to prevent any future Polish state from claiming the region. A post-war US Army counterintelligence report branded Lebed a “well-known sadist,” and Nazi collaborator.

The nucleus of Lebed’s international fascist agitation was Prolog, a New York-based publishing firm. A 1966 CIA memo noted this “cover organization” for the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (ZP/UHVR) was established to conduct “clandestine activity.” It approvingly added that Prolog’s work “contributes to Ukrainian nationalist ferment and to intellectual resistance to Soviet repression by exploiting existing and encouraging new deviationist tendencies” in Ukraine. Elsewhere, the Agency declared it was “important to continue to encourage divisive manifestation” of this sort. The explicitly stated objective was triggering “nationalist flareups” in the USSR:

‘Existing Suspicions’

A late 1953 Agency memo documents how the CIA for years broadcast “black radio transmissions” in Ukrainian from a secret CIA installation in Athens, Greece. “Soviet officialdom, Soviet military forces stationed in the Ukraine, the indigenous civilian population…the underground movement and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)” were an intended target audience of 40 million people, upon whom the Agency wished to have a “significant propaganda impact.” Produced by ultranationalist emigres who’d fled Ukraine after World War II, the project sought to foment insurrectionary anti-Communist violence:

Publicly, the station’s US-made broadcasts - which included Ukrainian folk songs - were “attributed to a notional group of Ukrainian Anti-Communists.” There was no connection “actual or implied, with any established Ukrainian emigre group.” It was of the utmost importance too the CIA’s hand in creating and running the station was concealed - “every effort will be made to keep this risk at a minimum.” However, the operation’s ruinous spoils were considered well-worth the hazards.

“It will provide a wedge which can be driven deeper between the Soviets and the Ukrainians and would exacerbate existing suspicions and antagonisms between the two ethnic factions,” the CIA declared. The Agency also sought to create a wider “psychological climate” among Ukrainian audiences which would be “more favorable” to other anti-Soviet operations it was simultaneously conducting. Moreover, it was forecast “Soviet reaction to the broadcasts may indicate certain areas of vulnerability or sensitivity not heretofore recognized,” which could be further exploited.

‘Imperial Policy’

The CIA’s efforts to encourage Ukrainian nationalism and separatism endured throughout the Cold War. Via avowed CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy, overt US assistance was provided to Rukh (The People’s Movement of Ukraine). One of Soviet Ukraine’s first opposition parties, Rukh is widely considered to have played a key role in securing Ukraine’s ‘independence’ in December 1991. Four months earlier, US President George H W Bush had visited Kiev and given an infamous speech in which he cautioned Ukrainians against embracing “suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”

His comments enraged Ukrainian nationalists, and Stateside anti-Soviet hawks. Yet, Bush’s fears were well-founded. By this point, Yugoslavia was rapidly disintegrating, engulfed by ever-violent fratricidal tensions. His administration was thus formally committed at this time to preserving the Soviet Union in some form, and undertook ill-fated measures in service of this goal. Too little, too late, that mission’s failure set Ukraine hurtling towards all-out conflict with Russia. As long-desired by the CIA, “antagonisms between the two ethnic factions” now run deep.

In a bitter twist, it was precisely because the NED-orchestrated February 2014 Maidan coup was led by rabidly anti-Russian nationalist elements that a majority of Ukrainians did not support the Maidan movement. As a contemporary Washington Post analysis noted, Viktor Yanukovych remained “the most popular political figure in the country,” and no poll conducted to date had ever indicated mass support for the uprising. Surveys conversely showed “large majorities” of Ukrainians opposed the violent storming of regional governments by Maidan insurrectionists.

This hostility was spurred by “anti-Russian rhetoric and the iconography of western Ukrainian nationalism…not [playing] well among the Ukrainian majority.” Washington Post noted how Neo-Nazi party Svoboda was at Maidan’s forefront. Its leader Oleh Tyahnybok had infamously praised the UPA for fighting “against the Moskali [Russians], Germans, Zhydy [Jews] and other scum.” His words were not well-received by the 50% of Ukraine’s population residing in regions that had “strongly identified with Russia” for over two centuries. “Nearly all are alienated by anti-Russian rhetoric and symbols”:

Fast forward to now, and in response to Ukraine’s state-level glorification of the ultranationalist UPA and its lead genocidaire Andriy Melnyk, Polish President Karol Nawrocki has announced he will seek to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Warsaw’s highest honour, bestowed in 2023. Meanwhile, premier Donald Tusk has cursed the Ukrainian leader’s actions as “[wounding] our historical sensitivity,” and “worrying from the point of view of our relations.”

Authorities in Kiev appear entirely unconcerned their close neighbour and proxy war ally has been so egregiously insulted. A Foreign Ministry spokesperson claimed Zelensky had not wished to cause any offence. “Our history confirms only Moscow benefits from disputes between Ukrainians and Poles,” they said. Besides, for Ukrainian soldiers, “the struggle of the UPA symbolises strictly the opposition to Moscow’s imperial policy.” As the CIA always intended, two antithetical versions of history are now effectively at war in Donbass. A more devastating modern day example of divide and conquer in action one would be hard-pressed to identify.

On April 12th, a political earthquake in Hungary upended 16 years of continuous rule by Viktor Orban. It was a period characterised by ever-mounting and fractious confrontation between Budapest and the European Commission, the EU’s executive body. Now, Orban’s exit has removed a major barrier to EU federalisation, and militarisation. Brussels’ fingerprints are plastered all over his departure from office, and the Commission now evidently perceives an ideal opportunity to exert its will not only over the bloc’s 27 member states, but beyond.

Countless legitimate criticisms could be levelled against Orban, and his lengthy run in power. He himself proudly characterised his ruling ideology as a fundamentally illiberal, nationalist project. Budapest under his stewardship clashed with Brussels on rule-of-law concerns spanning academic, judicial and media freedom, migration, minority rights, and social justice issues. Yet, Orban also stood firm against ongoing attempts to erode EU member state sovereignty, and promoted opposition across the bloc to construction of a fully federalized, continent-spanning superstate governed by the unelected Commission.

New prime minister Peter Magyar exploded onto Hungary’s political scene in March 2024, having no history of activism or prior public platform. Attacking Orban’s government for corruption while supporting greater EU integration, he was instantly anointed Budapest’s leader-in-waiting by Western politicians and news outlets. His unprecedented rise was significantly assisted by a vast anti-Orban media and civil society ecosystem locally, lavishly funded by Brussels. Obvious questions about whether Magyar’s abrupt, stratospheric success was truly organic haven’t been asked in the mainstream.

Over Orban’s last term in office too, the EU waged devastatingly effective, open financial warfare on Hungary. From late 2022 onwards, Brussels began freezing tens of billions in funds owed to Budapest, due to an array of rule-of-law concerns. It represented a significant proportion of the country’s GDP. To unlock these sums and finance everything from infrastructure repairs to stimulus for businesses affected by the COVID19 pandemic, Orban’s government needed to pass 27 separate reforms - dubbed “super milestones”. Authorities rejected many demands outright.

The withheld funds added to already grave economic woes locally, including high inflation, rising unemployment, and stagnant wages. This handed Magyar a highly compelling campaign platform - he promised to instantly unlock the cash upon taking office, when Budapest was again “a fully-fledged member of the EU.” Within days of Magyar’s election victory, a Commission delegation duly visited Hungary to discuss unfreezing over €30 billion in initial assistance. Magyar subsequently boasted how much-needed EU resources would “soon arrive.”

With Hungary brought to heel, the EU Commission is quickly moving to repeat the ploy in neighbouring Serbia and Slovakia, cutting the pair off from sizeable funds to ‘correct’ their behaviour. Both countries have long-frustrated the domestic and international designs of Brussels and Berlin in different ways. With inter-bloc opposition neutralised, never has the Commission been so assertive in pursuing its objectives. The implications for how the EU acts internationally, and its constituent member states and populations progressively unable to resist Brussels’ diktats, are massive.

‘European Continent’

On April 22nd, EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen declared: “we must succeed in completing the European continent so that it does not fall under Russian, Turkish or Chinese influence.” A Commission spokesperson clarified von der Leyen’s unprecedentedly combative comments specifically referred to future EU expansion into the West Balkans, much of which formerly comprised Yugoslavia. Opposition to EU membership is widespread throughout the region, especially in Serbia, while the Turkish government formally categorises it as a major foreign policy “priority”.

These statements thus rankled Ankara, itself a longstanding EU candidate country with strong cultural, economic, and historic ties to the West Balkans. Under von der Leyen’s bold, belligerent vision for future Europe, Turkey will be categorised alongside Beijing and Moscow as an unwelcome regional contaminant. Endless rounds of sanctions have almost completely cut off Russia from the bloc since February 2022, in every way. Concurrently, numerous Chinese investment projects in the EU have been rejected, while import of Beijing’s goods in key sectors is increasingly restricted.

Moreover, less than 24 hours after Orban’s defeat, von der Leyen bombastically called for an end to EU member state veto power on foreign policy matters. This is a deeply troubling shift. Advocates of greater EU federalism and integration - including outspoken, high-ranking Commission apparatchiks - have long-argued for ending the requirement of member state unanimity in sensitive policy areas, including enlargement, defence and security. Many Europeans reject the move. However, no EU member state is now likely to push back.

Under Orban, Budapest recently vetoed an EU membership plan for Ukraine, a €90 billion loan to Kiev, appropriation of frozen Russian assets, bloc-wide bans on importing Moscow’s oil and gas, and other controversial matters. With vetoes done away with, major foreign policy decisions could be made by Brussels with just 15 of the EU’s 27 member states agreeing. European governments and/or citizens unsupportive of these moves would have little recourse to oppose such changes, even if directly affected by them.

This could eventually extend to construction of a unified EU army. In October 2025, the EU Commission’s Defence, Industry and Space department published the so-called “Readiness Roadmap 2030”. It demands member states invest heavily in their militaries and war-fighting capabilities, while establishing joint bloc projects, such as a European drone force, in formal alliance with Ukraine. Meanwhile, in January EU Defence and Space Commissioner Andrius Kubilius proposed creating a 100,000-strong standing European rapid reaction force.

That same month, laws requiring German men aged 17 - 45 to obtain approval from the Bundeswehr if they intend to leave the country for more than three months came into effect. The move reintroduces military conscription, if not enough citizens voluntarily enlist. Due to widespread outcry, the requirement was dropped in early April. Weeks later though, officials in Berlin formally unveiled ominous Bundeswehr strategy documents, outlining plans for Germany to possess Europe’s biggest army by 2039. The papers identify Russia as Europe’s gravest threat.

Before vetoes have even been axed, EU member state opposition to the Commission’s foreign agenda is already precipitously shrinking. Brussels’ threats of financial penalties have prompted Slovak premier Robert Fico to jettison all objections to loaning Ukraine tens of billions. He also intends to visit Kiev, to prove his commitment to supposed European values. Given Fico was elected on a popular platform of ending his country’s financial and material support for Ukraine, and undoing EU-encouraged anti-Russian sanctions, the domestic implications could be significant.

‘Russian Disinformation’

In August 2023, the highly controversial EU Digital Services Act came into force. Under its terms, the EU Commission, member state election authorities, and EU-funded NGOs are granted enormous power to police online speech, under the cover of countering “disinformation”. Repeatedly in recent years, Brussels has activated a little-known “rapid response system” around European elections, to demand social networks censor supposedly problematic content, and ban offending users. If social networks fail to act as required by the Commission, they face massive fines and other penalties.

The strict EU-wide censorship regime established by the DSA’s adoption operated almost entirely hidden from European citizens, until the US Senate Judiciary Committee published a report in February this year exposing the Act’s abuse by Brussels. While the DSA has been used to compel platforms to remove false and hateful content, it is also routinely exploited to censor dissenting viewpoints, including Eurosceptic speech. The EU Commission can resultantly exert extraordinary online narrative control within member states and across the continent, at particularly sensitive political junctures.

Slovakia’s September 2023 parliamentary election was hotly-contested, with Fico’s Smer party under relentless attack by pro-Western politicians, NGOs, and media outlets. Fico’s policies are locally popular - many Slovaks even perceive him as too soft - and he won cleanly. Yet, the Judiciary Committee report reveals Brussels engaged in determined skullduggery via the DSA to deny Smer victory. In the months leading up to the vote, the Commission secretly submitted a variety of censorship requests to major social networks via the rapid response system.

Over the week prior to election day, this activity intensified substantially. The EU Commission provided TikTok with spreadsheets listing supposedly “problematic” Slovak accounts publishing “political content”, to be suppressed if not outright banned. In many cases, these users had seemingly done nothing actionable. This included a “well-known and popular” Slovak influencer primarily publishing “non-problematic” posts, “focused on entertainment.” Local users sharing political humour, and a Communist party member, were among other apparently innocuous accounts also in the Commission’s censorship crosshairs.

The rapid response mechanism was likewise put into play around the 2024 European parliament elections. Underscoring the vote’s importance from the EU Commission’s perspective, representatives of social networks were explicitly warned behind-closed-doors Brussels would “take enforcement actions” if they failed to act on censorship requests, in the vote’s leadup. Under direct threat of financial and legal retaliation, Google, Meta and TikTok purged a vast quantity of “misinformation” from their platforms at the Commission’s explicit behest.

TikTok alone censored over 45,000 pieces of content. Problematically, EU parliamentarians vote for the EU Commission’s president, and confirm its commissioners. The Commission was thus via the DSA ideally positioned to insulate itself and EU policies from online criticism throughout Europe, while promoting pro-EU political parties running for election. The DSA’s potential impact on Orban’s loss is difficult to quantify. On March 16th an EU spokesperson activated the “rapid response system”, to deal with purported “Russian disinformation” in Hungary’s election.

‘Romanian Democracy’

In December 2024, Romania’s constitutional court cancelled the country’s ongoing presidential election, after upstart outsider Calin Georgescu won the vote’s first round. Running on a Eurosceptic, nationalist platform - including ending Bucharest’s financial and military support for the nearby Ukraine proxy war - contemporary polls showed Georgescu was en route to becoming President via landslide. The shocking annulment was justified by authorities on the grounds a supposedly wide-ranging cloak-and-dagger Russian influence campaign conducted via TikTok had promoted his candidacy, skewing the vote’s result.

No evidence supporting this incendiary charge ever surfaced. Still, EU and US officials publicly endorsed the election’s autocratic voiding. Western media outlets unquestioningly reported that the cancellation was entirely proper, due to malign Muscovite meddling. A contemporary BBC analysis nonetheless admitted Georgescu was hugely - and organically - popular with Romanians, at home and abroad. The British state broadcaster conceded “fatigue” with Bucharest’s pro-NATO political establishment is common locally, and among Romania’s massive diaspora.

Devastating Westernising ‘reforms’ enacted since the fall of Communism mean Romanians harbour ever-multiplying legitimate grievances, entirely unaddressed in the mainstream. Per the BBC, in the annulment’s aftermath, “even those who feared a President Georgescu - and believe Russia was backing him - now worry about the precedent just set for Romanian democracy.” Suspicion widely abounded locally the vote’s cancellation was influenced by foreign actors. The Senate Judiciary report amply exposes how Brussels played a central role in sabotaging Bucharest’s 2024 presidential election.

Before, during and after the vote, “the European Commission took its most aggressive censorship steps” yet uncovered. With the rapid response mechanism activated in advance, authorities in Bucharest “repeatedly made content takedown requests” to social media platforms, using “expansive interpretations” of the DSA and local laws. This extended to demanding TikTok block videos of Georgescu not merely for Romanian audiences, but globally. The social network was wary of the “potential for political influence” on the election, posed by EU-enforced “unjustified removal of legal content.”

For example, TikTok was ordered to censor social media posts purely on the basis they were “disrespectful” to Bucharest’s governing pro-EU Social Democratic Party, with no stated legal rationale. Once Georgescu prevailed in the first round, DSA-inspired censorship orders became “even more aggressive.” Romanian regulators were sufficiently emboldened to order TikTok to purge “all materials” merely featuring images of Georgescu from its platform. In concert, EU-funded NGOs in Romania and the wider region dispatched spreadsheets to social networks “containing hundreds of censorship requests.”

While some of the content earmarked for suppression “may have been genuinely objectionable,” much of the material in question simply set out Georgescu’s policy stances. Bucharest and the EU Commission also pressured TikTok to validate the narrative that its platform was illicitly exploited by the Kremlin to promote Georgescu. After extensive trawling though, TikTok’s internal security team found zero indication of any “coordinated influence operation” to boost his candidacy whatsoever.

However, TikTok’s repeated appeals to Romanian authorities and the EU Commission that Russia hadn’t meddled in the 2024 presidential election were ignored, and remained concealed from public view. In a perverse twist too, the Commission thereafter launched a formal investigation under the DSA into TikTok’s moderation practices for political speech, due to the platform’s supposed role in subverting Romanian democracy. Georgescu was banned from standing in a re-run, which led to the election of a pro-EU coalition government. The administration collapsed on May 5th.

‘Change Policies’

This followed weeks of constantly ratcheting political crisis, during which left-leaning ministers within the ruling coalition resigned over the government’s locally-despised economic austerity measures. Brussels has made Romania unlocking almost €2 billion in state aid contingent on implementing savage public spending cuts, wage and pension freezes, and tax hikes. With public anger rising and the country teetering on the brink of a major recession, on April 23rd EU financial services commissioner Maria Luis Albuquerque quietly journeyed to Bucharest for the first time.

During her visit, she met with representatives of Romania’s finance ministry, stock exchange, National Bank, private investment firms, and trade unions, to discuss “the economic future of Europe.” Albuquerque’s presence was perceived locally as a clear signal Brussels is keeping a close eye on developments, and expects business as usual from Bucharest come what may. The EU Commission surely has little to fear. Due to the overturned November 2024 election, perspectives critical of NATO and the EU have been ruled contrary to the country’s constitution.

Despite surging public agitation for radical change, any Romanian political candidate or party espousing those perspectives is now barred from seeking, let alone occupying, high office. It must never be forgotten how in the wake of Syriza winning a clear mandate to end Brussels-imposed austerity in Greece in January 2015, European Commission vice president Jyrki Katainen bluntly declared: “We don’t change policies depending on elections.” As Greece was part of the eurozone, its government’s economic and political agenda was controlled by Brussels and Berlin, not Athens.

Syriza had little choice but to break all its campaign pledges, and reverse its longstanding ideological positions. The Greek people suffered immensely, and still do. Conversely, Western banks that recklessly loaned vast sums to Athens to fuel an unsustainable economic boom profited enormously from the eurozone crisis, and consequent austerity in Greece. The EU and IMF provided Athens with bailout loans that repaid German and other European lenders, while leaving Greece even more heavily indebted. Unemployment, poverty, and brain drain remain rampant today.

Despite the misery inflicted on Athens via membership of the euro, the single currency has engulfed further EU member states in the years since. Lithuania joined in 2015, Croatia eight years later, and Bulgaria in 2026. Czechia, Denmark, Poland, Romania and Sweden are all expected to join in due course. Magyar’s Hungary is now committed to doing so by 2030. The stage is set for “completing the European continent,” in von der Leyen’s sinister phrase, without citizens or governments anywhere standing in the way.

On May 13th, French outlet RTL published an explosive report, entirely unremarked upon by English language media. It exposed how Ukrainian military and intelligence units are covertly operating in Mali on France’s behalf, in coordination with both ethnic Tuareg rebels and Al Qaeda-linked forces determined to crush the country’s revolutionary government. Furthermore, Kiev is keen to expand and escalate its African operations yet further, and destabilise neighbouring countries. Ukrainian militancy, long-encouraged by the CIA and MI6, has now decisively developed into an international threat.

In August 2020, elements of Mali’s military staged a coup, overthrowing Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. Ever since, its government has sought to neutralise Western influence locally, while pursuing radical economic policies for the good of the population. French forces were booted out in 2022 after almost a decade of occupation. Mali has instead looked to China and Russia for economic, military and political assistance, while founding the revolutionary Alliance of Sahel States (AES) with neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.

Polling shows Malians almost universally embrace their government, and its close alliance with Moscow. However, Bamako’s military administration has throughout its lifetime battled incursions from ethnic Tuareg rebels, backed by murderous extremist groups. Since late April, they have conducted combined offensives, capturing several towns, executing deadly strikes on major cities, attacking state buildings, and murdering Defense Minister Sadio Camara via car bomb. Moreover, government forces backed by Russia’s Africa Corps have been ejected from several key areas.

Bamako and Moscow characterise the bloody upheaval as a thwarted coup attempt. Nonetheless, the situation remains volatile, and potentially grave. RTL now reveals the Al Qaeda-linked unrest has been orchestrated and practically supported all along by “Ukrainian soldiers on the ground, who are cooperating with the Tuareg rebels.” In turn, France can “continue to operate” in Mali “indirectly”. Through Kiev’s cutouts, Paris provides “operational support” to the unpopular and savage local counter-revolutionary insurgency, in the absence of her own occupying army.

Per RTL, “France relies in particular on numerous French-speaking Ukrainian soldiers who served in the Foreign Legion.” It’s not just French-sponsored Ukrainian soldiers attempting to foment civil war and regime change via brute force in Mali. Units of Kiev’s fearsome CIA and MI6-constructed military intelligence agency, the GUR, are also present in profusion. By “limiting its operational support to these Ukrainian proxies, France is thus avoiding direct cooperation with jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda” into the bargain:

‘Syrian Scenario’

RTL reports how “a Franco-Ukrainian alliance” to crush troublesome anti-imperial governments in Africa has been long in the making. Strikingly, Kiev took the lead. At the start of 2025, Ukrainian intelligence proposed a “detailed plan” to their French counterparts, “to dislodge the juntas from the Sahel region, and push back the Russian enemy” from the continent altogether. Paris reportedly “did not follow up on this proposal, particularly due to security concerns.” Yet, “the lock has now been lifted.”

To date, a fusion of battle strategies “seems to favor the jihadists, who are currently allied with Tuareg separatists” - not merely in Mali, but potentially wherever in the region Russian forces are present. As RTL notes, several Sahel countries harshly condemned Ukraine’s involvement in a brutal July 2024 rebel ambush, which allegedly killed 84 Wagner fighters, and 47 Malian soldiers. At the time, a GUR spokesperson boasted how Kiev’s support to the rebels “enabled a successful military operation against Russian war criminals.”

Ukraine’s centrality to the bloodshed was openly advertised, prompting West African governments to issue statements making clear Kiev’s local “interference” was highly unwelcome. Several summoned their respective Ukrainian ambassadors for verbal drubbings. Such was the opprobrium, the BBC contemporaneously enquired whether the operation represented an “own goal in Africa,” threatening to wreck “peaceful Ukrainian diplomacy.” Undeterred, Kiev’s military and intelligence conniving in the Sahel has only ratcheted since. RTL reports that Paris sees this counter-revolutionary activity as “proving its worth in the region.”

The Ukrainian-enabled capture of “major” cities by Mali’s local Al Qaeda affiliate has reportedly “caused a stir between the ruling junta and its Russian ally.” Moreover, Defense Minister Sadio Camara’s assassination was “another blow” directly aimed at Russia’s presence in Mali. Described as “number two in the junta” and “Moscow’s man”, Camara “had been trained in Russia.” Whether his death will be militarily or politically impactful is an open question. But there are ominous indications Ukraine foresees a long engagement in the Sahel.

A lengthy essay published April 29th by Militarnyi, Ukraine’s most prominent military news site, lays bare Kiev’s brutal cloak-and-dagger strategy in Mali and beyond. Headlined Islamist Offensive in Mali: The Prospect of a Syrian Scenario, it details how the successes of Ukraine’s Al Qaeda army in Mali - including Camara’s assassination - are part of a wider military and intelligence operation concerned with “dislodging Russian-Chinese influence from the region” altogether. Damascus being overwhelmed by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in mere days in December 2024 is cited as inspiration.

“The fall of Assad in Syria and the ascent of the radical Islamist [HTS] demonstrate that the radical wing’s transition to a moderate format occurs at the moment it takes power, assumes responsibility, and requires legitimization from the international community,” Militarnyi remarks. Kiev’s Mali machinations work in tandem with disruption of Moscow’s supply of food and agrochemicals to Sahel’s revolutionary governments, via “systemic Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refining and chemical production.” These attacks aim to degrade “the capacity of Russia’s leading fertilizer firms.”

Militarnyi promises, “the intensity of Ukrainian strikes against Russian chemical sites will continue to climb.” Meanwhile, Kiev has significantly contributed to the “intensified Islamist offensive” in Mali, dispatching instructors “disseminating FPV drone tactics among insurgent forces” locally. “Rebel battlefield effectiveness” has therefore been “materially boosted”. Beijing is also in the crosshairs of Ukraine’s Sahel offensive, as Moscow’s “hard-power backing” of AES governments - and the “popular loyalty” they enjoy among their populations due to grain and fertilizer deliveries - provides a “security umbrella for Chinese investments.”

‘Clandestine Maneuvers’

An October 2023 Washington Post investigation shed shocking light on the “raging shadow war” waged by Ukrainian intelligence, throughout the West’s proxy conflict with Russia. It documented how many of Kiev’s high-profile foreign operations, including targeted assassinations of figures such as Daria Dugin, were the work of “elite teams of Ukrainian operatives drawn from directorates…formed, trained and equipped in close partnership with the CIA.” From 2015 onwards, US spies “forged deep new bonds” with Ukrainian security and intelligence services, almost rebuilding them “from scratch” entirely.

Notwithstanding the CIA’s separate effective takeover of the SBU, the Agency’s “extensive transformation of the GUR” alone extended to spending many millions of dollars creating new headquarters for the GUR’s “paramilitary division and a separate directorate responsible for electronic espionage.” The CIA has since 2015 variously provided Kiev “with advanced surveillance systems, trained recruits at sites” in Ukraine as well as the US, and much more besides. “The new capabilities were transformative,” turning Kiev’s spying agencies into “potent allies against Moscow.”

In that capacity, the GUR intercepted hundreds of thousands of “separate communications” from Russian military and FSB units on the CIA’s behalf daily. Strikingly, the GUR also “began recruiting operatives for its own new active measures department.” Already, just over 18 months into the proxy war, the department’s activities had reportedly raised significant concerns within the CIA and Ukraine itself. Namely, the GUR’s use of “cutthroat tactics that may seem justified now…but could later prove difficult to rein in.”

An anonymous former senior CIA official warned the Washington Post, “we are seeing the birth of a set of intelligence services that are like Mossad in the 1970s.” They feared Kiev’s CIA-enhanced “proficiency” at assassinations and other black ops carried “broader risks”, if Ukraine’s “intelligence operations” against third countries “become even bolder.” With eerily precise foresight, they predicted chaos wrought overseas by Kiev’s CIA-trained GUR shadow army “might cause rifts with partners,” placing “serious tension” on Ukraine’s “broader strategic goals.” Just as in Mali now.

Despite these anxieties, at sites first on Ukrainian then US soil, “GUR operatives were trained on skills ranging from clandestine maneuvers behind enemy lines to weapons platforms and explosives.” The military intelligence agency has also launched “dozens of attacks” on targets in Russia, including buildings and “noncombatants”, using its deadly in-house drone fleet. A senior Ukrainian operative angsted how such operations play into “Putin’s false narrative” that Kiev poses “a growing danger to ordinary Russians,” and “Ukrainians are coming for them.”

Kiev’s demonic alliance with Al Qaeda in the Sahel amply demonstrates how her CIA and MI6-assisted military and intelligence capabilities definitively represent a “growing danger”, to average citizens the world over. Kiev is openly plotting to replicate HTS’ violent takeover of Damascus, first in Mali, then in Burkina Faso and Niger. Extremist-occupied territories are to multiply, while economic warfare impoverishes and enfeebles the military governments, damaging their domestic popularity. Then, they can be brought to heel via forced capitulation, or outright regime change.

It’s been publicly confirmed Kiev’s clandestine assistance was instrumental in toppling Assad. Now, as Militarnyi openly brags, Ukraine’s alliance with Al Qaeda in Mali is helping drive “a revival of contacts” between AES and the West. This has led to “the first publicly confirmed US diplomatic engagement” with all three Alliance members, in March. The CIA and MI6 have built a monster in militarised Ukraine, which is now training its proxy crosshairs globally with devastating effect. A new World War has begun.

On April 15th, Declassified UK published a bombshell investigation exposing how in the mid-1990s, senior British political and military officials were well-aware NATO expansion into Central and Eastern Europe “would provoke [the] Russians,” and likely trigger all-out war. Hitherto unreported Ministry of Defence files reveal London knew Moscow’s “sensitivities” over a “hostile military alliance” enlarging up to its borders were profound, and based on very “real” concerns. Yet, NATO’s dangerous crusade to absorb Central and Eastern Europe continued apace, ultimately producing the Ukraine proxy conflict.

Since the so-called Special Military Operation’s February 2022 eruption, British officials have relentlessly reiterated the mantra the proxy war was “unprovoked”. However, a declassified March 1995 Foreign Office memo noted “there was a widespread psychological and intellectual perception in Moscow that NATO was a real threat.” In May that year, then-Prime Minister John Major succinctly articulated Russian anxieties to his Irish counterpart John Bruton, as a “fundamental fear…of encirclement.” Concerns about EU membership were comparatively muted:

Still, in 1997 NATO invited Czechia, Hungary, and Poland to join, which they did two years later. In 2004, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania simultaneously joined the military alliance. So too did ex-Warsaw Pact members Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and former Yugoslav republic Slovenia. Declassified UK shows how back in August 1996, British Defence Intelligence prepared a NATO enlargement study specifically forecasting that these countries joining could trigger war, and an alliance military operation launched via Article 5 of the NATO treaty in response.

This refers to collective self-defence, under which NATO members are obligated to come to each other’s defence if attacked. In the scenario, Defence Intelligence assumed “Russia has vehemently opposed NATO membership for the Baltic states and has threatened retaliation to preserve her own security against a perceived hostile military alliance on her borders.” In the real world, Boris Yeltsin made at-times irate public statements about NATO enlargement into the Baltics at the time, while lobbying US President Bill Clinton on the issue behind closed doors.

NATO expansion continued regardless. In December 1996, Declassified UK reports then-Russian premier Viktor Chernomyrdin privately warned Major: “Russia could not stop NATO enlarging, but this would create a fragile situation which could explode.” Other declassified files from this time show senior apparatchiks in London were acutely aware of Moscow’s “concern,” “fears,” “hostility,” “negative attitudes,” and “resentment” over alliance enlargement. Both Major and his successor Tony Blair explicitly pledged in person to Kremlin officials that NATO wouldn’t “move up to Russia’s borders.”

However, a secret September 1996 policy paper made clear Britain was committed “to enlarge NATO to the East,” even if “Russian acquiescence is not possible.” In February 1997, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Nikolai Afanasievsky angrily branded public discussions in Western capitals of admitting former Soviet republics to the alliance a “blatant provocation” in a meeting with Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow. Greenstock reassured his Russian opposite number NATO had “no intention” of admitting former Soviet states “at this stage” - which, technically, was true.

‘Russian Problem’

A March 1997 Foreign Office memo forecast rapid NATO enlargement would “antagonise,” and ultimately “provoke,” Russia into a belligerent counter-response. Yeltsin’s “anxiety” about the “possible accession of Ukraine, the Baltic states and other states of the former Soviet Union” was considered the “most difficult issue” affecting Western relations with Moscow. A more staggered approach was thus required. That month, John Major met with NATO secretary general Javier Solana, who spoke of “Russians fears about NATO troops and equipment moving eastwards.”

Reflecting the deep unpopularity and distrust of NATO expansion among many sections of the Russian public and political class, Solana relayed to Major how Moscow’s foreign minister Yegeny Primakov “had more or less begged him for help in giving the Russians reassurance about NATO forces not moving eastwards.” A month later, Yeltsin dispatched a strongly worded private letter to John Major:

Hitherto unreported declassified CIA files amply demonstrate Washington’s cognisance of vehement public and state-level Russian opposition to NATO military action and enlargement not only in the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union, but the former Yugoslavia, dates back even further. A January 1993 CIA memo discussed “Serbia and the Russian Problem”. The Agency perceived it necessary - but potentially difficult - to secure Moscow’s acquiescence to US and UN actions being taken against the Serbs over the Bosnian civil war.

At the time, the newly-inaugurated Clinton White House was openly mulling direct intervention in the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis, up to and including all-out invasion. A year prior, Washington had imposed crippling sanctions on what remained of Yugoslavia over the bloodshed. The CIA felt it urgent to “sensitize [Clinton’s] new policy-making team to the growing danger of Russian alienation” from “Western policy toward Serbia.” The Agency feared “historical relations” between Belgrade and Moscow could “work against an effective international response” - in other words, overt US involvement.

“While the US cannot mortgage its Yugoslav policy to Russia, Washington should probably work harder at consulting Moscow before new policies are established,” the CIA memo cautioned. The Agency sought to explain “why Russian unease over Western policy toward Serbia may well lead to a veto of [UN Security Council] resolutions on the use of force.” The CIA reported how the Russian government had “grown increasingly concerned about the possible use of force against Serbia,” before outlining “five driving forces behind the concern.”

Among them was “Pseudo-Geopolitics”. Problematically for Yeltsin, and in turn the CIA, Pentagon and White House, “some Russians” were asking “why the West and the US in particular should inject itself in an area that Russia always regarded as its traditional sphere of influence.” While the CIA scornfully declared “the West should not take this argument very seriously in today’s world,” the agency warned that argument was “being made” at a public and political level in Russia, and the Kremlin “must deal with it.”

Another “concern” was “Slav Brotherhood”. The CIA observed how “romantic nationalists” in the country were replacing the Marxist slogan “workers, unite”, with “Slavs, unite.” Resultantly, Russian “ultranationalists” considered Moscow to be “duty bound to come to the aid of Serbs.” Without outlining why, the CIA believed that “for some of the same reasons cited above, we should not take this too seriously, but it cannot be dismissed if other players aid their racial or religious brothers.”

‘Dangerous Precedent’

The Balkans are of enormous cultural, economic, historic, military, political, and strategic importance to Russia. Yugoslavia had in the immediate aftermath of World War II been directly aligned with the Soviet Union, before the pair split in 1948. Thereafter, Belgrade and Moscow enjoyed harmonious albeit intermittently tense relations. It was entirely understandable why the Kremlin - and Russians - would be anxious about destructive US-led actions against collapsing Yugoslavia, which was being forcibly broken up into easily exploitable Western puppet states, and future NATO members.

However, the CIA - and White House, and NATO - took for granted that in a unipolar world of unchallenged and unchallengeable US global hegemony, the notion Russia had any sphere of influence in the world, and interests outside her own borders, should not be taken “very seriously” in policy planning considerations - if at all. The West’s casual disregard for Moscow’s clearly-stated red-lines and obvious concerns became significantly ingrained, and turbocharged, with the March - June 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.

Chinese and Russian aversion to the campaign was forecast throughout Western capitals. Hence, NATO avoided Beijing and Moscow’s inevitable UNSC vetoes on unilateral military action by invoking the UN Charter’s self defence clause, to bomb Yugoslavia without a Security Council vote. An eerily prescient April 1999 New Statesman article warned NATO’s unauthorised, illegal bombing was no “one off”, but “just the beginning” of a “brave new world”, in which the military alliance acted as a worldwide “riot squad.”

When the campaign erupted, by then prime minister Yevgeny Primakov was literally mid-air, en route to the US for an official meeting. He immediately ordered the pilot to return to Russia. Despite Primakov’s protests, the Yeltsin administration did not come to Belgrade’s rescue, instead encouraging Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic to surrender to NATO. Nonetheless, as a declassified June 1999 cable from Britain’s Moscow embassy dispatched to all London’s top overseas diplomatic missions reported, the alliance’s bombing of Yugoslavia had “left Russia bruised and bewildered.”

There was shock in the country, from the streets to its highest levels, that “NATO resorted to military action in the face of direct Russian opposition.” The campaign was widely regarded as “setting a dangerous precedent for military action without UNSC authority,” therefore “reducing the weight of the Russian veto.” This was not only perceived as a “blow” to the UNSC, but outright “threat to Russian interests…setting an unacceptable precedent for action out of area, circumventing the Security Council if necessary”:

‘Intervention Elsewhere’

As a result of NATO’s illegal 78-day-long bombing of Yugoslavia, which killed thousands - including children - and violently disrupted daily life for millions, Russia suspended formal dialogue with NATO. The high-level Moscow station cable noted, “there are signs that Russia may be interested in resuscitating” the dialogue, “but an early return to the status quo ante is politically impossible.” It added:

However, the Russian military was said to have “stood out for their vociferous rhetoric and active promotion of what they perceive to be Russia’s interests as a great power.” Moscow-based foreign policy analysts had “focussed in response” to the bombing “on the possibility of aligning Russian policies” with China and India, “but so far without much conviction as to whether this will prove practicable.” Nonetheless, the option was being widely discussed by influential political thinkers, “confidence” in the West locally having been grievously “undermined”.

The cable forecast that “rebuilding mutual trust” between NATO, its member states and Moscow following the alliance bombing of Yugoslavia was “likely to be a slow process.” It was believed an impending European Council meeting on creating a European Security and Defence Policy in Cologne, Germany would “be an important first opportunity to show Moscow that we continue to attach importance to working with Russia”:

The same unambiguous pledge had been “made separately” to the similarly outraged and disquieted Chinese, by Blair and senior diplomats. However, the bombing of Yugoslavia rapidly did become a precedent for further unilateral Western military action “out of area”, whether conducted under NATO’s auspices or not. Along the way, independent states like Libya were reduced to open-air slave markets. Meanwhile, the remnants of countries shattered by NATO imperialism were hoovered up by the alliance, one by one, with ever-rapacious speed.

Again, the British well-knew Western actions in the former Yugoslavia gravely enhanced Russian concerns about NATO-enforced unipolarity, and the alliance’s inexorable expansion ever-closer towards Moscow’s borders. In September 1999, then-foreign secretary Robin Cook’s private secretary wrote to Blair, warning how the Russians had found recent unilateral Anglo-American economic and kinetic warfare waged against Iraq and Yugoslavia “particularly hard to swallow”:

‘Strong Divisions’

A February 2000 Foreign Office brief for a meeting between Blair and NATO secretary general George Robertson noted, “Russian opposition to NATO expansion has become even more hardline as a result” of Yugoslavia’s bombing. Undeterred, the alliance continued getting bigger, with British military and intelligence figures at the forefront of this push. Chief among them was Chris Donnelly, a longtime Ministry of Defence apparatchik elevated to NATO in 1989, just in time for the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia.

As a scathing academic review of his 2004 work Reforming For Wars Of The Future noted, “if any one man has played a central role in the process of NATO enlargement and in providing constructive support for military reform in the newly liberated countries of East-Central Europe, it has been Chris Donnelly.” In many cases, states became ensconced in NATO despite significant public and political opposition. Strikingly, Donnelly himself admitted in January 2002 NATO was fundamentally not a defensive military alliance.

“Small armies from small countries cannot do much,” he explained, so “NATO runs better as a political alliance.” Donnelly left NATO in 2003. His thinking on NATO enlargement remained hugely influential thereafter. In early 2004, the alliance’s in-house magazine NATO Review published an essay he wrote on constructing a NATO “for the Greater Middle East.” An October 2006 US Army War College paper discussing how to embroil Ukraine in the War on Terror cited Donnelly’s 1997 thesis on “defence transformation in the new democracies.”

Ukraine was tentatively put on the NATO path at the alliance’s April 2008 summit. In February that year, then-US ambassador to Moscow Bill Burns - CIA chief under Joe Biden’s presidency - cabled Washington that Moscow was “particularly worried” about how “strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership.” “Much” of the country’s “ethnic-Russian community” opposed joining, and it “could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war.” This would force Russia to “decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

NATO’s own polling from 2011 suggested less than 20% of Ukrainians supported joining. Yugoslavia’s bombing was “particularly unpopular” locally - “for many…the image of NATO still evokes a sense of fear.” A week later, Burns outlined Moscow’s likely responses to Georgia and Ukraine being offered NATO membership to the White House. In respect of Georgia, “the prospects of subsequent…armed conflict would be high” - indeed, Russo-Georgian war came to pass in August 2008. Meanwhile, Burns’ observations about Ukraine reverberate today as a prophet’s curse wretchedly validated:

A stunning investigative report by Hebrew-language outlet Ynet has laid bare the embarrassing cataclysm not only of the US-Israeli war on Iran, but the Zionist entity’s long-running effort to destroy the Islamic Republic and wider Resistance via covert and overt military and intelligence operations. Violent Mossad-orchestrated protests, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s murder, and a Kurdish invasion were intended to produce regime change and “total victory” over Tehran. Yet, as Ynet bitterly concludes: “what started as a far-reaching Israeli move, rich in imagination, final in its solution, ends in heartache.”

In granular detail, the investigation tracks how the Zionist entity’s deranged scheme germinated in the minds of Israeli intelligence, military, and political chiefs, before the Trump administration was comprehensively sold on the plot. Along the way, Ynet exposes extraordinary and hazardous levels of delusion and imperial hubris at the highest levels of Tel Aviv and Washington. For example, Benjamin Netanyahu sincerely - and dangerously - believed Israel’s criminal September 2024 assault of Lebanon, and the June 2025 12 Day War, had decimated Hezbollah and Iran.

This perspective was shared by Mossad, which had been building a vast, dedicated anti-government army in Tehran since 2022. The Zionist entity was wholeheartedly convinced its local proxy forces had the power to collapse the entire Islamic Republic. “Fostering mass protest,” encouraging “armed resistance of minorities” - specifically, Kurds within and without Iran - while assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khameinei were in “parallel” parts of a three-pronged coup d’etat strategy. Netanyahu truly believed “total victory” over the Resistance was in grasp across every West Asian theatre. Ynet reports:

The operation was intended to be put into action this June. Yet, in January, with “tens of thousands” of Mossad-directed insurrectionists in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities, the Zionist entity felt conditions had sufficiently “ripened” to make a decisive move. Mossad’s “influence organization” in the Islamic Republic was birthed in 2022, reaching “operational maturity two and a half years ago” - coincidentally around the time of October 7th. Ynet bleakly boasts of the “effort and sophistication” of the Zionist entity’s clandestine army of murderous anti-government rioters in Tehran:

Mossad pitched its braindead regime change plan directly to the CIA, Pentagon Central Command was informed of it by visiting Zionist Occupation Forces chief of staff Eyal Zamir, while Trump got personally lobbied by Netanyahu. The President - “convinced there were no limits to the capabilities of the military system at his command” after Nicolas Maduro’s January 3rd kidnap - and his administration were a highly receptive audience. Trump indicated his endorsement of the conspiracy on January 13th, publicly informing Iranians “help is on its way.”

A vast US military buildup in West Asia immediately began, while supposed peace talks with Tehran were ongoing. The negotiations were of course a con, intended to lull the Resistance into a false sense of security before the next phase of Israel’s intended palace coup commenced. On February 28th, Zionist-American airstrikes rained down on Tehran. Israel and the US felt certain Iran’s leadership had been eliminated or scattered, and the Islamic Republic’s command and control system “severely beaten.” But then, catastrophe started to erupt.

‘Popular Uprising’

While the Supreme Leader was killed - demonically celebrated by Western media as “the assassination of the century” - sending Iran’s leadership temporarily underground, “an orderly change of government, in accordance with Khamenei’s will,” was successfully executed. Iran’s command and control system wasn’t in reality significantly disrupted, returning to full capacity within hours. No defections were forthcoming. Still, “euphoria” abounded in Washington and Tel Aviv. Trump - who privately “welcomed the Israeli hit” - issued a video statement urging the Iranian people to take power by violence, warning:

Netanyahu joined the insurrectionary call. Meanwhile, genocidal US-Israeli bombing was in reality stoking incendiary public anger in Iran and beyond. Among the most egregious atrocities, a deliberate Zionist-American airstrike on a primary school killed 156 young girls, sparking fiery international condemnation, vengeful mourning throughout West Asia, and UN investigations. Iranians of all ethnicities and faiths instead took to the streets in substantial numbers to grieve Khamenei, while celebrating his son Mojtaba’s ascension to Supreme Leader. Immediately, the IRGC moved to blockade the Strait of Hormuz.

Despite the closure being an absolutely inevitable upshot of Zionist-American aggression against Iran, which Western intelligence assessments universally long-forecast, Ynet reports the US was “not ready for this move and its devastating economic consequences.” Trump’s threats to Tehran not to blockade the Strait were ignored. The riddle of why Washington was so caught off guard is answered by Netanyahu’s personal assurances to Trump the Islamic Republic would crumble in mere days. Astonishingly, there was no contingency plan beyond that.

In the meantime, another cog in the Zionist-American regime change operation in Tehran was also decisively faltering. “After 100 hours of air activity…a ground invasion from Kurdish militias based in Iraq” was supposed to commence. An invasion force had been training there over prior weeks, preparing “to reach the Kurdish region of Iran” and link up with fighters locally before a “mass march” on Tehran. For inspiration, Tel Aviv looked to Damascus being overwhelmed by MI6-supported HTS forces in mere days in December 2024.

However, Ynet reports Iranian intelligence learned “in advance about the planned invasion,” and supposedly informed Turkey, prompting Recep Erdoğan to personally demand Trump call it off. Regardless, the entire proposal was by any objective measure manifest insanity. After reports emerged in early March of the CIA training Kurdish militants “with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran,” even Zionist think tank pundits and diaspora activists warned invasion was a recipe for total disaster, which would unite Iranians of every extraction in opposition.

Undeterred, Kurdish invasion remained a fundamental component of Israel’s regime change strategy against Tehran, throughout the war. When a tentative ceasefire was struck on April 7th, after 40 days of devastating Iranian strikes, Ynet reports Israeli officials wondered why the military intervention never came to pass. Did the US not believe in the operation in the first place? Perhaps Trump changed his mind after Erdoğan picked up the phone? Or was “the whole idea a fantasy, with no chance of being realised?”

‘Inadvertent Effects’

That the Zionist entity was so convinced its self-evidently misguided, suicidal mission could possibly succeed is all the more damning, given the contents of a July 2025 report from Tel Aviv’s highly influential Institute for National Security Studies. A withering appraisal of the 12 Day War, the think tank acknowledged Iranian “regime change” had been an avowed Zionist objective from that conflict’s inception, which failed spectacularly. INSS still advocated for destroying the Islamic Republic, but cautioned against pursuing certain strategies.

Strikingly, the think tank warned against employing precisely the regime change tactics depended upon by the ZOF and Mossad, during the latest Zionist-American war on Iran. For one, INSS correctly predicted any Israeli military effort - particularly civilian bombing - intended to ignite mass anti-government protests had no chance of success. Such actions during the 12 Day War had conversely produced an intense “anti-Israel wave” among Iranians, who “exhibited a notable degree” of “rallying around the flag” in response.

Iranians’ determination “to defend their homeland at a critical moment against an external enemy” endured after the 12 Day War ended, to the extent all traces of public dissent in the Islamic Republic “almost completely disappeared” in the conflict’s wake. INSS likewise vehemently cautioned against encouraging “separatist tendencies” in Iran - such as Kurdish militancy. Due to “heightened public sensitivity to any perceived foreign attempts to promote ethnic fragmentation,” separatist insurrection, let alone outright invasion, would unite “large segments” of the Iranian public “against Israel.”

Moreover, a particularly prophetic portion of INSS’ report strongly cautioned against assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as doing so “would not necessarily result in regime change,” and inevitably backfire. The think tank precisely foretold Tehran “would likely have little difficulty selecting a successor, who could prove to be more extreme or more capable.” INSS likewise predicted the Iranian government instead being strengthened, and anti-Zionist sentiment skyrocketing in the country and beyond, leaving any subsequent “efforts to destabilize the regime through popular protest” dead on arrival.

All these humiliating outcomes duly happened following February 28th. Elsewhere, INSS forecast military-driven Israeli regime change efforts in Iran could compel the Islamic Republic to seek nuclear weapons capability “as an existential insurance policy.” This hasn’t yet materialised, although Western officials now widely fear it may. Meanwhile, ever since the ceasefire was implemented, talks between Washington and Tehran have been stuck in seemingly implacable stalemate. While US officials remain committed to imposing sharp limits on Iran’s nuclear research, the Islamic Republic refuses to even negotiate the issue.

Furthermore, Tehran has made clear its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz will only be loosened when the Empire stops blockading the country, and ends the conflict. While Netanyahu still harbours reveries of shattering the Islamic Republic, the Empire lacks anything like the required economic and military muscle. Meanwhile, heavily overextended Tel Aviv has blundered into a colossal trap in Lebanon. The Resistance is waiting and watching intently. In recklessly seeking self-evidently unattainable “regime change” in Iran, the Zionist entity has only hastened its own permanent destruction.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s April 13th announcement Rome will suspend a longstanding defence agreement with Israel sent shockwaves throughout Europe. Historically, Italian governments - even when led by figures who abhor Zionism - have enjoyed constructive, close ties with Tel Aviv. The pair’s security, intelligence and military apparatuses also have a long-running clandestine relationship. In fact, Mossad’s putrid overseas spying, assassination and sabotage nexus was effectively born in Italy, and has wreaked havoc in the country ever since.

Details of how Zionist spies secured a firm foothold in Italy are provided in a fascinating paper by academic Massimiliano Fiore. Drawing on archival sources, he “traces the evolution of Israeli clandestine activity” in Rome, exposing how Zionist intelligence connivances were waged in and against the country even before the entity’s May 1948 founding, and throughout Tel Aviv’s subsequent war of erasure against Palestine. Several case studies map Mossad’s evolving and ever-bolder criminality in Italy, which informed how the agency operates globally ever after. Fiore’s research is in turn heavily indebted to the groundbreaking work Mossad Base Italy, by veteran reporter Eric Salerno.

The story begins in the wake of the United Nations General Assembly’s November 1947 Partition Plan, which proposed giving Zionist colonisers 55% of Palestine’s territory. Arab leaders immediately began preparing to resist the entity’s construction, training soldiers in Palestine and neighbouring states for the purpose. In response, Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion issued a directive to Zionist paramilitary and intelligence factions to secure weapons for the impending genocidal war over Palestine - which resulted in the Nakba - while denying arms to Arab forces.

Fiore records how the chief of Mossad le-Aliyah Bet and Rekhesh - respectively, the spying and arms procurement wings of notorious Zionist paramilitary Haganah - immediately “established a sabotage unit in Rome that quickly became an operational hub of Israeli covert activity in Italy and across Europe.” Thereafter, Zionist operatives “exploited Italy’s political ambiguity and physical infrastructure to conduct a sustained campaign of sabotage and interception.” The academic dubs this covert contest on Italian soil “a secret front” in the 1948 war.

Rome’s ports and air and sea transport corridors “played a critical role in sustaining Israeli supply” of weapons for the 1948 war, while disrupting the flow of arms to Arab militaries. Moreover, Zionists “sought to shape the Mediterranean balance of power” for malign geopolitical purposes. Their covert actions - “conducted under conditions of political tolerance and diplomatic constraint” - forged strong bonds with the Italian state, while threatening Rome’s status “as a strategic bridge between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East” in Israel’s favour.

The incipient Mossad’s cloak-and-dagger conniving in Italy had a devastating impact. A June 1948 CIA memo observed how the “European headquarters” of Zionist intelligence “operated under cover in Rome,” through which “clandestine transport of munitions by air” to Palestine was conducted with “the knowledge and collusion” of Italian authorities. Without European citizens, Arab governments or the ‘international community’ noticing, Rome had been secretly transformed into an international nucleus of “illegal traffic in arms for the Jewish underground.”

‘Riskier Measures’

Rewind to March 1948, and Czechoslovakia’s government approved the delivery of 8,000 rifles, 200 machine guns and six million rounds of ammunition to Syria. Set to sail next month on the Lino, a 450-ton Italian freighter, Zionist operatives were determined the shipment would not reach West Asia. First, its passage was impeded by Haganah warning authorities in Rome a ship laden with weapons was headed to Italy. Given the “charged political atmosphere” preceding the country’s election, officials quickly moved to impound the Lino.

On the night of April 10th, a Zionist sabotage squad descended on the vessel and attached explosive charges, before slipping away undetected. The ship sank without casualties, or attribution. Per Fiore, the Italian media speculated weapons aboard might have been headed to local Communists, which “[deflected] suspicion away from Zionist involvement.” While a small operation, the Lino’s sinking was seismic. The effort “demonstrated how limited resources, local networks, and deniable maritime sabotage could produce disproportionate effects, disrupting adversary supply while avoiding interstate escalation.”

The Lino operation’s success prompted the formal establishment in May 1948 of a “Unit for the Sabotage of Enemy Supply in Europe”, headquartered in Rome. It rapidly became a “central hub for intelligence, logistics, and coordination” across Italy and Europe, for Zionist spies. “Jewish operatives and instructors already active on the continent” joined its ranks, receiving training in all manner of skullduggery, assisted by Italian military and intelligence veterans. Among them were battle-hardened fascists, whose World War II experiences informed future Israeli operational practices.

Meanwhile, a Syrian initiative to recover the sunken Lino’s consignment was ongoing. The weapons and ammunition were successfully salvaged and repaired, then redirected to their original destination on a vessel called the Argiro. But Zionist spies were watching, and intended to seize the shipment. Via bribery and elaborate deception, operatives infiltrated the ship’s crew, clearing the way for Zionist militants posing as a security escort to board the vessel while en route to West Asia. On August 21st, the Argiro was captured, and directed to Palestine.

Five days later, Zionist naval forces commandeered the Argiro, seizing the materiel before sinking the ship outright. The lethal cargo reached Haifa four days later, and was sent to Zionist militants fighting in Jerusalem. The Italian crew was temporarily detained rather than killed or disappeared, although the captain died from tuberculosis in captivity before being returned home, raising the spectre of an international incident erupting between the expanding settler colony and Rome.

Fiore notes the Argiro effort was an early example of “strategic appropriation” by Zionist spies, foreshadowing future operations in which “intelligence, deception, and procurement functioned as mutually reinforcing instruments.” This journalist has documented how a similar approach was applied in the early 1960s, during the entity’s criminal quest to clandestinely acquire nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the Argiro’s takeover amply illustrated how Zionist agents in Italy were willing to undertake “progressively riskier measures”, which could inflame public, political tensions with Rome. But the burgeoning Mossad had little to fear.

‘Diplomatic Buffer’

In early 1949, Zionist militants attempted to blow up motor torpedo boats in an Italian shipyard that had been purchased by Egypt. Fiore records how the operation prioritised concealment and “strict deniability” to avoid “diplomatic repercussions”, and benefitted from an insider providing access to the site. However, the plot’s executors, led by an explosives specialist centrally involved in the Lino’s sinking, were caught in flagrante by local police. In June that year, the group’s leader was sentenced to three years in prison for possessing explosives.

This prompted “sustained diplomatic intervention” from the fledgling Zionist entity’s highest levels, resulting in the convicted agent being freed under a presidential pardon. A “calculated act of executive leniency,” the move set a precedent that endured for decades ever after, and may do so today. The same month the Zionist spies were busted, Italian premier Alcide De Gasperi granted local Mossad chief Ada Sereni informal carte blanche to conduct clandestine operations in the country.

Accordingly, Mossad activities not merely in Italy, but the world over, subsequently emphasised “deception, improvisation, and operational daring.” As long as the activities of Zionist spies “remained beneath the threshold of public escalation,” authorities in Rome would “close one eye - preferably two.” It was the beginning of a policy of strategic ambiguity, whereby Italy sought to maintain amicable relations with the Arab and Muslim world and Tel Aviv simultaneously. It was hoped Rome could avoid being dragged into the Palestinian conflict, therefore preserving “political equilibrium”.

Under the auspices of this clandestine concord, the Zionist entity benefitted enormously from “selective enforcement” of local laws, political pardons if its operatives and/or schemes were exposed, and other indulgences. Mossad could thus exploit Rome “as a transit corridor, logistical base, and diplomatic buffer.” However, Tel Aviv routinely flouted the terms of this dispensation, gravely compromising the country’s “political equilibrium”. Israel couldn’t tolerate Palestinian resistance fighters and groups smuggling weapon or travelling without hindrance through Italy, or enjoying political protection locally.

This blind eye to Palestinian resistance became known as the “Lodo Moro” agreement, so-called because it was instituted by veteran Italian statesman and repeat prime minister Aldo Moro. Mossad sought to harshly penalise Rome for such leniency towards the Palestinian cause. Questions abound over Zionist involvement in numerous high-profile acts of terror perpetrated in Italy subsequently, such as the August 1980 bombing of Bologna Centrale railway station, which killed 85 people and wounded over 200, and political assassinations - including Moro’s own.

An ardent anti-Zionist, Moro was ostensibly kidnapped by the Red Brigades, a left-wing guerrilla movement, in March 1978. He was killed after 55 days in captivity. Numerous knowledgeable sources have testified to successive parliamentary inquiries and official investigations over the decades since how Mossad infiltrated and assisted the Red Brigades, seeking to influence the group’s activities from inception. Moreover, there was likewise a little-known but hugely impactful Zionist hand in the notorious CIA and MI6-run Operation Gladio from the very beginning.

Chaos unleashed by Gladio greatly furthered Mossad’s quest to destabilise Italy, in service of boosting Israel’s financial, military and political support from the US. There is little chance of Tel Aviv’s geopolitical position being challenged by Rome today. Yet, incidents such as the mysterious late March attack on an Italian oil pipeline raise obvious questions about whether the local Zionist wrecking network constructed decades ago remains in place, and still sends incendiary warnings to the country’s government not to step too far out of line.