* Beloved Dr. Hoffe Testifies

Posted on by
Reply

Those who’ve been following this blog, and earlier incarnations, including Connecting the Dots, which were slow information paper newsletters, know that Dr. Hoffe is a beloved doctor here in our region. His courage and integrity standing up the tyranny, censorship and abuse of medical consent during the COVID scamdemic cost him dearly. There is much to say about this good country doctor but one image will suffice. He’s the kind of man who, when he receives a call from a patient during dinner, after dark, will leave the dinner and drive off into the inky black night on a lonely road through mountains as big and majestic as the Alps. He deserves every medal of honour that our wounded, damaged, degraded society should bestow but will not…not until everyone wakes up to the global crimes that were committed by big pharma.

Here’s his testimony at the recent Allison Inquiry.

* Reading Notes (Part One) ~ Mao: the Unknown Story 

Posted on by
Reply

*Reading Notes (Part One) ~ Mao: the Unknown Story 

by Jung Change and Jon Halliday

This is a tome, or a brick, depending on your level of book-love. 613 pages then another nearly 200 pages of chapter notes, bibliography and index. If I wrote down all the notes I wanted to, I’d be writing a novel myself—even still, there are so many I’ve divided them into two parts. The authors leave no stone unturned, no turn unstoned. If you’re not into reading, the synopsis is this: in his youth Mao Tse-tung was a lazy, lying, selfish, aimless boy who loved his mother and hated his father. Gradually, as he matured, he learned that he enjoyed abusing people. He was thrilled by extreme violence and torture; “Mao discovered in himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery”. His power-hunger and slash-and-burn looting accelerated his ambitions and led him directly into Communist politics. He was driven by devious ambition; he used, manipulated and betrayed everyone who trusted him in order to get more for himself, including the despot Stalin. He stopped at nothing to get more power. He was universally loathed, even by his soldiers; on the Long March he would execute soldiers and hang them in trees along the road where his army marched, to dissuade deserters. He was, in the clearest sense, a raging psychopath. He did nothing good for the peasantry and brought great harms instead. If you’re thinking Communism could be an antidote to late capitalist rot, this book will shake that notion right out of you. The essential problem with all political/economic systems are the psychopathic personalities who inevitably get to positions of extreme power. And if ever a soul should rot in hell, it’s Mao Tse-tung’s. 

“This is a bombshell of a book.” ~ Chris Patten, last governor of Hong Kong

From late 1920, when he entered the Communist orbit, Mao began to use expressions like “workers and peasants” and “proletariat”. But they remained mere phrases, part of an obligatory vocabulary. Decades later, Mao talked about how, as a young man in Shaoshan, he cared about people starving. The record shows no such concern. Mao’s peasant background did not imbue him with idealism about improving the lot of Chinese peasants. (9) 

Mao’s attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, “I”, above everything else. “I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others….People like me want to…satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.” (13) 

The other central element in his character which Mao spelt out now was the joy he took in upheaval and destruction. “Giant wars,” he wrote, “will last as long as heaven and earth and will never become extinct….The ideal of a world of Great Inequality and Harmony [da tong, Confucian ideal society] is mistaken.” This was not just the prediction that a pessimist might make; it was Mao’s desideratum, which he asserted was what the population at large wished. “Long-lasting peace,” he claimed, “is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace…When we look at history, we adore the times of [war] when dramas happened one after another…which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored…Human nature loves sudden swift changes.” Mao simply collapsed the distinction between reading about stirring events and actually living through cataclysm. He ignored the fact that, for the overwhelming majority, war meant misery. (14) 

When he came to the question “How do we change [China]?,” Mao laid the utmost emphasis on destruction: “the country must be…destroyed and then re-formed.” He extended this line not just to China but to the whole world—and even the universe: “This applies to the country, to the nation, and to mankind…The destruction of the universe is the same…People like me long for its destruction, because when the universe is destroyed, a new universe will be formed. Isn’t that better!” These views, worded so clearly at the age of twenty-four, remained at the core of Mao’s thinking throughout his life. (15) 

In an article written on 21 November 1919, shortly after his mother’s death, and entitled “On Women’s Independence,” Mao claimed that “Women can do as much physical labour as men. It’s just that they can’t do such work during childbirth.” So his answer to “women’s independence” was that “women should prepare enough…before they marry to support themselves,” and even that “women should stockpile necessities for the period of childbirth themselves.” Evidently, as a man, Mao did not want to have to look after women. [Or his wives, or his children, as his life revealed.] When he came to power, the core of his approach to women was to put them to heavy manual labour. (18)  

In June 1920, Mao called on a Professor Ch’en Tu-hsiu, at the time China’s foremost Marxist intellectual. It was crucial encounter that would change his life. The professor was in the midst of forming a Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao had written a long article calling him “a bright star in the world of thought.” Aged forty, Chen was the undisputed leader of Chinese Marxists, a true believer, charismatic, with a volatile temper. The idea of forming the Communist Party did not stem from the professor, nor from any other Chinese. It originated in Moscow. In 1919, the new Soviet government had set up the Communist International, the Cominterm, to foment revolution and influence policy in Moscow’s interest around the world. In August, Moscow launched a huge secret programme of action and subversion for China, starting with a commitment of money, men and arms three decades long, which culminated in bringing the Communists under Mao to power in 1949—Soviet Russia’s most lasting triumph in foreign policy. (19) 

Approaching twenty-seven, Mao had become a Communist—not after an idealistic journey, or driven by passionate belief, but by being at the right place at the right time, and being given a job that was highly congenial to him. He had effectively been incorporated into an expanding organization. Mao was no fervent believer. This absence of heartfelt commitment would result in a most unconventional and unusual relationship with his Party throughout his life, even when he was head of that Party. (20) 

Without Moscow’s funding the CCP could not even begin to carry out any activities such as publishing Communist literature and organizing a labour movement. Over a nine-month period (October 1921—June 1922), out of its expenditure of 17, 655 yuan, less than 6 per cent was raised inside China, while over 94 per cent came from the Russians, as Ch’en himself reported to Moscow. Indeed, there were many other Communist groups in China at the time—at least seven between 1920 and 1922, one claiming as many as 11,000 members. But without Russian funds, they all collapsed. Unlike Ch’en, Mao showed no qualms about taking Moscow’s money. He was a realist. Russian funding also transformed his life. After the congress he began to receive 60-70 yuan a month from the Party for his Hunan branch, soon increased to 100, and then 160-170. This large and regular income made a tremendous difference. Mao had always been short of money. He had two jobs, headmaster and small-time journalist, and he dreaded having to depend on these two occupations to make his living. (27) 

It was only now, when he was thirty-two, that Mao—assumed by many to this day to have been the champion of poor peasants—took any interest in their affairs. Under Mao, the Peasant Institute churned out agitators who went into the villages, roused the poor against the rich and organized them into “peasant associations”. Now, because the Nationalists [rivals to the Communists headed by Chiang Kai-shek] were following Russian instructions aimed at bringing about a Soviet-style revolution, social order broke down for the first time. Violence erupted as poor peasants helped themselves to the food and money of the relatively rich, and took revenge. Thugs and sadists also indulged themselves. By December there was mayhem in the Hunan countryside. In this capacity as a leader of the peasant movement, Mao was invited back to his home province to give guidance. (40)

Though Mao did not address the issue of violence, his general approach was not militant. Shortly afterwards he went off on an inspection tour of the Hunan countryside. By the end of the tour, which lasted thirty-two days, he had undergone a dramatic change. Mao himself was to say that before this trip he had been taking a moderate line, and “not until I stayed in Hunan for over thirty days did I completely change my attitude.” What really happened was that Mao discovered in himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery. This gut enjoyment, which verged on sadism, meshed with, but preceded, his affinity for Leninist violence. Mao did not come to violence via theory. The propensity sprang from his character, and was to have a profound impact on his future methods of rule. (41) 

Mao was very taken with one weapon, the suobiao, a sharp, twin-edged knife with a long handle like a lance: “it…makes all landed tyrants and bad gentry tremble at the sight of it. The Hunan revolutionary authorities should…make sure every young and middle-aged male has one. There should be no limit put on [the use of] it.” Mao saw and heard much about brutality, and he liked it. In the report he wrote afterwards, in March 1927, he said he felt “a kind of ecstasy never experienced before.” His descriptions of the brutality oozed with excitement,  and flowed with an adrenaline rush. “It is wonderful! It is wonderful!” he exulted. Mao did not once address the issue that concerned peasants most, which was land redistribution. What fascinated Mao was violence that smashed the social order. And it was this propensity that caught Moscow’s eye, as it fitted into the Soviet model of a social revolution. (42) 

At the time Chiang Kai-shek broke with the Communists in April 1927, Stalin had emerged as the No. 1 in the Kremlin and was personally dictating policy on China. His reaction to Chiang’s split was to order the CCP to form its own army without delay and occupy territory, with the long-term aim of conquering China with the gun. Mao agreed with the military approach. On 7 August 1927, he told an emergency Party meeting presided over by Lominadze [a Russian agent]: “power comes out of the barrel of a gun” (a saying that later acquired international fame). But within this broad design, Mao harbored his own agenda—to command both the gun and the Party. (50)

Mao did not invent public execution, but he added to his ghastly tradition a modern dimension, organised rallies, and in this way made killing compulsory viewing for a large part of the population. To be dragooned into a crowd, powerless to walk away, forced to watch people put to death in this bloody and agonising way, hearing their screams, struck fear deep into those present. The traditional bandits could not match Mao and his orchestrated terror, which frightened even them. Yuan and Zuo [two powerful bandit warlords] submitted to Mao’s authority; soon after this they allowed themselves and their men to be formed into a regiment under him. Mao had out-bandited the bandits. (54) 

This is what Moscow had intended: peasants must be coerced into doing things that left no way back into normal life. To “get them to join the revolution,” the Party had decreed, “there is only one way: use Red terror to prod them into doing things that leave them with no chance to make compromises later with the gentry and bourgeoisie.” One man from Leiyang recounted: “I had suppressed [i.e., killed] counter-revolutionaries, so I could not live peacefully now. I had to go all the way…So I burned my own house with my own hands…and left [with Zhu].” (60) 

At this time (1929), the mainstay of the Party leadership in Shanghai was Chou En-lai. The man who held the formal top post as general secretary, Hsiang Chung-fa, a sailor-dockworker, was a figurehead, appointed solely because of his proletarian background. But the real decision-makers were operatives sent by Moscow, who in those days were mainly non-Russians, mostly European Communists. The immediate bosses were a German called Gerhart Eisler (later Moscow’s intelligence chief in the U.S.) and a Pole known as Rylsky. These agents controlled the Party budget, down to the slightest detail, as well as communications with Moscow. They made all policy decisions, and monitored their outcome. Moscow’s advisers supervised military activities. Their Chinese colleagues referred to them as maozi, “Hairy Ones,” as they had more body hair than the Chinese. ‘German Hairy.” “Polish Hairy.” “American Hairy,” etc., frequently cropped up in conversations among the Chinese. One probably stooped agent was known as “Hunchback Hairy.” The “Hairies” gave orders through Chou En-lai, who later won international fame as prime minister for a quarter of a century under Mao. But the real Chou was not the suave diplomat foreigners saw, but a ruthless apparatchik, in thrall to his Communist faith. Throughout his life he served the Party with a dauntless lack of integrity. (70)

Mao was addicted to comfort, while Zhu lived like an ordinary soldier. Aversion to privilege was particularly strong in the army because many had originally been attracted to join by the lure of equality, which was the Party’s main appeal. To quell any protests about privilege, Mao now invented the term “absolute egalitarianism” to designate an offence, adding the word “absolute” to make it harder for opponents to disagree. It was from this time on [1930] that privilege was formally endorsed as an inalienable part of Chinese communism. (75)

1932. Most men of working age were drafted into the army or as conscript labour. After three years of Communist rule, there were hardly any men left in the villages aged between their early teens and fifty. Women became the main labour force. Traditionally, women had done only fairly light work in the fields, as their bound and crippled feet [a horrific practice that had been in place for 1000 years!] meant that heavy manual labour caused great pain. Now they had to do most of the farm work, as well as other chores for the Red Army, like carrying loads, looking after the wounded, washing and mending clothes, and making shoes, for which they had to pay for the material themselves—no small extra burden. Mao, who had thought since his youth that women were capable of doing as much heavy labour as men, was the strongest advocate of this policy. He decreed: “Rely overwhelmingly on women to do farm work.” (105) 

China’s first Red State was run by terror and guarded like a prison. A pass was needed to leave one’s village, and sentries were ubiquitous around the clock. In this prisonlike universe, suicide was common—an early wave of what was later to grow to a flood throughout Mao’s reign. The number of suicides was so staggering, even among officials, that the regime had to tackle it publicly, as proclaimed by the slogan: “Suicides are the most shameful elements in the revolutionary ranks.” (108) 

In early 1945, Mao was ready to convene the long-delayed [by Stalin] Party congress and have himself inaugurated as the supreme leader of the CCP. Mao had not only weeded the list of delegates with a fine-tooth comb, he had held most of them in virtual imprisonment for five years, and put them through the grinder of his long-drawn-out terror campaign. Of the original 500 or so delegates, half were victimized as spy suspects and suffered appallingly, with some committing suicide and others having mental breakdowns. Many were then dropped. Hundreds of new delegates were appointed, guaranteed loyal to Mao. Mao Tse-tung had become the Stalin of the CCP. (269) 

The German invasion of Russia in June 1941 made Mao look round for an alternative source of funding in case Moscow was unable to continue its subsidy. The answer was opium. Within a matter of weeks, Yenan bought in large quantities of opium seeds. In 1942, extensive opium-growing and trading had begun. To a small circle, Mao dubbed his operation “the Revolutionary Opium War.” In Yenan, opium was known by the euphemism “te huo,” “Special Product.” When a Russian liaison man asked Mao outright over a game of mah-jong in August 1942 how Communists could “openly engage in opium production,” Mao was silent. One of his hatchet men, Teng Fa, supplied the answer: opium, he said, “brings back a caravan loaded with money…and with it we’ll whip the [Nationalists]!” That year a carefully researched study put the opium-growing area at 30,000 acres of the region’s best land. The major opium-producing counties lay on the borders with the friendly Nationalist general to the north, Teng Pao-shan, who was actually known as “the Opium King.” Mao received invaluable collaboration from him, which he reciprocated by facilitating Teng’s own opium-trafficking. (276) 

In one year, opium solved Mao’s problems. On 9 February 1943 he told Chou that Yenan had “overcome its financial difficulties, and had accumulated savings….worth 250 million fabi.” Fabi was the currency used in Nationalist areas, which Mao had been stockpiling, along with gold and silver, “for when we enter Nationalist areas,” i.e. once all-out war began against Chiang. This sum was six times the official Yenan region budget for 1942, and it represented pure saving. In 1943 the Russians estimated Mao’s opium sales at 44,760 kilograms, worth an astronomical 2.4 billion fabi (roughly U.S. $60 million at then current exchange rates, or some U.S. $640 million in 2005, this book’s publishing date). (277)

The lives of Party members in Yenan improved dramatically too, especially for senior officials. Cadres arriving from other base areas marvelled at how well they ate. One described a meal with “several dozen dishes,” and “every table left many dishes unfinished.” For the peasants, the main benefit opium brought was that it lessened the impositions visited upon them. Up till now, they had been liable to have their meagre household possessions and vital farm tools commandeered. After he became opium-rich, Mao ordered steps to improve relations with the locals. Opium wealth, however, did not improve the locals’ standard of living, which remained far below that of the occupying Communists. (277) 

Moscow’s arming of Mao accelerated. The Russians transferred some 900 Japanese aircraft, 700 tanks, more than 3,700 artillery pieces, mortars and grenade-launchers, nearly 12,000 machine guns, plus the sizeable Sungari flotilla, as well as numerous armoured cars and anti-aircraft guns, and hundreds of thousands of rifles. More than 2,000 wagonloads of arms and war material came by rail from North Korea, which had housed major Japanese arsenals, and more captured Japanese weapons from Outer Mongolia. Russian-made arms were also shipped in, plus captured German weapons with the markings chiselled out, which the Reds pretended were captured American arms. (297) 

[Anybody else completely disgusted with this? To think that Japan completely decimated Nanjing in 1937 and committed the worst atrocities against the Chinese, then only years later the Japanese arsenal were used against them by their own people, Mao’s Reds. This makes it exceedingly clear that there’s a global brotherhood of psychotic warmongers.]

In addition, the Russians secretly transferred tens of thousands of Japanese POWs to the CCP. These troops played a major role in turning the ragtag Communist army into a formidable battle machine, and were crucial in training Red forces to use the Japanese arms on which they chiefly depended, as well as for servicing and repairing these weapons. It was Japanese, too, who founded the CCP air force, with Japanese pilots serving as flight instructors. Thousands of well-trained Japanese medical staff brought the Red wounded a new level of professional and much-welcomed treatment. Some Japanese troops even took part in combat operations. The gigantic assistance from Russia, North Korea and Mongolia was carried out in the greatest secrecy—and is still little known today. The Reds went to great lengths to conceal it. Moscow played its customary part by calling reports of Soviet assistance “fabrications from start to finish.” The real fabrication was Mao’s claim that the CCP was fighting with “only millet plus rifles.” (297)

This Russian help, however, came at a grievous price for those living under Mao’s rule. A secret agreement was reached for the CCP to send Russia one million tons of food every year. The result was famine and deaths from starvation in some areas of China occupied by the Communists. In the Yenan region, according to Mao’s logistics manager, over 10,000 peasants died of starvation in 1947. Mao knew the situation very well, as he was travelling in the region that year, and saw village children hunting for stray peas in the stables of his entourage, and women scrabbling for the water in which his rice had been washed, for the sake of its driblets of nutrient. In Manchuria itself, civilian deaths from starvation were in the hundreds of thousands in 1948, and even Communist troops were often half-starved. Few knew that the famine in Red areas in those years was largely due to the fact that Mao was exporting food; the shortage was put down to “war.” (299) 

The part that really mattered was a practice called dou dizhu, “struggle against the landlords,” which in reality meant meant violence against the relatively better-off. (In China, unlike pre-Communist Russia, there were very few large landowners.) When people recall the land reform, it is this practice that dominates their memories. The violence typically took place at rallies, which all villagers had to attend. Those designated as targets were made to stand facing large crowds, and people were psyched up and organized to come forward and pour out their grievances against them. The crowds would be led to shout slogans while brandishing fists and farm tools. Village militants and thugs would then inflict physical abuse, which could range from making victims kneel on broken tiles on their bare knees, to hanging them up by their wrists or feet, or to beating them, sometimes to death, often with farm implements. And there was often torture of even more ghastly kinds. (315) 

The Party’s orders to its cadres were not to try to stop the violence, the line being that these were legitimate acts of revenge by the downtrodden cadres were told they must “let the people do what they want” to those who had oppressed and exploited them. In fact, the Party wanted to encourage violence and where there was no violence, local cadres were accused of obstructing the land reform movement, and promptly replaced. A model was created between March and June 1947 by Mao’s terror expert, Kang Sheng. Cadres in all other Red areas were instructed to copy his methods. The fact that land reform was entrusted to a man who was an expert, not in agrarian reform but in terror (and who knew nothing about land issues), makes clear the nature of the programme. (315) 

Kang went to a village in northwest Shanxi called Haojiapo. After the first rally, he berated the local cadres and activists for being “far too polite.” “There must be abuse,” he said. “Educate the peasants…to have no mercy…There will be deaths. But let’s not be afraid of deaths.” Kang told the cadres and activists to treat whole families as targets, even children. He stood by smiling when village children beat up “little landlords,” as children from the wrong families were called. These could be almost anybody, as Kang extended the criteria for condemning people far beyond the original “landlords” and “kulaks”. Public displays like these brought shivers for decades to people who witnessed them. In many places people were obliged to watch even more gruesome sights. In one place, one elderly member of the gentry whose surname was Niu, which means Ox, had a wire run through his nose and his son was forced to pull him through the village by the wire, like an ox, with blood streaming down his face. Elsewhere, “entire families from the youngest to the oldest were killed. Babies still on milk, grabbed and torn apart at the limbs or just thrown into a well.” (316)

Mao saw violent scenes with his own eyes. His bodyguards described him going, in disguise, to watch a rally in the village where was staying in late 1947, Yangjiagou, where dreadful things happened. Afterwards, he talked to the guards about the various forms of torture, and the fact that children had been severely beaten up. The upshot was, as reports to Mao made clear: “Everyone is terrified.” Mao had achieved his goal. The terror and extraordinary high level of killing were recorded on the spot in Hebei province by Jack Belden, an American reporter extremely sympathetic to the Reds, who told U.S. diplomat John Melby about “the increasing use of terror against any form of opposition, and extermination of large sections of the population.” (317) 

On 1 October 1949. Mao appeared standing on top of Tiananmen Gate, a stone’s throw from Zhongnanhai, in front of the Forbidden City, and inaugurated the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This was his first-ever public appearance before a large crowd of hundreds of thousands. The crowd was well organized, and very distant from the Gate high above. On this occasion Mao made the only speech he ever delivered from the Gate in his entire reign of twenty-seven years. He cleared his throat every other sentence, in the manner of a nervous speaker rather than a rousing orator. The content was extraordinarily flat, mainly a list of appointments. Its most salient feature was what he did not say. Mao did not outline any programme to benefit “the people” in whose name the regime had been installed. The crowed of over 100,000 cried “Long live Chairman Mao!” He had established himself as the absolute ruler of some 550 million people. (322)

Stay tuned for Part Two. 

* Flammable Chemicals and Wildfires

Posted on by
1

How wise or compassionate is a provincial government that funds reckless chemical experiments in the atmosphere over a region experiencing massive wildfires?? That’s what the BC government did–they funded a start-up called Skyward Wildfire with $1 million.

In July, the Fire Chief of Summerland, BC, told a CBC reporter the Bald Range wildfire doubled in size so fast firefighters could do little but order over 12,000 residents to flee. “The fire exploded,” he said. CBC’s Johanna Wagstaffe said, “I’ve never seen anything like this as a meteorologist.” During California’s deadliest-ever fire season in 2018, their exasperated Fire Chief told reporters the “fire behaviour has changed, the fires are exploding.”

When we hear the word “exploding,” we can point directly at the chemical industrial complex. Every year, for well over fifty years, flammable chemicals particular to geoengineering are sprayed into earth’s atmosphere. 

The Piper should look familiar to people in this region. For months, a yellow one has been flying into Lillooet with a Lidar bubble on its belly. It circles around and around, from various altitudes, for 30-45 minutes, then flies out again. Local municipality does not know what it is.

Billions and billions of pounds of chemicals that are hostile to lightning, fire, water and fire-fighting—not to mention human health, the entire ecosystem and all its lifeforms—are dumped into the air we all need to breathe. 

When we research Material Safety Data (MSD) sheets—the respected, globally-harmonized standard of chemical reporting—this is what we find: 

  • Aluminum Particulate: “reacts violently and/or explosively with water, steam or moisture.” 
  • Barium: “Contact with water releases flammable gases which may ignite spontaneously.” 
  • Sodium Chloride: “avoid excess heat and exposure to moist air or water or will explode”. 
  • Sulphur dioxide: “may explode if heated.”
  • Silver Iodide: “excess heat is a condition to avoid—no data available for explosive limits.” Potassium Chloride: must be “kept away from heat or sources of ignition.” 
  • Calcium Carbonate: “may explode when heated, should not be released into the environment.” 
  • Aluminum Strontium: “should not be released into the environment. Do not allow product to reach ground water, water course or sewage system.” 
  • Manganese: “keep away from heat, sparks or open flames.” 
  • Titanium Oxide nano-particles: “must be kept away from open flames and sources of ignition.” 
  • Aluminum oxide: “avoid excessive heat.” 

They say they’re doing this in order to “cool the planet”. They’ve blabbed on about reducing CO2. They’ve terrorized us for years about global warming. 

Now this latest story is they’re spraying chemicals in order to manipulate where lightning strikes. Sounds to me like some fools with big-fat money are suffering from a big-fat God complex.

It’s time for us to start connecting the dots. We’re the ones living in harm’s way—every year wildfires get bigger, more volatile, and greater in number; climate emergencies are, to a large extent, being manufactured, or ‘geoengineered’.

It’s time to disassemble the climate crisis narrative into its component parts. And one integral part is that ‘geoengineering’ brings in $5 TRILLION per year for the chemical industrial complex.

More details here in my just-published article in Druthers, Canada’s hardest-working independent newspaper with well over 150,000 subscribers and countless more readers online.

Screenshot

* AI Lies by Telling Half-Truths?

Posted on by
Reply

Despite already knowing the answer, a few weeks ago I asked AI if geoengineering was being done in southern BC. Proof positive that AI can lie like a thief: “chemtrails are conspiracy theory and misinformation”, what people see are “contrails due to all the airline traffic today.”

When I asked again, like the thief who can’t get his story straight, AI spat out this backhanded, double-negative-styled sort-of confession:

Screenshot

In the battle between Contrails vs. Chemtrails, it appears that Logic wins. If chemtrails are conspiracy theory and what we see in the sky is engine exhaust from planes, then when the sky is completely clear, no planes can be flying. Correct?

Tough luck, folks. If you plan to buy a plane ticket, doublecheck that the planes are flying that day. If skies are clear, it means they aren’t flying. Sorry about that, apparently airplane rules have changed.

This ‘contrail’ is strange, no? Why did it suddenly disappear like that? Did the pilot have to turn off the engine all of a sudden? Or, did the engines quit!? OMG. I sure hope not. Didn’t hear a peep on the news about a plane going down, I sure hope everyone on board made it out alive.

Carrying on with slaying with logic. The remote area where I live is not near, or beneath, a busy plane corridor.

When they aren’t making chemical grids above our head we might see or hear four jets per day.

I guess we’re supposed to believe that some days we are suddenly close to an international airport. That is not plane activity, that is not natural cloud formation, that is a chemical grid being laid out.

Liars never get their story straight. No surprise, turns out they are doing chemical experiments in southern BC. Skyward Wildfire, a start-up funded by the BC government, is “testing whether spraying specific particles into storm clouds can stop lightning strikes from hitting dry forests and starting wildfires.” Their website, slick with black graphics and little scientific detail, explains that “a small, precise amount of lightning reduction material is released into the storm.” Note the language hiding chemical names: “spraying specific particles” and “lightning reduction material.”

Strange coincidence. On August 22nd, 2026, a hot Saturday night, southern BC was pummelled by 7000 lightning strikes within 2 hours.

Stay tuned for more slaying with logic.

* Lillooet Skies Poisoned

Posted on by
1

For the sleepy-heads unaware that our region is heavily sprayed with toxic, flammable chemicals touted to help with climate change. They call it ‘geoengineering’ but, really, it’s sky poison and much of the world has banned it. Here in Canada we allow it. Since the chemical industry makes $5 TRILLION per year from chemical sales, it’s a safe bet someone in the nation’s power elite is heavily invested.

Leesa Van Peteghen
Leesa Van Peteghen

Gardeners like myself who spend lots of time in close contact with plants and soil notice that trees and bushes will suddenly look scorched around the edges, as if they’ve been shocked.

People who live and work in remote areas are noticing that spruce and fir trees are starting to die. They are turning orange the way the pines did. The pine beetle was blamed for the die-off but the huge chemical grids they spray in the sky above us require a tremendous amount of moisture to activate the chemicals, which means a theft of moisture from the eco-system. Did their climate experimentation take into consideration the effect of transpiration on the root systems of trees? Perhaps the pines were weakened by chemical saturation in the soil, which allowed the pine beetle to attack. Are the chemicals making drought?

See the geoengineering article here which details the reality of chemtrails. Our region, because it’s the hottest area of Canada, is under a heavy chemical spraying experimentation program. Look up Skyward Wildfire.

I’ve been closely observing the sky here for several years, ever since I first heard about the fact of geoengineering. Two years ago this is what it looked like. The chemical industry started off with linear experimentation, single chemtrails.

Gradually the experimentation has increased. That means new and bizarre cloud formations. I call this one ‘applying the chemical corset’.

The atmosphere does not make ramrod-straight lines. This is our first evidence of atmospheric interference. Look closely at the edges of the chemtrail. See all the chemical reactions happening? It looks like a string of nodules.

This ugly monster must be delivering a large payload of chemicals, or, the atmosphere is reacting in a massive way to a chemical injection.

As time went on, the experimentation was becoming more aggressive. The linear lines were turning into grid patterns.

Do the chemical bros name their handiwork? I guess this would be a chemical waterfall.

This is not clouds. This is chemical chaos.

* Reading Notes ~ Nest of Spies

Posted on by
Reply

Nest of Spies ~ the Startling Truth About Foreign Agents at Work Within Canada’s Borders

by Fabrice de Pierrebourg and Michel Juneau-Katsuya

The clever strategist is subtle, so much so that he is no longer visible. The clever strategist is discreet, so much so that he can not be heard. Thus he becomes the master of his enemy’s destiny. – Sun Tzu, The Art of War (c. 509 BCE) (1)

Espionage is a multi-faceted problem that challenges our society in many ways. The theft of Canadian cutting edge research in new products and technologies in only one of them, the visible tip of a vast, submerged and problematical iceberg. (2) Many of these issues are poorly understood by the general public. in some cases, information has been suppressed. A strange silence surrounds the subject in this country. (2) 

Consider this: there have been hundreds of prosecutions  of spies, including domestic traitors, in the United States, France, and Great Britain during the past fifteen years alone. But there has never been a prosecution for espionage in Canada. Not one. The widespread belief that espionage ended when the Cold War ended is unfortunately not true. The overall extent of espionage today is much greater than it was during the Cold War. Instead of two politically hostile blocs confronting each other [US and USSR], we now live in a global political and economic configuration where there is cloak-and-dagger warfare of all against all. (3) 

Canada’s oversized role in this drama is due to four factors.  First is our advanced technology (others want our know-how); second is the economy (they want our markets); third is political (they need to manipulate our national and international policies, making certain that citizens of foreign birth do not criticize their homelands). The final factor is military (they want our secrets, and those our allies share with us). (3-4)

And then we must consider one of the dubious consequences of multiculturalism, that wonderful human mosaic, which we rightly celebrate, but which also readily conceals the newly arrived spy. It offers him or her a useful reservoir of potential sources for the homeland, as well as informers anxious to denounce malcontents. And finally, there is the open-hearted character of Canadians, who welcome foreigners without asking a lot of questions. This propensity arises from our liberal and inclusive culture, and we are proud of it, but it is readily abused by curious visitors: particularly those who intend to leave with intellectual property in their pockets. (4) 

Where espionage is concerned, the change is two-fold. The first is that military espionage has indeed declined. [Really? Somehow I highly doubt that] The other part, the important part, is that its resources were redeployed to the small but expanding speciality of economic espionage. What began as small and intermittent theft of industrial research has now grown into a vast and destabilizing form of economic warfare. (16) 

The mafiosi and the oligarchs grew fat during the chaotic years of the USSR’s collapse. [Whitney Webb documents this, too, in her incredible tome, One Nation Under Blackmail, in which she documents the prominent Americans who also grew fat from the USSR’s collapse.] Today they are held in contempt by average Russians, but that is only because they successfully seized a good part of the country riches through the purchase of state companies at derisory prices. At the same time, the security services ransacked the treasury of the Soviet Communist Party and used the booty to set up more than 600 overseas corporations. This new structure was essentially in place by 1993. Since then there has been a golden age of collusion among organized crime, legitimate business, bankers, and corrupt politicians. In a 1994 report, CSIS alluded to the disappearance of billions of dollars in value from the Russian economy in what it called a “criminal revolution”. With the aid of Vladimir Putin, scores of agents from the old KGB infiltrated the worlds of politics and business. A Russian sociologist reported in 2005 that around 80 percent of key positions in the corporate and government hierarchy were occupied by siloviki, a sinister term referring to senior police and military officers now tricked out with bespoke suits and attaché cases.  (21-22)

After the events of September 11, 2001, however, the other countries of the western alliance also turned their backs on the old Cold War template. Overnight most investigative resources were shifted to Osama bin Laden, to the great satisfaction of the growing army of Russian and Chinese undercover agents. (29) 

This leads us back to Biopreparat, a biological weapons program started in 1973. Since the USSR had signed a treaty to ban biological weapons less than a year before, it was always publicly described as a routine pharmaceutical research project. It remained one of the best kept secrets of the Cold War. Difficult to track because it was decentralized in a string of laboratories scattered across remote regions of the USSR, Biopreparat was scaled to produce an armoury of fully usable weapons derived from toxins, deadly viruses, and bacteria. (64) 

For all the resources devoted to it, this dark program depended on infusions of information form the advanced laboratories of the West. According to Alibekov, the second-in-command at Biopreparat who had defected to the US, it was the job of the KGB to steal these toxins and viruses and send the samples back to Biopreparat. Alibekov revealed how agents from the highly secretive Department 12 of Directory S were posted around the planet in order to expedite the business. They used the diplomatic bag from various Soviet embassies and consulates to transport laboratory phials filled with dehydrated germ cells, cultures, and assorted deadly substances that they had acquired from their collaborators. These plague bags travelled in the pilot’s cabin of Aeroflot jetliners. (64) 

Agents linked to Biopreparat targeted in particular the Defense and Development agency at the Canadian Air Force base in Suffield, Alberta. The mandate of this highly classified operation is to create medical treatments and systems of defence against both chemical and biological attack. It was a place entirely fascinating to Soviet authorities, and only a simpleton would imagine that they are any less interested today. (65) Their final destination was either Suffield, Alberta, or the military research centre at Fort Detrick, Maryland—two biological laboratories working in close concert. [65)  

Not too long ago, should anybody think the Biopreparat story a relic of another era, the British security agency MI-6 caught Russian spies lurking near a biological research center. Their objective was to steal ampoules containing anthrax and Ebola virus. That was in 2007. (66) 

With the dramatic dissolution of the Soviet bloc after 1989, Canadian politicians competed with each other to cut back on the amount of money spent on national security. Some leaders babbled about “peace dividends” and seriously contemplated abolishing counter-espionage altogether. CSIS’s budgets and staff were reduced by nearly half, at a time when hostile governments were already rebuilding their espionage networks. This raises questions about the Canadian political system. Why do we produce so few leaders capable of dealing seriously with these issues? There is in this country a persistent belief that espionage is somebody else’s problem. Do we really believe that Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” has simply faded away? If so, who is sending all these freshly minted and highly motivated spies to Canada? Do we have something they want? Why do China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and many other countries also do us the honour of sending legions of spies to take up a Canadian address? (122)

These are the principal areas of [espionage] activity: economic and industrial; surveillance and suppression of dissidents; manipulation of foreign political systems; military espionage; research into the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. (122-3)

To put it simply, spies operate outside of all legal frameworks. The local loyalties that most of us feel have no importance on this chessboard, where all moves are strategic and the players treat people and places as mere pawns, to be played according to the needs of the game. This is the dynamic that determines Canada’s role in the great scheme of things. It is not, perhaps, an inspiring one. At worst, chance has dealt us the role of victim; at best, we are a  happenstance pawn in a deadly game much bigger than ourselves.  (123) 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaders of the G8 countries committed themselves to economic espionage. They made no secret of it. The stakes had changed, and it was time to become proactive. Canada, however, did not make this commitment. Our governments were aware of economic espionage, of course, but never did more than timidly advise the intelligence services to keep a watching brief on the matter. This was hardly the same thing as adopting the decisive and ruthless policies that our supposed allies were already employing. (124)

Canadians would be shocked if they understood the climate of fear in which many of their fellow citizens must live, for no reason other than the happenstance that they were born abroad and chose to come to Canada. Many immigrant communities are, in effect, taken hostage by agents of their homeland government. These governments have few or no democratic scruples. When the victims approach Canadian authorities for help they are met with avoidance and moral equivocation. After being repeatedly rebuffed, they lose hope. After all, the Canadian government is now the only government they have. If it chooses to ignore them, there is nowhere else to go. (135)

Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) research, from nuclear to chemical to bacteriological, is carried out in our universities. That’s why our weaponry and operational plans are of great interest to foreign powers. They are also aware that our allies share desirable information with us, and that hundreds of foreign military officers are posted to our army, navy and air force bases. International trafficking in Canadian-made weaponry is another poorly understood subject. We are an unusually open society and, for the time being at least, we enjoy a reputation for integrity. International arms traffickers take advantage of the situation. They steal weapon prototypes or use Canada as a convenient transit route for international arms shipments. (139)

“Dual purpose” technologies are those originally developed for civilian products but which can also be used to improve weapons; sometimes they appear on the frontier between bio-weapon research and legitimate medical research. They are subject to high security, but foreign agents exploit the lapses that occur in transferring them between private sector and military use. (139)

Most spies in Canada are working under protection of diplomatic immunity. It’s the best possible cover because it allows the “diplomat” to socialize with Canadians from all levels of society. If this “diplomat” commits a crime, whether espionage-related or a regular Criminal Code offence, he or she cannot be tried before a Canadian judge, only sent home as a persona non grata. (140) 

HUMINT is Human Intelligence, meaning information gathered from informants. SIGINT is Signals Intelligence, gathered by intercepting all forms of electronic communication. OSINT is Open Source Intelligence, or information that might be published in newspapers or broadcast publicly. ( 141)  

Of all the countries that happily dance across the Canadian border to shoplift out technology, China is far and away the busiest and the most aggressive. Chinese agents exploit a certain liberal Canadian sympathy toward their country that dates back to the 1960s. they don’t even much bother to disguise what they’re doing as they operate out of their Ottawa embassy and their three consulates in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto. Meanwhile, the Canadian government—including, unfortunately, CSIS itself—is so befuddled that it hasn’t begun to understand how serious the problem is. (147) 

In the US, UK, and Australia there is an average of one trial per month of Chinese agents charged with economic or industrial espionage. One per month. In Canada, Chinese spies have never been brought to court, even though Canada is at least as rich a target as those other countries. (147) 

Although China is capable of innovation, the underpinnings of its culture and society are heavily connected to tradition. There are two particularly useful tools for understanding what kind of tradition this is: Sun Tzu’s book The Art of War and the ancient board game called Go. The game of Go, with its underpinnings of philosophy and strategic thought, has been learned and played as a discipline by China’s emperors, ministers of state, warlords, and imperial officers since the fourth century BCE. Used for centuries as a way for the Chinese to shape strategy, the game is based on an initial division of power between the realm of outright control and the realm of influence. The player seeks to move his pieces on the board in such a way as, first, to encircle and conquer territory outright, and second, to encircle and thereby influence whatever can’t be conquered. Whoever possesses the most territory at the end wins. (150) 

Sun Tzu’s life predates even the popularity of Go. He was a general in the sixth century BCE. His small book, which has thirteen chapters, covers military strategy generally but concentrates on the mechanics of leading successful campaigns and of carrying on clandestine operations within enemy territory. It is part of today’s compulsory curriculum for the Chinese officer corps and, of course, aspiring SIS agents. (150)

Chinese strategists have long understood that influence is more important than control. This is because influence, wisely deployed, will ultimately lead to control. That’s why the Go player will rarely launch a frontal assault. Almost always he begins by moving his players to locations where the enemy finds them to be unthreatening and even useful. (151) 

When a nation sets out to make friends, the first “soldiers” into the battle are honey-tongued emissaries who really do hope for good relations with your country. If you’ll be our special friend, they say, we’ll buy what we need from you alone. And when we sell, well, talk about getting it wholesale! You won’t believe the deals! (151) 

The Security and Intelligence Service (SIS) of China plans its operations in generational rather than calendar-year intervals. This kind of long-term planning, all by itself and without further cleverness, is enough to baffle the fast-food mentality of western intelligence agencies. These take as their mantra the dubious slogan “Time is money.” Meanwhile, their Chinese counterparts sit back and relax. Given the time-obsession of the enemy, it’s only a question of waiting for him to grow tired and inattentive. When the other side drops his guard, that’s the moment to activate one’s resources. Also, if you flood the enemy with an overwhelming number of agents, some might be caught but several will succeed. (152-3) 

What was going on during all those years the agents were out of contact with the homeland? They were steadily climbing the career ladder of their chosen Canadian company or their government ministry. In either case, they’re now at the executive level and they have received security clearance. To the employer they are long-term, very loyal employees, and giving then a high-level clearance was the easy and obvious thing to do. (153) 

And now, by way of recalling that it is useful to be curious the workings of Chinese culture, remember that in China there are countless thousands of young people who aspire to become exactly such sleeper agents for their homeland. (153)   

As a totalitarian country, China has the additional advantage of knowing that its citizens will do exactly what they’re told. To refuse is unthinkable. If you hesitate, your family will be told that you are a “traitor” to the nation. The punishment for your ambivalence will be meted out to those you hold nearest and dearest. (155) 

The elaborate Hollywood-type masquerade that lets a foreign agent “infiltrate” a foreign government or corporation is not much used in the real world. The perpetrator is far likelier to be an exceedingly naive Canadian who is anxious to please a new Chinese “friend”. The friend in question is often a diplomat who is grateful for any information that might help him to “do his job or come to a better understanding of Canada.” From our perspective, the most amazing thing is the puppy-dog-like wagging of Canadian tails as we endeavor to be of service to our exotic new friends. (157) 

To expand and anchor its influence, China has developed a strategy similar to that of the Trojan horse. Confucius, the celebrated moral and political philosopher of ancient China, was far ahead of his time in understanding that peace and justice can thrive only where rulers are professional and scrupulously honest. Today Confucius whose writings were once banned by Mao Zedong because they emphasize respect for a hierarchy. This was thought to be “reactionary” and not compatible with Communist principles. But history has its own sense of irony, and today the honest humanist described by Confucius is seen as the saviour of the system, the good federalist who will ride to the rescue and revive China’s pride and nationalism. (158) 

Confucius Institutes have since multiplied with astonishing speed and can now be found in more than eighty countries. They are ubiquitous in Africa, where China is working to establish a dominant presence. After only five years, there are 314 in operation in 81 countries, and the program is just getting underway. China expects to be operating a thousand of them by the year 2020. [where are they at now?] (159) 

The big issue is this: are the partnership agreements that these Institutes habitually sign with both a Chinese and (in this case) Canadian university—and in many cases with Chinese high-tech enterprises—not in fact a cover-up for a gigantic system of siphoning and draining away of other people’s scientific research? In other words, are the Confucius Institutes a case of “soft power” in the service of “soft spying”? (160) 

The Israeli security agency Mossad sold the software product called Promis to a number of police forces and security agencies around the world—including Canada—in the 1990s. The programming turned out to include a “trap” or “back door.” It was a dirty trick that allowed Mossad to follow the movements of Palestinians in Canada when they were under surveillance by our police. The information was used in Israel’s bloody struggle with Yasser Arafat and the PLO. (168-9) 

Chinese Han immigrants to Tibet now outnumber the native population by more than 2 million, and newcomers continue to throng toward Tibet’s capital city, Lhasa, with the kind of energy that Canadians can muster only when there’s a round of job offerings in the Alberta tar sands. Further masses of Han colonists will arrive on the recently completed “railway to the roof of the world” (sometimes described as the “railway of colonization”), which was built with the help of Bombardier, Nortel, and General Electric. Beijing spent $4.2 billion on the project. (184)

Jiang Chengzong would like Canadians to believe that the building of the railway proceeded from affection for the people of Tibet, rather than its strategic proximity to India, not to mention the mineral wealth of the sprawling Himalayan country. This is a remarkable assertion of selflessness in light of reports that Tibet contains the world’s largest reserves of chrome and aluminum, together with not insignificant quantities of uranium and electric-car-powering lithium. (185)

Today, former Ambassador Mei sets aside diplomacy in favour of a straightforward plea for China. The propaganda is adroitly blended with economic blackmail. China, he says, is patiently waiting for Canada to come to its senses. How much longer can China maintain the current level of trade and commercial exchange if Canada keeps being so confrontational? The audience gets the subtext. They are people of influence, and China requires them to use their influence to change Canada’s foreign policy. Otherwise they will most certainly miss the diplomatic gravy train. 

“Foreign interference” is a polite diplomatic term that masks a little-known aspect of international espionage. Setting aside for a moment the everyday theft of commercial and technological information, let’s take a look at the extensive machinery that undermines Canadian government policy-making. It aims to intimidate the host government and suborn public and private organizations that can advance the foreign regime’s interests. At least 20 foreign countries have agents in Canada…Obviously this is unacceptable to a democracy. But they won’t be discouraged. Nor will they stop shadowing, subverting, harassing, intimidating, and coercing their diaspora communities here, especially the many political movements in exile. Foreign interference now appears to be the most serious threat to Canada, at least so far as the scale of the operations is concerned. More than 6 million Canadians, about one-fifth of the population, were born elsewhere. Multiculturalism has given birth to multi-espionage and multi-intimidation.  (187) 

The Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa) was founded—or perhaps “invented” is a better word—by Li Hongzhi in 1992. Its adepts practise a highly original mixture of non-violent Buddhist philosophy and Taoist gymnastics. At the beginning the movement was legal. But Falun Gong suffered a sudden reversal of fortune one night in April 1999. Thousands of its devotees from all corners of China converged without warning in Beijing. There they surrounded the headquarters of the government and the Communist Party, where they stood in utter silence for several hours. Then they left the area in an orderly fashion, without making a sound. (201-2)

The event was pacifist and brief, although certainly eccentric and unsettling. And all might have been well, except that the rally had fallen ten years after the infamous massacre of students in nearby Tiananmen Square. The authorities realized the connection, as they were meant to. But then they panicked…it was humiliating to the apparatchiks that such a well-organized event had occurred without their spies hearing of it first. Lashing out reflexively, they banned Falun Gong and denounced it as a “heretic organization”. Its followers were attacked and beaten wherever they were found. This quasi-hysterical frenzy has now passed beyond China’s borders. (202)

When asked about the nature of Falun Gong, the group’s Canadian spokesperson, Lucy Zhou, wants one thing understood: “We are ordinary people. Falun Gong is not a sect. Nobody is a ‘member’ of it. It’s simply a way of life…that is beneficial for a person’s health. (203-4)

Mehmet Tohti, a 35-year-old official of the Uyghur Canadian Association is frightened. “Since September 11, 2001, we’ve been the Chechens of China.” He beings by describing the Uyghers and their situation in a remote corner of China’s far west. They speak a Turkic language that has no connection at all with Chinese languages. Until 1949 they had no connection with China. But that year the Communist forces, which had just seized power, pushed into the far west and seized control of eastern Turkistan as well. It was given a new name—the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang—and it was soon colonized. It is a vast area of 2 million square kilometers, and today there are approximately as many Han Chinese living there as indigenous Uyghurs: each group makes up about 40% of the population. 

Where terrorism is concerned, Canadians at best display the wide-eyed detachment of those who find a subject interesting but in no way connected to themselves. Concerning Air India Flight 182, however, we manage something more than detachment: it’s been stricken from memory as if it never existed. (235)

Irangate was a truly scandalous business. It gave birth to the “October Surprise” theory, which held that Ronald Reagan’s Republicans plotted with the ayatollahs in order to bring about the defeat of Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. Ben-Menashe believes the plot was nicely tied up and packaged in October, a month before the election, in a salon of the ultra-chic Ritz Hotel in Paris. This was the deal: the United States and Israel supplied weapons to Iran’s religious leaders to help them in their war with Iraq, while unfreezing their financial assets, which had been blocked in American banks. The quid pro quo was that Teheran would keep the fifty-four hostages from the American embassy under lock and key until after the U.S. elections were over. (274-5)

“The weapons came from the United States….Pierre Trudeau agreed to it after an informal meeting with Israel.” Twice during 2005, a Canadian airport was used to ship weapons and explosives from the US to a country on the Indian Subcontinent that was threatened by a Marxist uprising. So the Eitan/Ben-Menashe operation would hardly the first time Canada served as a convenient doormat to erase the muddy footprints of arms traffickers. (275) 

When a Canadian corporation was asked by the Chinese for an “official visit” it was a technique of Chinese espionage.  “The board members started babbling excitedly about the size of the Chinese market. They were like teenage boys asking the homecoming queen for a date.” (283) The corp took all kinds of measures to protect their assets. “But the security boss was still anxious He’d made time to join the Chinese visitors personally for their tours of the plant. He’d kept his eyes open as well, and he’d noticed something odd. It was the shoes. Nobody’s shoes stay completely clean walking around a factory, of course. But the Chinese engineers’ shoes were remarkably dirty. Stuff from the floor seemed almost to jump onto them. And one guy appeared to have breadcrumbs that clung improbably to his rather long tie. The security man was a quick thinker, and he made up a rule on the spot that required visitors to remove their shoes before moving on to the next department. The shoes were rushed to the lab, where he was amazed to learn that one of them contained a magnet that grabbed scraps of metal from the factory floor. As for the visitor who had the annoying habit of leaning into garbage pails filled with scrap metal, they’d had to confront hi. Damned if he didn’t turn out to have a magnet in his tie as well. This was the strangest example of reverse engineering he’d ever seen. The plan was clearly to take the precious scraps back to China and find out what chemical elements in what proportions had gone into fabricating them. These visitors meant to rob his company blind. (284) 

There’s a difference between “information” and “intelligence”. Information is what you collect during your research. Intelligence is the outcome of a process. This is the formula we use to describe how intelligence is produced: Information + Analysis = Intelligence. (287)

Steaming an envelope is neither as old-fashioned nor as uncommon as one might think. In Canada it is sometimes risked by private detectives, but not often, because it’s a criminal act with heavy consequences. It’s also easy to get caught doing it. But none of this applies once you leave Canada. Certain national security services simply open all the mail that comes from foreign countries, plucking confidential corporate information and occasionally uncovering a juicy traitor or two. (298) 

Garbage picking. What a glamourous business we have here! From dumpster-diving to the delicate sifting of monsieur’s kitchen scraps, the trained agents of a nation’s lofty secret service organizations rub elbows with gumshoes and peepers from back-alley agencies. (299)

Exchanging engineers and technicians is a reliable and popular method of slipping one’s agents into a targeted competitor’s operation. When a delegation arrives at your front door, it will contain a number of spies with a tightly designed plan for stealing information. Sometimes these delegations are made up entirely of spies. This is the moral of an unfortunate tale told by a well-known Canadian corporation, dominant in its market, that accepted an offer to build a partnership with a Chinese company. As a condition of the arrangement, the Chinese bosses insisted on sending a team of twenty-five engineers and technicians for a lengthy working visit to their Canadian “partner”. Considering the stakes, the CEO of the Canadian enterprise disregarded his security director’s warnings and pleas. …[despite all measures to protect their intellectual property] after 72 hours the Chinese engineers had broken into every forbidden database. (300-1)

What really went beyond all limits in this episode was the reaction of the company’s CEO when the “visitors” were unmasked. This occurred at a board meeting where the CEO was present. When the security director had finished exhibiting the evidence and drawing his conclusions, the CEO asked to speak. He curtly informed the security director that his comments were “immoderate” and that the presentation was “not exactly what we were looking for”. In effect, the company did not want to know what was going on. The security director was later warned that “fear mongering” was bad for his career. (301-2) 

Then there is the tactic of eliminating the researchers. We wish this were a tongue-in-cheek way of suggesting they be bribed, but we are in fact talking about murdering them. The pharmaceutical research industry has a remarkable reputation for brutality. The development and marketing of a single new medication costs on average $800 million, which means that a professional killer’s $50-60K tab is just so much small change… (306) 

-30-

* Reading Notes: One Nation Under Blackmail Volume 2

Posted on by
Reply

One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffery Epstein  By Whitney Webb 

Volume 1 Reading Notes are here. 

In this second volume, Webb zeroes in on Epstein’s closest circle of influence and chicanery while situating him amidst a global psychopathic brotherhood. The single most important thing to take away from her 1000-page tome, in my opinion, is that the so-called elite who run the world (99% are male) will make deals with anyone inside their network and a network is anything that increases their power, wealth and influence; no separation exists between and among mafia, organized crime, political parties, business, science, intelligence or military. Bear that in mind the next time the news tries to sell you their fictions. 

Publisher’s Forward quotes Bush’s Senior adviser, who told Ron Suskind, New York Times, 2004:  We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

[Most mainstream media declined to dig deeper into Epstein’s connections [or were prevented] to the CIA and Israeli intelligence], instead largely focusing on the salacious aspects of the Epstein case. In addition, also in the early 1990s, Epstein’s name was mysteriously dropped from a major investigation into one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history even though he was labeled the mastermind of that swindle in grand jury testimony. Around the same time, subsequently released White House visitor logs show that Epstein visited the Clinton White House 17 times, accompanied on most of these visits by a difference, attractive young woman. (viii) 

This two-volume book endeavors to show why Jeffery Epstein was able to engage in a series of mind-boggling crimes for decades without incident. Far from being an anomaly, Epstein was one of several men who, over the past century, have engaged in sexual blackmail activities designed to obtain damaging information (i.e. intelligence) on powerful individuals with the goal of controlling their activities and securing their compliance. Most of these individuals, including Epstein himself, have their roots in the covert world where organized crime and intelligence have intermingled and often cooperated for the better part of the last 90 years, if not longer. Perhaps most shocking, these men are all interconnected to various degrees in networks and associations. (ix)

While the sex trafficking activities of Epstein and Maxwell are discussed at length and examined in depth, this book gives particular attention to the dramatically under-reported relationship that Jeffery Epstein had with the Clinton White House from 1993 to 1995 and the significance of his 17 known meetings. Epstein brought many attractive young women with him to these meetings and many of his meetings were with a man named Mark Middleton. Middletown, who died under suspicious circumstances in May 2022, was embroiled in foreign espionage activities at the time he was meeting with Epstein. Those activities were later investigated by Congress in relation to illegal fundraising efforts for Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign. Epstein’s activities at the the Clinton White House, and in other parts of the country during this same period in time, point toward a major scandal of the Clinton era that has yet to be properly investigated. (ix) 

Hoffenberg has also asserted that Epstein, in the early 1980s, “was trained in arms trafficking and money laundering by Adnan Khashoggi and Sir Douglas Leese jointly….Jeffery Epstein was a major participant and principal in the arms trafficking and money laundering operations of Adnan Khashoggi and Sir Douglas Leese, for Israel, for what they were doing in the United Kingdom.” Though it’s not exactly clear, Thompson Ramo-Woodbridge [aircraft parts and weapons components systems] seems to have been Leese’s introduction into the world of weapons dealing. Oddly enough, years later, a young Bill Gates, who would eventually develop his own ties to Epstein (see Chapter 20), would also get “his first break” thanks to TRW, when he worked “debugging grid control software for” the company at age 15. (12) 

Per his claims to several friends and as mentioned in more than a few press reports authored prior to his 2007 arrest, Epstein was working as a financial “bounty hunter” and helped both recover and hide stolen money on behalf of powerful people. (16)

Hoffenberg, who was found dead in his apartment in late August 2022, had notable confided in Edward Szall off the record that Epstein had had a relationship with BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International], but did not provide any specifics. (17) 

In addition, in 1989, Khashoggi himself had been called by Vanity Fair “one of the greatest whoremongers in the world.” His biographer, Ronald Kessler, remarked in 1988 that “His [Khashoggi’s] whole modus operandi was to influence clients with his opulent lifestyle” and that “he would give them [potential clients] anything they wanted: girls, food, cash…He had quite a variety of occasions on the boat. Some were very formal, some were orgies.” According to the UK’s Independent, ‘One of the ‘girls’ used in this way, Pamella Bordes, later spoke of being “part of an enormous group…used as sexual bait,’” suggesting that Khashoggi commanded a veritable harem of women who were used to entice, or potentially coerce, would-be clients. However, these lists of “potential clients” also included notable politicians, diplomats, celebrities, and a cadre of businessmen. In the case of politicians and diplomats, it’s entirely possible that Khashoggi’s yacht was used as a means of collecting blackmail that Khashoggi used to benefit his network, or anyone willing to pay the right price. This was also alleged by the head of a highly-connected call-girl ring, Fortuna Isreal a.k.a. “Madame Tuna”. (17) 

Notably, Khashoggi’s infamous yacht would be sold to Roy Cohn’s protege, Donald Trump, in 1988, with the involvement of the Sultan of Brunei. The Sultan of Brunei would become Epstein’s landlord in the office he shared with Evangeline Gouletas-Carey and, as we will see in Chapter 19, the Sultan of Brunei makes other curious appearances in the Epstein-Clinton relationship. (18) 

Furthermore, given that Khashoggi was affiliated with Saudi, American, British, and Israeli intelligence by 1982, it is also possible that Epstein made his way into the fold of intelligence himself through Khashoggi. Epstein’s affiliation with some national intelligence agency was essentially confirmed in 2019, when it was reported that then-Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, who had signed off on Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” during his first criminal case, had “been told” to back off Epstein, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” Acosta repeatedly told the Trump transition team. (20) 

Hoffenberg told the Washington Post in 2019 that Leese had told him about Epstein. “The guy’s a genius…He’s great at selling securities. And he has no moral compass.” Hoffenberg, at the time, has admitted to having been “a schemer,” stating that he “was always under investigation,” well before Towers Financial Corporation collapsed and became known as one of the largest Ponzi schemes in US history. (26) 

Hoffenberg appeared in front of a Chicago grand jury, in November 1993, to which he confirmed while being questioned that “Jeffery Epstein was the person in charge of the [fraudulent] transactions.” Kohler’s line of questioning and overarching narrative at the hearing painted Epstein as the “technical wizard” of the Towers Financial fraud; yet, somehow, three months later, Epstein’s name mysteriously disappeared from the case. (28)

Hoffenberg was arrested in 1994 and pled guilty in April 1985. Hoffenberg had been offered a reduced sentence by prosecutors in exchange for information about co-conspirators, but either prosecutors were longer interested in pursuing Epstein or Hoffenberg chose not to talk about Epstein. Other Towers executives were charged for their role in the Towers Financial schemes, but Epstein was never charged. (29) 

As detailed in Chapter 9, the CIA’s modification of the PROMIS software was alleged to have taken place at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Indio, California. Cabazon, at this point, was under the dominion of a mobster (and possible CIA asset) named John Nichols, who had managed to take control of the reservation from the tribal government after becoming the manager of a bingo hall—and projected casino project—at the reservation. The multi-faceted plan—which came to full fruition, despite a surprising number of dead bodies turning up along the way—included a scheme for an arms research, development, and manufacturing plant. It seems that the weapons made at Cabazon were to be deployed into the different theatres of the Reagan administration’s various covert wars. For instance, as previously mentioned, it is a matter of record that representatives of the Contras attended a meeting at Cabazon to observe a weapons demonstration. (42) 

The year 1987 was a pivotal year for Epstein, as it was the year he not only became involved with Hoffenberg and the Gouletas, but also with Donald Trump and Leslie Wexner. Both Trump and Wexner, at the time, were deeply involved in the worlds of New York real estate, as were the Gouletas. It was during this period that Epstein would begin branding himself a “property developer” and become focused on real estate deals, with numerous reports referring to Epstein as “a property developer” well into the 2000s. However, it seems that Epstein’s involvement with real estate may have been a new means of disguising his old financial tricks, as many of his real estate transactions during this period involved the same property multiple times, all for miniscule sums, including for as low as $1. (47)

Commercial real estate in the US has a long history of being used to launder money, and the practise is particularly common in specific American real estate markets like New York City and Palm Beach, Florida. These are notably two places where Epstein, as well as trump, have long been active in property markets. Trump and his inner circle, including the family of his son-n-law Jared Kushner, have long been accused of both permitting or engaging in money laundering in connection with their real estate interests, particularly in New York. Much of the money laundering accusations that would later dog Trump during his political career revolved around his alleged cooperation with Russian mobsters whereby those mobsters used Trump properties to launder their ill-gotten gains. However, while some in the mainstream press misleadingly painted this Russian mobster-connection as meaning Trump was “owned” by Vladimir Putin, it is important to note that the Russian mobsters in question connected back to Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich. Mogilevich was a major business partner of Robert Maxwell [Ghislaine’s father, Guislane became Epstein’s girlfriend] and a key figure in the global criminal syndicate that Maxwell had helped to create at the end of the 1980s. (48)

After purchasing the Plaza Hotel, it would be reported and confirmed by then-attendees that Trump “used to host parties in suites at the Plaza when he owned it, where young women and girls were introduced to rich, older men” and “illegal drugs and young women were passed around and used.” (49)

The relationship with Trump would continue for some time, with Trump flying on Epstein’s place in 1997 and the two men being photographed together at a Victoria’s Secret party that same year. A year later, Epstein claimed to have introduced Trump to his current wife, Melania, at an event during New York fashion week. They would attend other parties together, including an event in 2000 hosted by media baron and convicted fraudster Conrad Black, who appears in Epstein’s book of contacts. Mar-a-Lago would figure prominently as a place of socialization for Epstein and Maxwell, as well as a place where they recruited minors into their sexual blackmail/sex trafficking operations, with the most well-known of these being Virginia Roberts (now Virginia Giuffre). (50) 

Those apartments at 301 East 66th Street would play a role in Epstein’s sexual trafficking and blackmail activities. For instance, Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister and Israeli military intelligence chief, was a frequent visitor to this location. Specifically, several apartments in the building were “being used to house underage girls from South America, Europe, and the former Soviet Union,” according to a former bookkeeper employed by one of Epstein’s main procurers of underage girls, Jean Luc Brunel.  (53)

Today, LS Power is a major supplier to Elon Musk’s Tesla, while Luminus Management was the largest shareholder in Valaris, which—in 2020—sold $650 million in oil rigs to Musk’s SpaceX. SpaceX plans to transform the rigs into rocket launching platforms. As reported by Business Insider, Jeffery Epstein had introduced a member of his entourage to Elon’s brother Kimbal Musk, who sits on the board of SpaceX and Tesla. The woman in question, who lived at an apartment at 301 East 66th Street and had previously “dated” Epstein, dated Musk from 2011 to 2012 and the relationship “brought Epstein into contact with the Musk family and its businesses.” In 2019, it was reported that Epstein had confirmed rumours to journalist James Stewart that he had been secretly advising Tesla. (55)

Michael Chertoff later became intimately involved in an Orwellian company funded by both Epstein and former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak named Carbyne911 whose founding leadership was replete with Israeli intelligence veterans and assets. (84) 

Klaus Schwab’s now infamous “penetrate the cabinets” quote may offer insight as to Leslie Wexner’s own interest over the decades in “developing leaders” in American Jewish communities, in Israel and beyond. With nearly 40 years focused specifically on training men and women of influence in American Jewish society—as well as in Israel’s government and private sector—ideas and policies that benefit Wexner both personally and professionally have been instilled into generations of leaders and influencers, who then go on to influence many others. Over the past two decades, Wexner’s foray into becoming one of the main donors of the Harvard Kennedy school allows for much the same to occur, but this time for leaders who operate and influence those far outside the boundaries of the global Jewish community. (124) 

The same year he and Epstein  began donating to Harvard, in 1991, Leslie Wexner teamed up with Charles Bronfman to establish an exclusive group of 20 of “the nations wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen” that is referred to as either the “Study Group” or the “Mega Group.” (124)

The 1990s saw a proliferation of Israeli espionage activity that targeted the highest levels of government, including the White House. FOX news reported: Israeli telecommunications company Amdocs helped Bell Atlantic install new telephone lines in the White House in 1997…[and] a senior-level employee of Amdocs had a separate T1 data phone line installed from his base outside St. Louis that was connected directly to Israel…

While this wiretapping for the purpose of blackmail took place, it is important to keep in mind that Jeffery Epstein had been visiting the White House, where he allegedly courted the president and influential White House officials, Congressmen and Senators. Former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe has alleged that Epstein’s sexual blackmail operation was created at Israel’s behest specifically to blackmail Bill Clinton. Ben-Menashe specifically said the following: The Israelis feared that Mr. Clinton, when he was campaigning for President, will be a repeat of Mr. Carter. He wanted to press them for peace with the Palestinians and all that stuff. …And I think Mr. Epstein was sent early on to catch up with President Clinton.   (130) 

In 1996, Leslie Wexner joined the board of directors of Hollinger International, a media holding company created by Conrad Black, a now disgraced media mogul who also makes an appearance in Epstein’s contact book. Black was the son of prominent Canadian businessman George Montegu Black, Jr., who managed a division of Argus Corporation called Canadian Breweries. (131) By the late 1970s, Conrad and his brother controlled the company. Between 1978 and 1985, Conrad Black asset stripped the conglomerate and used the spoils to build a major Anglo-American media empire, rivaling that of Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell. A year later, he began aggressively acquiring US media assets, and, by the time Wexner joined the board, Black, via a Hollinger subsidiary, controlled 393 newspapers in US alone. Not long after Wexner joined the board of Hollinger, Conrad Black began to exhaustively defraud the company. It was later discovered that, from 1997 to 2004, Black stole approximately $400 million from the company, “a sum equal to 95 percent of the net profits for the period 1997-2003.”  (132) 

In this same 1985 period, Ghislaine also became involved with “philanthropy” tied to her father’s business empire by hosting a “Disney day out for kids” and benefit dinner on behalf of the Mirror Group for the Save the Children NGO. Part of the event took place at the home of the Marquess and Lady of Bath, a gala that was attended by members of the British royal family. It’s worth noting that the Marquess of Bath at the time was an odd person, having accumulated the largest collection of paintings made by Adolph Hitler and having said that Hitler had done “great things for his country.” The very same evening that the Ghislaine-hosted bash concluded, the Marquess of Bath’s son was found hanging from a bedspread tied to an oak beam at the Bath Arms in what was labeled as a suicide. (146)

Toward the end of her relationship with Cicogna, Ghislaine founded the Kit Kat Club, which she depicted as a feminist endeavor. Why Ghislaine chose the name “Kit Kat Club” is something of a mystery. The original Kit Kat Club was set up by a well-known pie maker named Christopher Catling in London during the eighteenth century to promote the freedoms obtained during the 1688 Glorious Revolution. Until the late 1800s, Catling’s organization was the only entity to use the name. Then, in the 1900s, various wealthy private clubs, music venues, and public houses adopted the name for establishments all around the UK. The original name of the club created by Catling was also the inspiration behind the naming of the famous KitKat chocolate bar produced by Nestle. (147)

There has since been speculation that Ghislaine’s Kit Kat Club is where Donald Trump met his future wife Melania. Although the New York Times and other outlets reported that, at Fashion Week 1998, Donald Trump first met Melania at the Kit Kat Club in New York… (148) 

Soon after her “painful” split from Gianfranco Cicogna, Ghislaine was seen skiing in Aspen, Colorado—”where the rich and famous mix” during the winter season—with American actor George Hamilton, who was also seen escorting Ghislaine to the Epsom races in 1991. Hamilton, twenty-two years Ghislaine’s senior, is apparently much more than just an actor, as he allegedly played a major role in aiding Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator of the Philippines, and his wife Imelda move billions of public funds out of the country and convert them into private wealth for themselves and their accomplices abroad. Marcos originally rose to power with the help of the CIS and, as previously mentioned, Adnan Khashoggi—who worked with Epstein in the 1980s—was also close to the Marcos’s, specifically Imelda Marcos, and stood trial alongside her for his alleged role in aiding her in illegal financial schemes. (148) 

The Rothschilds’ interest in gaining a foothold in Wall Street seems to have been motivated by more than money. The Times report notes that “although the family staked valuable claims in Africa, the Middle East, and South America, they grossly mismanaged the opportunities directly across the Atlantic” and in the United States. It quotes Evelyn de Rothschild as saying, “We’ve been in business for 200 years, but we never seized the initiative in America and that was one of the mistakes my family made.” The New York Times also states, perhaps controversially, that “No other family in the annals of finance can match the Rothschild record for influencing the course of history, or its Machiavellian instincts for economic opportunity. (150) 

…the banking entity looking to help the Rothschild family “reassert its dominant role in international finance,” i.e. Rothschild Inc., was directing Robert Maxwell’s efforts to “establish a strategic presence in the United States” via a takeover of a major US-based publishing company. This intimate relationship between Rothschild banks and Robert Maxwell would again become evident as N.M. Rothschild was the group “called in to investigate his books and arrange the sale of his heirs’ 54 percent stake in Mirror Group Newspapers” after Maxwell’s 1991 death [murder]. (151) 

After Maxwell purchased Macmillan with the help of Pirie and Rothschild Inc., he used the company to establish his foothold in the United States, specifically New York City. There, he would being a sprawling influence operation to cultivate the city’s elite, which would soon intimately involve his daughter Ghislaine. With Macmillan under his control, he began using funds from the company’s charitable trusts, “spending lavishly on events in New York, paying large sums of money, sometimes as much as $100,000, for a seat at charitable functions attended by people he wanted to impress. He has acquired Macmillan for $2.6 billion, a sum “considerably more than his own Maxwell Communications Corporation was worth.” The amount of money he had to repay for this and other acquisitions of this period would become a factor in his infamous decision to pilfer the pension funds of the Mirror Group. (151)

Some speculated at the time that some of the funds Maxwell raised during this period for these acquisitions had originated in the Soviet Union, where had had considerable connections, including to the KGB. There are also the possibilities that some of the funds included proceeds from Maxwell’s sale of bugged PROMIS software to governments around the world on Israel’s behalf or, as previously detailed in Chapter 9, included profits from his business interests that were interlaced with notorious Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich. (151)

Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, best known for being the vice-chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee and subsequently Reagan’s chief of staff after the Iran-Contra scandal, had become Robert Maxwell’s business partner in 1991 in a venture called Newstar. Newstar focused on expanding investment opportunities for Americans in the former Soviet Union and was described by Richard Jacobs, who cofounded the company with Baker, as “an international merchant banking, investment, and advisory company.” Jacobs also stated that Robert Maxwell was one of the major shareholders in the company. Newstar just one of several companies that Maxwell used to enrich himself through privatizing assets of the former Soviet Union. Baker and Maxwell also attempted to recruit other respected public figures into Newstar, including the former top banking regulator in the US, William Seidman. (153) 

Soon after arriving in New York City, Robert Maxwell was determined to expand his footprint in there as well as to grow the influence of a Maxwell “dynasty.” His hopes to establish a dynasty were also described by the New York Post, which noted that Maxwell “saw himself as Britain’s Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of a dynasty that would wield financial and political power on a global scale. Like Kennedy, he expected much of his children and pushed them hard.” (156)

One of the weddings Ghislaine attended was the June 1990 nuptials between Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, and Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo, the son of New York governor Mario Cuono who would later become governor of the state himself, was said to have treated the planning of the wedding “like a political campaign” and, not unlike Robert Maxwell, had allegedly sought to marry into the Kennedy political dynasty for personal gain. (157) 

However, it is worth noting that Ghislaine Maxwell’s and Jeffery Epstein’s subsequent influence and blackmail operations, beginning in 1991, had largely targeted politicians and prominent figures within the Democratic Party. Given this context, it is also entirely possible that Robert Maxwell and his network, including organized crime networks and intelligence services, were looking for a launching pad to more broadly influence the Democratic Party before Maxwell’s death—and what better way to do that than marry into the most prominent (and respected) of Democratic political dynasties. (157) 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also stated that the two occasions he was on Epstein’s plane had been arranged between Ghislaine Maxwell and Mary Richardson. In one instance, the flight was part of a pre-planned fossil hunting trip to South Dakota, which he believed had been Ghislaine’s idea as Epstein appeared to only have attended “grudgingly.” On that trip, Kennedy remembered that Epstein “did not mingle with us and hardly spoke and did not participate in the fossil hunt.” One one of the flights, the return trip to New York from South Dakota, Epstein “clearly” had a problem with Kennedy’s “rambunctious children” and “half way back to New York, Epstein ordered the pilot to put down at Midway Field in Chicago. He got off the plane and made his own way home. A blonde was waiting for him at planeside in Chicago”. (159) 

Among other questions that emerge when considering Ghislaine’s efforts to court at least two Kennedy men—would she have continued to court a Kennedy, or perhaps a Democrat politician of influence, if her father had not died so abruptly in late 1991? Indeed, Robert Maxwell’s planned trajectory, not just for himself but for his “dynasty”, was in tatters after his death, particularly as his financial crimes were revealed, permanently staining his legacy. Indeed, numerous reports have alleged that it was the chaos after her father’s abrupt death that drove Ghislaine so publicly into the arms of Jeffery Epstein. (159) 

Kroll was unable to give Robert Maxwell the information he had wanted [if there was a conspiracy to ruin him financially and destroy his empire] before Maxwell died under suspicious circumstances on his yacht in November 1991. Though media reports often say that his death was most likely a suicide, several biographers, investigators, and Ghislaine herself assert that he was murdered, having hit the end of the line in terms of usefulness to those who had empowered his legal and illegal activities over the years. Many of them have asserted that “rogue” Mossad agents had been responsible, including Ghislaine herself. Ghislaine reportedly blames “a dark conspiracy of Mossad renegades and Sicilian contract killers” for taking her father’s life. (160) 

Throughout the 1990s, Maxwell described herself to the press as an “internet operator.” She and a few family members to found an internet services company called the McKinley Group. It’s not hard to see why Christine and Isabel [Ghislaine’s sisters] saw the internet as their chance to expand upon and rebuild upon Robert Maxwell’s “legacy.” Christine, right up until her father’s death, had been president and CEO of the Robert Maxwell-owned Israeli intelligence front company, Information on Demand, where Isabel had also worked. Upon his death, Christine had founded a related company called Research on Demand, which specialized in “internet and big data analytics” for telecommunications firms, and would later overlap with the McKinley Group’s work. (162) 

Ghislaine and Jeffrey Epstein’s public relationship is believed to have officially begun in 1991 during a tribute dinner at the Plaza Hotel in Robert Maxwell’s honor, where Epstein sat at the same table with Ghislaine and Betty Maxwell. According to media reports, this was Ghislaine’s “first step in publicly announcing her deep affection for Epstein. The choice of the Plaza would prove to be ironic given that Epstein and Ghislaine were beginning an extensive sexual-blackmail operation that would go on for well over a decade. (165) 

The earliest official interaction between Epstein and the Clinton White House took place in 1993. For Epstein, it would be the first of 17 visits he would make to the executive residence in just under two years. (171) One of the top executives of Robert Maxwell’s main bank with “substantial responsibility” for at least one of his major financial crimes, was the person to first connect Epstein with the Clinton White House. [Robert Rubin] Furthermore, Rubin would become Treasury Secretary at the tail end of 1994, the year when Epstein made 12 of his 17 visits. While Rubin served as Clinton’s second Treasury Secretary, his deputy was Lawrence “Larry” Summers, who would later take over for Rubin as Treasury Secretary in 1999 and who, along with Rubin, helped engineer the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. This allowed an economic bubble to inflate, ultimately resulting in the 2008 crisis. Epstein is also alleged to have played some role in the 2008 financial crisis by apparently helping to instigate the collapse of Bear Stearns. (172) 

Fostergate. Grabbe’s investigation found it unlikely that this woman had been responsible for Foster’s death, which would mean their meeting was likely related to the Fostergate allegations regarding Foster and espionage on behalf of Israel. Grabbe’s investigation instead pointed to a “Bush plumbers unit” that continued to operate after Clinton’s election as having been responsible for Foster’s death. Grabbe notes that Foster’s murder had been sloppy and had “taken place under emergency conditions—a spontaneous, last-minute solution when Vince Foster failed to react in expected fashion to a $286,000 attempted bribe” [suspicion the hush money came from Hillary Clinton, involving CIA, money laundering and the usual bullshit during a White House heritage renovation project.] “We dumped him [Foster] in a queer park to send Clinton and his queer wife a message,” said FBI agent Robert Goetzman. (185) 

After Grabbe’s investigation into Fostergate and other issues, he was smeared by 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl as a source of “misinformation” online and an example of why Americans should not read reporting outside of mainstream media outlets, which are now owned by a small handful of companies and many of which are controlled by the intelligence-organized crime networks profiled in this book. Stahl’s segment sought to portray Grabbe, a Harvard-trained economist and former assistant professor of economics at Wharton Business School, as a loony “conspiracy theorist” without making an effort to factually challenge any of Grabbe’s reporting. Stahl argued the interest in Grabbe’s reporting was of the danger of allowing “just anyone” to post content onto the internet. 60 Minutes may have had a vendetta against Grabbe’s reporting on Fostergate as he had written, as part of that series, that 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace (an attendee of parties on the Lady Ghislaine [Robert Maxwell’s yacht, named after his daughter] had been paid $150,000 by the Democratic National Committee to attack reporters who questioned the official narrative that Foster had committed suicide.  (186) 

Aside from the sudden death of Ron Brown and other Commerce officials, Mark Middleton—a central figure in the campaign finance scandals of the mid-1990s—would also, years later, suffer a grisly fate. He died on May 7, 2022 at a ranch in Arkansas owned by Heifer International, a non-profit whose funders included Walmart, Blackrock and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The local sheriff told media that, at the ranch, Middleton was found hanging from a tree branch by the neck with a shotgun blast to the chest. It was subsequently claimed by authorities that he had hung an extension cord around his neck before shooting himself in the chest with a shotgun. Despite the shotgun blast to hischest, police claimed there “was not a lot of blood or anything” at the scene. Speculation about Middleton’s death grewafter an Arkansas judge sealed all photos, videos, and visual content related to Middleton’s alleged suicide. (213) 

Shortly after Middleton’s death was reported, it was widely noted that he had been the official at the Clinton White House to sign off on many of Jeffery Epstein’s visits. The full extent of Middleton’s role in facilitating these visits had been made public only a few months before Middleton’s death, in December 2021. Thus, not only was Middleton the point man for questionable individuals with links to Chinese military intelligence seeking to gain access to the White House compound, he was also the point man for the intelligence-linked Epstein to do the same. This should be a clear indication that the real “Chinagate” scandal was much larger in scope than just China and the same can also be said of Mark Middleton’s activities at the time. (213)

With both Middleton and Epstein dead, it is exceedingly difficult to determine the exact nature and extent of their relationship as well as the subject of their White House meetings. Yet, Middleton’s major role in the campaign finance scandal is a critical clue. As it turns out, Epstein and other unsavory figures tied to Robert Maxwell were also involved in suspect fundraising and influence efforts during the 1996 campaign season in what is perhaps the other, less explored side of the so-called Chinagate scandal. (215) 

[Was Monica Lewinsky an operative?] Perelman’s controversial hiring of Hubbell and Lewinsky had been arranged by Clinton advisor Vernon Jordan…Jordan was known as Clinton’s “conduit to the high and mighty” and had taken Clinton to the 1991 Bilderberg conference. On the decision to hire Lewinsky following the scandal, a former business associate of Perelman’s told the Washington Post that “It’s like the Mafia, it’s all done in code,” adding that “I can assure you that Ronald made the decision to give Lewinsky the job. And I can assure you he wouldn’t want you to know why Jordan was asking.” (216)

As previously mentioned, the son of Esther Salas, the judge set to oversee a case against Deutsche Bank related to its role in enabling Epstein’s financial activities, was murdered right before that court case was to begin. (221) 

Thus, in 1991, we have a situation where Chinese arms giants, also major figures in technology transfer, were at a crossroads. They needed new markets for their weapons and, with the collapse of BCCIHK [international bank fond of dirty money laundering and intel agency smuggling, etc] they needed a new yet similar web of financial institutions that would aid them in the laundering and sequestering of  their profits. They found their new market, not in the Middle East, but in the United States. As the LA Times reported: “When [the Iran-Iraq] war subsided, the three companies [Norinco, Polygroup, and China Jingan, all Chinese companies] moved into the market created by the ballistic mayhem of American streets, selling primarily semiautomatic versions of the AK-47 and low-cost handguns modeled on more famous brands [like Colt and Smith & Wesson]. (247)

It turns out the ships used to smuggle the weapons seized via Operation Dragon Fire were owned by China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), the “merchant marine arm” of the People’s Liberation Army. A partner of COSCO at the time was Hutchinson-Whampoa, whose main shareholder was Li Ka-Shing. [Vancouverites will recall that Li Ka-Shing was the whale who bought the entire False Creek lands, which were then turned into Expo 86 and a rash of condo towers—the purchase spelled the beginning of the end of our beloved old Vancouver which soon thereafter was plagued by Chinese Triads and money laundering.] (251)

If Epstein’s meetings with Middleton were connected to Southern Air Transport’s activities [CIA smuggling cocaine into the US) during the same period, what would that mean? The Chinese network in which Middleton was enmeshed at the time was known to be engaged in smuggling weapons into the U.S. They simultaneously seem to have been paying off the DNC and the Clintons, a political dynasty notorious for pay-to-play politics. (254)

Those of us without national security clearances are left to look at a trail of crumbs, which seem to paint a certain picture and lead us to a particular conclusion. However, it seems that, unless greater pressure from the public [hahahahahaha] is applied to these concerns, the true nature of Epstein’s meetings with Middleton and the real motive behind Epstein’s courting of CIA-linked airlines on Wexner’s behalf will remain elusive. At the same time, as this book has labored to show, the US government is clearly in a position where it cannot investigate itself. Indeed, if any of these threads were to be pulled on, much of the excessive corruption, espionage, and criminal activity that has filled these pages thus far would quickly unravel. (258) 

Vasquez also testified that the teenage models that Brunel flew in to “work” for MC2 (and whose visas had been paid for by Epstein) were housed in the 301 66th Street apartment owned by Ossa Properties—the company of Mark Epstein, Jeffery’s brother. Vasquez stated that the girls were then “loaded out to wealthy clients” for as much as $100,000 a night. If they refused to have sex with the “client”, then they weren’t paid. Brunel denied these claims, but they were notably corroborated by the most well-known of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre. In a 2014 court filing [before Virginia was murdered/suicided], Giuffre alleged that Brunel offered “girls ‘modeling’ jobs. Many of the girls came from impoverished backgrounds, and he lured them in with a promise of making good money.” She also alleged that she was forced to have sex with Brunel of several occasions. She also stated that Epstein imported underage girls from France with Brune’s assistance, including 12-year-old triplets he had flown in from France so he could abuse them as a “birthday present” to himself. (266) 

Epstein is believed to have had many of his underage victims photographed in the nude, pictures which were displayed all over his Palm Beach mansion when it was first raided by police in 2005. He was never charged, nor have any of his accomplices ever been charged, with child pornography. Police also found that clocks in parts of the house had contained hidden cameras which filmed many of the girls while inside the house and potentially some of their sex acts with Epstein and his wealthy “friends”. Those images were stored on a computer hard drive also found in the residence. Vanity Fair reported that Ghislaine had openly stated that, in addition to Epstein’s residences in Palm Beach and New York, Epstein’s “island had been completely wired for video”… as an insurance policy, as blackmail. Brunel, like Epstein himself, died under what some regard as suspicious circumstances while in prison. Brunel was detained in December 2020 in connection with a French investigation into Epstein’s sex crimes in that country and was found hung in his cell in February 2022. The death was quickly ruled a suicide. (268) 

Other girls were offered a mix of money and promises that Epstein could help them receive an education at places like Harvard. In court testimony from 2021, a victim referred to as Jane Doe #11 stated that: “He promised me that he would write me a letter of recommendation for Harvard if I got the grades and scores needed for admission. He word was worth a lot, he assured me, as he was in the midst of funding and leading Harvard’s studies on the human brain, and the president was his friend. [Another woman, formerly a model, who was seduced by Epstein became a neuro-surgeon and is now ensconced in the World Health Organization and WEF] Epstein, once in a locked room with Jane Doe #11 after luring her in with such promises, threatened to kill her and then raped her. (273) 

Other victims of Epstein’s have stated that, in addition to luring girls in with promises to help them, Epstein also perversely claimed to some of his victims that being sexually abused by him was also a form of “help.” One victim, identified as Jane Doe #9, stated that “When I was 15 years old, I flew on Jeffery Epstein’s plane to Zorro Ranch, where I was sexually molested by him for many hours. What I remember most vividly was him explaining to me how beneficial the experience was for me and how much he was helping me to grow.” (275)

Carbyne911, formerly Reporty, is an Israeli tech-start-up founded in 2014 that promises to revolutionize how calls are handled by emergency service providers, as well as by governments, corporations, and educational institutions. Prior to Epstein’s arrest in mid-2019, Carbyne had received high praise from US and Israeli media. Other reports claimed that Carbyne’s services result in “a 65% reduction in time-to-dispatch” for emergency services. (359) 

Privacy concerns with Carbyne go beyond the company’s ties to Israeli intelligence and US intelligence contractors like Peter Thiel’s Palantir. For instance, Carbyne’s smartphone app extracts the following information from the phones on which it is installed: Device location, video live-streamed from the smartphone to the call center, text messages in a two-way chat window, any data from the user’s phone if they have the Carbyne app and ESInet, and any information that comes over the data link, which Carbyne opens in case the caller’s voice link drops out. According to Carbyne’s website, this same information can also be obtained from any smartphone, even if it does not have Carbyne’s app installed, if that phone calls a 911 call center that uses Carbyne or merely any other number connected to Carbyne’s network. Carbyne is a Next-Generation 9-11 (NG911) platform and the explicit goal of NG911 is for all 911 systems nationwide to become interconnected. Thus, even if Carbyne is not used by all 911 call centers using an NG911 platform, Carbyne will ostensibly have access to the data used by all emergency service providers and devices connected to those networks. (361)

Epstein was also working to build up a company focused around “DNA data-mining.” Created in 2012, Southern Trust was a “start-up” created by Epstein with the apparent goal of sequencing people’s genomes and selling that data to the pharmaceutical industry. In 2012, Epstein seemed to know something that those guiding other, more prominent “data mining” firms like Chiliad and Palantir also knew—that, soon, data would become the world’s most valuable commodity. This would become a common public talking point in the years that followed. For instance, in 2017, The Economist declared that the world’s most valuable resource was no longer oil, but data. Referring to data as “the oil of the digital era”, it notes that this new “data economy” runs on masses of data generated by billions of devices as well as algorithms, particularly Artificial Intelligence algorithms. It also notes that the “data economy” is intimately linked to Big Tech’s “surveillance systems”, which gives these powerful companies a “God’s eye view” of both markets and citizens behaviour. (372) 

Epstein’s decision to court and gather “dirt” on Big Tech scions, while also rebranding as a tech investor and entrepreneur, was carefully calculated. Indeed, he and the Maxwells were intimately aware of h ow the digital revolution was drastically reshaping the face of blackmail and influencing operations. Arguably beginning with the PROMIS software scandal, which intimately involved the Maxwells, the utility of bugged software to intelligence agencies quickly became obvious. With a few lines of surreptitious code, intelligence agencies could gain access to troves of sensitive data in real-time, which previously would have required scores of highly embedded and sophisticated spies. Yet, those spies could be caught if just one in their network slipped up. However, with a few lines hidden among thousands and thousands of line of code, a software program’s “treachery” is much more difficult to detect. While Epstein and the Maxwells, throughout the 1990s and beyond, blackmailed powerful people using trafficked women and girls, the digital revolution offered them, and their benefactors, a new opportunity to fulfill the same operational goals, but with much less risk. (372) 

In a world where blackmail is overwhelmingly electronic, people like Epstein and Ghislaine become liabilities to be silenced, rather than assets to protect. Another critical consequence of the advent of electronic blackmail is that the very same systems that enable that blackmail to occur are intimately enmeshed with the infrastructure of mass surveillance. This is the core idea behind the panopticon model. (373)

While the US has long been “one nation under blackmail”, the perpetuation of this system and means of control is rapidly reaching its logical conclusion. The more we live our lives on our phones and our computers, the more we can be exploited if and when certain groups and networks with access to our data decide that they want something from us. Yet, now that these corrupt power structures have grown so accustomed to our digital dependence, we now have the chance to disrupt the empire that they have built on a foundation of blackmail, bribes and bullet. By taking ownership of our data, and depriving intelligence-linked Big Tech their monopoly of control over it, we can start to rupture a system that would enslave us if allowed to advance. (374)

When one  realizes where power really lies and how it really functions, it becomes clear that the only way to deter a corrupt system of this magnitude, which has now merged public and private power into the hands of the few, is not to comply. The government is no longer capable of investigating itself and our institutions have long been too compromised to guarantee American well-being or the American way of life. Instead, quite the opposite had taken place. The US, after being used by these networks to loot countries around the world, has itself been looted and hung out to dry…as this book has endeavored to show, non-compliance is a must when facing a system that, among other crimes, is willing to enable and engage in the unconscionable exploitation and abuse of children to further its stranglehold over the country, and ultimately over us. (375) 

-30-

* Wildfires. A letter sent to all BC Municipalities

Posted on by
2

From: S. Troy Anderson, Concerned Citizen, Researcher, Published Writer

Sent: August 28, 2026

To: Mayors and Councils, All BC Municipalities, UBCM, BC Fire Chiefs

Subject: Exploding Wildfires and the Urgent Need to Stop Chemical-Induced Weather Experiments

To All it may concern,

Another summer of communities evacuated, 1000s of people losing their homes, massive fires burning out of control, smoke-filled air for weeks and months. Tremendous resources—human and financial—go into fighting fires that become larger, more volatile and greater in number every year. The strain on families, communities, business, tourism, health, and taxpayers is excessive. We’re continually told the crisis is due to climate change but this is not the whole picture. 

Recently, a Fire Chief told a CBC reporter that the Bald Range wildfire near Summerland doubled in size so fast that firefighters could do little but order over 12,000 people to evacuate. He said the fire “exploded”. CBC news presenter, Johanna Wagstaffe, said, “I’ve never seen anything like this as a meteorologist.” Back in 2018, during California’s deadliest-ever fire season, their exasperated Fire Chief told a reporter the “fire behaviour has changed, the fires are exploding.” And it gets worse. We’re now seeing fire tornadoes and on the weekend of August 22nd over 7000 lightning strikes! 

This must be our call to action. It’s time to question why billions of pounds of flammable chemicals are sprayed into earth’s atmosphere every year—for over 50 years—and how this is contributing to exploding wildfires, extreme weather events, and other problems.

They call it ‘geoengineering’. Mexico has banned it. Seven American states have also banned it. Lawmakers in over 30 states are in the process of criminalizing atmospheric manipulation or climate intervention. Legislative bills are currently wending through the U.S. political system: New Jersey’s Bill 4161 “seeks to ban the release of hazardous chemicals for geoengineering”; North Carolina’s Bill 362 “amends environmental laws to bar intentional chemical releases for weather or sunlight manipulation”; Montana “prohibits releasing chemicals to alter weather or sunlight intensity”; Florida is “protecting natural weather patterns.” 

According to their Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), the flammable chemicals being sprayed fundamentally conflict with fire, water and fire-fighting: Aluminum Particulate “reacts violently and/or explosively with water, steam or moisture.” Barium: “Contact with water releases flammable gases which may ignite spontaneously.” With Sodium Chloride, “avoid excess heat and exposure to moist air or water” or the chemical will explode. Sulphur dioxide “may explode if heated.” When using Silver Iodide, “excess heat is a condition to avoid—no data available for explosive limits.” Potassium Chloride must be “kept away from heat or sources of ignition.” Calcium Carbonate“may explode when heated” and “should not be released into the environment.” Aluminum Strontium “should not be released into the environment. Do not allow product to reach ground water, water course or sewage system.”Manganese: “keep away from heat, sparks or open flames.” Titanium Oxide, which are nano-particles, “must be kept away from open flames and sources of ignition.” Aluminum oxide: “avoid excessive heat.” And more. 

Canada has no domestic laws prohibiting chemical experiments involving solar radiation, weather modification or climate intervention. What we have is a Canada/U.S. Weather Modification Treaty, formed in 1975. (Verification documentation at the end of this letter). Canada’s only oversight over our skies is the toothless Weather Modification Information Act which politely asks only to be informed of what’s already been done. See UBC’s Bertram Research Group website for their active involvement in the region.

It must be noted that climate geoengineering makes $5 trillion in sales for the chemical industry every year. They sell both the flammable chemicals that can cause explosive fires and the dry chemicals they advise are “suitable for extinguishing” them. MSDS for flammable chemicals have pages and pages of missing data: “toxicological properties have not been fully investigated.” Effects on human health: “no information available.” Product flammability, burning rate, or explosion limits: “no information available.” Ecological information: “no information available.” No data for chemical stability or reactivity. After more than 50 years, there’s no information pertaining to downsides and negative effects? Or is that information being hidden?

We all know the history of industries claiming their products are safe and harmless, then it turns out they’re not. Thalidomide, big tobacco, and opioids are three of many examples. Corruption repeats—as do reaction patterns. When harms become evident, industries typically ignore, deny, explain away, and cover up; vested interests and profits are prioritized. Nothing changes until dedicated researchers and whistleblowers expose the facts to the people, who then organize and demand change. It’s not our fault if we didn’t know, or if we trusted and believed what they told us. But it is our fault if we learn the truth and kick the can down the road. 

We need everyone to share information, band together, call for government transparency, and demand a moratorium on chemical climate experimentation. The upcoming UBCM conference would be a good opportunity. You are our best defense. You can protect our health, our lives and livelihoods, our communities, our firefighters, our clean and clear atmosphere, our land and waterways, our shared future. 

Thank you for your honourable service and your attention to this urgent issue. Links to primary sources, documentation and high quality research listed below.  

Respectfully,

S. Troy Anderson

Lillooet, BC, V0K 1V0

Email: theLillooetGazette@gmail.com

Primary Source Documentation for Verification and Research 

Type or Copy/Paste into the search bar of your preferred Search Engine (Google, Firefox, Safari, Brave, etc)

1975 Weather Modification Treaty between Canada and U.S.  

Canada Weather Modification Information Act 

Bertram Research Group: UBC Chemistry Department

Material Safety Data Sheets and the chemical name – MSDS and Aluminum Particulate

State-level geoengineering bans: Florida, Montana and Beyond

Is geoengineering pushing us into climate chaos

Geoengineering Watch has been documenting this for over 20 years. See their excellent documentary, Hacking the Planet: the Geoengineering Reality

Chemtrails Exposed is a database of photos of climate experimentation, uploaded to the internet from concerned citizens all over the world.

Center for International Environmental Law Expose the Dangers of Geoengineering on Substack

EPA Releases New Online Resources Giving Americans Total Transparency on the Issues of Geoengineering and Contrails

Controversial Geoengineering Test Quietly Launches Salt Crystals into Atmosphere

* Reading Notes: One Nation Under Blackmail by Whitney Webb

Posted on by
1

I’ve read it twice, so you don’t have to—though I would recommend you do. Webb is a brilliant researcher with encyclopedic knowledge of the historical development of global corruption and crimes, the players involved, and their connections to one another. All is not what it seems! Here are the Coles notes. 

One Nation Under Blackmail Volume 1 ~ the Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein by Whitney Webb

In order to understand Jeffery Epstein and his activities in their full context, one must understand his powerful contacts and the structures that protected him. Those structures and those networks did not begin with Jeffery Epstein and they also did not die with him. In revealing his broader milieu, and that of his past associates and clients, one is left not only with a damning indictment of Jeffery Epstein, but also a damning indictment of American institutions, particularly those involved in “national security” matters and law enforcement. We cannot properly address the crimes of Jeffery Epstein, nor prevent them being committed by others in the future, unless we grapple with the covert power structures that have long wielded blackmail, bribes and assassinations as their weapons of choice to corrupt and control public institutions while manipulating and looting the public. JE was not an anomaly and his activities represent just the tip of the veritable iceberg. (ix)

Former CIA officer and Iran-Contra whistleblower Bruce Hemmings, circa 1990: “If you let them, they will take over not only the CIA but the entire government and the world, cutting off dissent, free speech, a free media, and they will cut a deal with anyone, from the Mafia to Saddam Hussein, if it means more power and money. (x)

Operation Underworld [WWII, where the U.S. government decided to enlist organized crime members in their operations], which the government was forced to reluctantly acknowledge after decades of public denials, involved the recruitment of high-level organized crime figures for work with American intelligence services, justified by wartime necessity. (2)

The National Crime Syndicate might be best understand as a social network—a sprawling, faction-filled web of associations and organizations that either collaborated or competed, depending on the situation of the spoils. (4) 

Lurking in the background of Operation Underworld, which has seen the ONI directly recruit [Lucky] Luciano, was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime forerunner to the CIA and America’s first robust national intelligence organization [WW2]. (5)

[China involved in big pharma right from the start.] The Green Gang [who rose of power after Beijing tried to squash their grassroots trading empire] financed its activities through the cultivation and sale of opium—an activity that was fully sanctioned by Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang (KMT). Prior to the KMTs rise to power, Chinese opium production was unorganized, distributed among many different warring figures. Under Chang, however, a “suppression” was carried out with the ostensible goal of wiping out the opium trade in the name of public health. Behind the scenes, however, the KMT was doing quite the opposite: the “suppression” of opium production was actually an integrated effort to centralize it, placing production, distribution and ultimately control of the substance in the hands of a joint KMT-Green Gang monopoly. (11) 

Support for the KMT opium monopoly came from Western modernizers—including the Rockefeller Foundation, which had set up shop in China during the 1910s with the creation of the China Medical Board. At the same time, it was also part of a larger tendency among internationalists like the Rockefellers to seek regulation and control of the global drug trade. The overarching imperative of the League of Nations efforts for global drug regulation was to rationalize the production of opium and other precursors and to consolidate drug refining and distribution within a series of select major pharmaceutical corporations. Under Chiang’s leadership, China simultaneously kowtowed to the League’s initiatives while using the monopolization drive to cement itself at the center of drug production for both the criminal underworld and the “legitimate” overworld. A full-blown narco state was in the process of being formed, as opium cultivation came to be the central focus of the government’s revenue-raising programs. (11) 

The Supermob. The global drug trade is a massive business, and the offshore banking system that enables it is even bigger. Although most imagine drug networks, their controllers and their users as existing on the fringes of society, in reality, the massive amounts of capital that result from the production and distribution of illicit drugs occupy a central place within the global economic system. Consider a statement made in 2009 by Antoinio Maria Costa, who was then head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. According to Costa, proceeds from the drug trade were an important source of liquidity for cash-starved banks at the height of the 2008 economic crisis. The amounts absorbed by the banking system were enough to prevent some banks from collapsing. (22) 

The UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimated that money laundering activities—encompassing the washing of illicit drug revenue and more—make up anywhere from 2 to 5% of global GDP, at around $800 billion to $2 trillion. This, again, is almost certainly a conservative estimate. (22) 

What makes the “Supermob” unique is that it was a particularly stark and fairly unmasked example of how criminal networks, political power, and “legitimate” commercial activity mixed together in the period of explosive economic and cultural growth in the wake of WW2.  (24)

William Mellon Hitchcock was one of the financial backers of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the so-called “hippie mafia” that produced and distributed psychedelics on an international scale. (33) See Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond by Lee & Schlain

Castle Bank was a melding of worlds. A blossoming of heroin traffic coming out of Southeast Asia and a complicated money laundering operation that silently moved the funds of powerful gangsters, politicians, businessmen, and intelligence services around the globe. (33)

Carefully removed from the official Watergate narrative is Woodward’s stint, immediately prior to his career as a journalist, in the military. After attending Yale, Woodward had gone into the Navy, where he spent “four years of sea duty as a communications officer”. He served under two superiors who would go on to land important positions at the Pentagon. In August 1969, Woodward, still an enterprising young naval officer, arrived in Washington, DC. (179)

Clearly, this emergent network was like an octopus, with far-reaching tentacles reaching out in all directions and intertwined with seemingly legitimate businesses. …a strange, darker underbelly… (211)

Saudi Arabia was lending its Egyptian allies large sums of money, which were then used to purchase French-produced weapons that soon flooded African conflict zones. (220) 

At the end of the war [WW2], Donovan organized a committee to advise Hollywood on the production of spy-themed movies. The members of this special commission included Daved K.E. Bruce, J. Russell Forgan, Allen Dulles, and Shaheen. Their efforts successfully inserted a score of OSS veterans into the movie business, while also giving directors and producers a direct link to the inside world of wartime-intelligence operatives. Hollywood, as a result, became yet another milieu where the worlds of American intelligence intersected with organized crime. (250) 

When Nixon had briefly returned to private law practice, Shaheen had been one of his clients. He was responsible for connecting Nixon with Joey Smallwood, the premier of the Canadian province of Newfoundland. Smallwood, meanwhile, was engaged in an effort to industrialize the remote province by courting European and American capital. Some of the firms he courted bore the unmistakable mark of organized crime—for example, the controversial John C. Doyle and his company, Canadian Javelin. (250)

Thus, BCCI supported the work of A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani nuclear physicist and engineer known as the father of Pakistan’s weapons program. This work had begun after India tested the “Smiling Buddha,” their own nuclear weapon, in 1974 and it was carried out under the auspices of Khan Research Laboratories. Pakistan and Iraq had an experimental weapon called a “Columbine head”. Columbine heads were allegedly a type of thermobaric bomb, better known as a “fuel air explosive,” as they suck in the surrounding air to create a powerful explosion. (271) 

During the 1980s, Singlaub headed the US Council for World Freedom, the US branch of a global network of spies, criminals, Nazi exiles, fascist operators, and death squad leaders belonging to the World Anti-Communist League. By 1984, he was serving as the chairman of the league itself. The World Anti-Communist League and the US Council for World Freedom were interlaced with a host of like-minded pressure groups, dark-money fronts, private-intelligence apparatuses, and closed-door meeting places. These groups pressed for rolling back Cold War policies and boosting defense spending. More specifically, the pushed for the continuation and deepening of covert wars across the world; free trade policies, and other packages beneficial to multinational corporations; and the curtailing of civil and labor rights. Some of these, such as the American Security Council, appear to have participated in psychological operations aimed at the domestic population of the United States as well as abroad. (292)

A key aspect of the covert operations of the Reagan era that is frequently overlooked is that, with respect to the complex trafficking of arms to Iran, Oliver North and the Enterprise were dipping their toes into a much wider swamp of political and economic corruption, arms trafficking, and money laundering on a truly colossal scale. As the conflict between Iraq and Iran heated up, companies, banks, intelligence agents and smugglers poured arms and military materials into both sides of a bloody war. Despite laws barring such activities, the conflict in the Middle East was a boom time for many. (306) 

Space Research Corporation is best remembered for the man behind the company: Gerald Bull, a Canadian-born engineer and artillery expert who, prior to his 1990 assassination in the doorway of his Brussels apartment, had designed weapons systems for the Iraqis and the Chinese. He had also brokered the sale of arms to South Africa. Yet, his most famous effort was Project Babylon. Commissioned by the Iraqi government, Project Babylon was intended to construct a series of space guns, based on Bull’s earlier designs for launching satellites into orbit. These guns would be used to fire projectiles high into the atmosphere or near-earth orbit in order to reach targets far beyond the range of normal artillery equipment. (318) 

[A note on the exhaustive research Webb has brought to bear in this tome: one chapter, A Killer Enterprise, has 267 end notes! Each chapter is chock-a-block full of citations and documentation.)

[The book details the unbelievably byzantine labyrinth of a global toxic brotherhood]… “which paints a complicated picture of the unstable alliances and power competitions that raged beneath the surface of the this covert world”. (341) 

One of the most brazen and successful operations ever conducted by Israeli intelligence on a global scale involved its sale of a bugged software program to governments, corporations, and major financial and scientific institutions around the world. That software program, known as the Prosecutor’s Information Management System or PROMIS, was originally created and marketed by Inslaw Inc., a company created by former NSA official Bill Hamilton and his wife Nancy. In 1982, Inslaw leased its revolutionary PROMIS software to the US Justice Department, then headed by Edwin Meese III, Ronald Reagan’s most trusted advisor, Attorney General and, later, an advisor to Donald Trump following the 2016 election. The success of the software, which allowed integration of separate databases and information analysis on a previously unimaginable scale, eventually caught the attention of Rafi Eitan, the notorious and legendary Israeli spymaster as well as the handler of the “most dangerous spy” in American history, Jonathan Pollard. The PROMIS software could track anything, specifically money and people…This agreement between Eitan and Brian eventually led to two different versions of bugged PROMIS software, one bugged by Israel for the main purpose of spying on the operations of foreign governments and intelligence services and one bugged by CIA-linked entities and individuals for the main purpose of engaging in financial espionage and money laundering. (384-5)

Through Degem and other Maxwell-owned companies based in Israel and elsewhere, Maxwell marketed PROMIS so successfully that Israel intelligence soon had access to the innermost workings of innumerable governments, intelligence services, and corporations around the world. Many of Maxwell’s biggest successes came in selling PROMIS to dictators in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Following the sale, and after Maxwell collected a handsome pay check, PROMIS’ unparalleled ability to track and surveil anything—from cash flows to human movement—was used by these governments to commit financial crimes with greater finesse and also to hunt down and disappear dissidents. Israel intelligence, of course, watched it all play out in real time. (386)

In Latin America, for instance, Maxwell sold PROMIS to military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. There, PROMIS was used to facilitate the mass murder that characterized Operation Condo, as the friends and families of dissidents and so-called subversives were easily identified using PROMIS. PROMIS was so effective for this purpose that, just days after Maxwell sold the software to Guatemala, its US-backed dictatorship rounded up 20,000 “subversives” who were never heard from again. Of course, thanks to their backdoor in PROMIS, Israeli intelligence knew the identities of Guatemala’s disappeared before the victims’ own families. Israel, along with the United States, was also intimately involved in the arming and training of many of the same Latin American dictatorships that had been sold the bugged PROMIS software.  (387) 

Per Seymour, Riconosciuto had been recruited by the CIA while at Stanford University and Riconoscuito “and Earl Brian had traveled to Iran in 1980 and had paid $40 million to Iranian officials to persuade them not to let the hostages go before the presidential election”, a scheme better known as the October Surprise. Riconoscuito later testified that the software “was stolen as a favor to software-company executive Earl Brian, a friend of Meese’s, for Brian’s help in persuading the Iranian government to hold on to the embassy hostages until the 1980 election was over. (390) [In order to make residing president Carter look bad to the voters and lose.]

Systematics has had close ties to the NSA and CIA ever since its founding, sources say, as a money-shuffler for covert operations. It is no secret that there were billions of dollars moving around in “black” accounts—from buying and selling arms to the Contras, Iran, Iraq, Angola and other countries paying CIA operatives and laundering money from clandestine CIA drug dealing. Having taken over the complete computer rooms in scores of small U.S. banks as an “outsource” supplier of data processing, Systematics was in a unique position to manage that covert money flow. Sources say the money was moved at the end of every day disguised as a routine bank-to-bank balancing transaction. (396, footnote 67, James Normal articled called Fostergate) 

This focus on obtaining a secret window into the in and out-flows of the global banking system enabled not only the covert tracking of funds, but presumably allowed funds to be covertly hidden and financial crimes to be effectively covered up or rendered invisible. 

As previously mentioned, prior to Casolaro’s death [he was murdered], those close to the journalist had seen documents involving money transfers involving the World Bank to people involved in these scandals, such as Earl Brian and Adnan Khashoggi. In addition, it was reported by economist and author J. Orlin Grabbe that his particular version of PROMIS in use by the World Bank was being used to track wire transfers “in connection with a money-laundering operation that went from BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International] London through the World Bank into Caribbean institutions. The role of the World Bank in the PROMIS scandal has been largely unexplored. (406-7)

One of the men who developed Neva alongside Maxwell, Ognian Doninov, president of the Bulgarian Chamber for Industry and Trade from 1980 to 1984 and Bulgaria’s Vice Premier from 1984-1986, claimed that Bulgarian intelligence agents involved in Neva had been covertly working “in Silicon Valley and other key technology sectors” in the United States, as well as in Britain and other Western countries. There, they would steal “technology blueprints, actual software, even computers. According to Gordon Thomas, Robert Maxwell created an umbrella of companies for use in Neva within six months. Thanks to Maxwell, Thomas writes, “The country had become […] the center of a thriving economy based upon whole-sale theft and money laundering.” This growing business empire, Thomas asserts would later “grown into one of the most powerful crime syndicates in the world, embracing the Russian mafia, the crime families of Bulgaria and, far away across the Atlantic, those in New York and, on the other side of the world, the crime families of Japan and Hong Kong. (412-3) 

John Patrick O’Neill, FBI executive agent-in-charge in New York until 2001, would later say the following about Maxwell and Multi-Group: in many ways Maxwell was at the heart of the global criminal network. Beginning with his Bulgarian connection he showed how to structure a network that grew into financially powerful criminal corporations whose power would extend to the South American drug cartels, the Tongs and the Triads, the Russian Mafia and the Japanese Yakuza. They were all there before. But the way Robert Maxwell set things up, they would all come together in Multi-Group in its early years. His last contribution was not that he just robbed his pension funds. It was that he was the man who set in motion a true coalition of global criminals. (413) 

[Reagan era schemes] Some have explained these specific scandals away, painting them as blights of the Reagan-Bush administrations and treating these intelligence-organized crime rackets as isolated incidents. However, instead, it appears that these intelligence-organized crime networks were so central to the national power structure by the time Reagan took office that the more well-known scandals of the era can be seen as “business as usual” for the period. Yet, lurking beneath Iran-Contra and other scandals that rocked the Reagan administration, there were darker and more nefarious activities that reached the highest levels of power during the same period, but received considerably less media attention. These other, lesser known scandals and crimes of the era show that, during the reigns of Reagan and Bush Sr., the rot reached all the way to the White House. Key power brokers in this sordid milieu included individuals intimately involved in the world of sex blackmail, who often bragged about their ability to “fix” and “manipulate” any politician or powerful individual they sought to influence, for the benefit of intelligence agencies, organized crime, as well as their own personal gain. (434)  

[Stay tuned for notes on Volume 2, when I’m done reading it.]

-30-

* Reading Notes ~ Wilful Blindness by Sam Cooper

Posted on by
Reply

All things wacko in the state of Canada, by one of our very best investigative journalists ~ written with style and integrity. Of the many things you’ll learn reading this book is that many of the Chinese whales who came to Canada own, or owned, mines in China. Some of them sold the mines in order to turn swaths of Chinese land into real estate which was so expensive it was too difficult for the Chinese to buy. They caused tremendous harms, uprooted communities and rendered many people homeless and destitute. Some of those whales brought their lust for more real estate scams; some of them became ranking members of the Communist Party; some are deeply embedded in Triads and all things illegal, including fentanyl, which is decimating Canadian communities. 

Wilful Blindness ~ How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West by Sam Cooper 

Teng Biao, Professor and human rights scholar, in his forward to the book: An open society must not be exploited by dictatorial regimes to monitor the diaspora communities and to spread its anti-democracy propaganda. 

Regarding the detention and cruel treatment of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig by the CCP, “as an obvious retaliation for the detention of Meng Wanzhou. If Canadians have been shocked by the judicial blackmail, it is a wonderful opportunity to deepen their understanding of the characteristics of the regime..” 

After the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, with the help of Western engagement, money, and technology, the CCP has established increasingly powerful and brutal totalitarianism domestically and has become more and more aggressive on the international stage and a threat to global freedom. Its extraterritorial laws and long arm of enforcement overstretch in many different ways. For example, its control of Chinese immigrants, its economic coercion, and its abduction of refugees overseas, including dissidents, booksellers, Uyghurs, and businessmen. It’s theft, bribery, and propaganda are institutionalized through the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), One Belt One Road (BRI), South China Sea aggression, international cyber attacks and espionage, manipulation of the UN human rights mechanisms, and the “Thousand Talents Program”.” 

Calvin Chrustie: “It is a complex issue, but as stated yesterday [during a money laundering commission inquiry] while the flight of capital issue is a key concern, we know China’s financial elite have close ties to organized crime. And we also know the cartels are close to Chinese networks.”

Regarding underground banking, Cooper has extensively researched Silver International, located in Richmond, BC. “It was a stunning and terrible operation, laundering more than $1 billion each year in Vancouver for Chinese, Mexican and Iranian crime cartels. To my mind, Silver took on the shape of a financial weapon, a toxic creation that systemically eroded Canada’s economic foundations and the rule of law, while fulfilling the needs of transnational narcos and CCP oligarchs in elegantly balanced, symbiotic transactions—effortlessly shifting narco-dollars worldwide by leveraging massive reserves of corruption money seeking underground channels out of mainland China. 

There is no dispute among criminologists about the cartel’s profound influence in Vancouver’s conversion into a hub for transnational crime. A 2015 report prepared by Canada’s anti-money laundering agency Fintrac says: “Vancouver is a critical money-laundering hub for: international drug money; dirty money from China (drugs, corruption, tax evasion). Transnational criminal organizations and local drug money.” The report says Vancouver is especially vulnerable to money-laundering because of its proximity to China and the U.S., its hot real estate market, and its busy marine port, which has been stripped of regulation by provincial and federal government funding cuts. (32)  

“But if you focus on 1988, you have to zoon further back, all the way to China’s bloody Cultural Revolution and the year 1967, when overly aggressive members of Chairman Mao’s paratrooper Red Guards were purged and detained in Guangzhou. 

“It was in these internment camps that the Red paratroopers formed a new Triad-like society, the Big Circle Gang, and the prisoners eventually escaped to Hong Kong, where they made a violent impression on the original Triads that had already fled to Hong Kong and Macau in the 1950s and 1960s, after losing bloody battles with Mao and the Communists. (50)

In Canadian federal court records regarding Triad infiltration of Canada’s immigration system, the Hong Kong police force’s leading Triad expert, Stanley Ip, is cited explaining the ancient roots of these secret societies. According to Ip, governments in China have, to various degrees, confronted the Triads since 1674—when leaders from China’s Han ethnic groups formed sects to buck the authority of the Manchurian Qing dynasty. The Triads functioned like shadow governments, evolving into powerful criminal societies controlling underground channels of finance and trade, and enforcing contracts through guanxi (relationships) and violence. 

In the 1900s, secretive relations between national leaders and criminal leaders continued, Ip says, until Mao and the Communists firmly gained the upper hand and vanquished the Triads. But in the early 1980s, as negotiations progressed between the United Kingdom and China for the handover of Hong Kong, the pragmatic paramount leader Deng Xiaopeng had a new arrangement in mind. [China style capitalism] (50)

Sidewinder [1997 CSIS report] concluded that Canada faced a growing national security threat of economic infiltration driven by a network of allies from the Chinese Community Party. Triads and Hong Kong tycoons—all working together with Chinese intelligence services. And there was a shocking thesis: ahead of the conversion of Hong Kong from British rule, the CCP had forged a truce with the Triads in order to secure Hong Kong’s stability. [In 1982] Deng Xiaopeng “asked for cooperation and business advice from the Hong Kong tycoons. He wanted to smoothly adjust China’s economy to capitalism. In return, Beijing would give the tycoons privileged access to China’s markets. Two years later, Deng publicly stated that “not all Triads are bad, and many of the secret societies are patriotic.” (67) 

Sidewinder said that throughout the 1980s, Western intelligence agencies recognized increasing activity in Hong Kong from one of China’s foreign intelligence arms, the United Front Work Department. United Front agents were responsible for fostering business ties between CCP and Triads. Bonds were forged with United Front shell companies that enabled Triads to run businesses in Mainland China with elite military and revolutionary families. (68)

“As early as 1992, Western intelligence services knew that Wong Man Fong, formerly head of the New China News Agency, was instructed to inform the Triad bosses that if they agreed not to jeopardize the transition process and the normal business in Hong Kong, Beijing would assure them that they will be allowed to pursue their illegal activities without interference,” Sidewinder said. For example, they set up a nightclub in Beijing with Deng’s Public Security Bureau chief Tao Siju, and also ran a number of similar clubs in Shanghai in partnership with People’s Liberation Army officers. 

The allegations are shocking. But several media and academic reports have corroborated the secret deals between Beijing and Triad bosses.

And in his 2010 study “Beyond Social Capital,” Hong Kong criminologist T. Wing Lo reiterated Sidewinder’s findings on business ties between CCP and Hong Kong Triads. (68) 

The Ye’s are one of the most powerful Red Army princeling clans, controlling vast military and industrial conglomerates. And they are known to be backers of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. 

…Chinese criminals were taking over in western Canada. They had mastered drug importation and distribution. They had connections and routes worldwide. In B.C., they worked with the Vietnamese, the Persians, the Hells Angels and the new multi-cultural dial-a-doper gangs, the United Nations and Red Scorpions. Some of the bikers were still doing well. But they didn’t run Vancouver anymore. (78) 

[Over the years, Chinese gangsters] got “better at moving narcotics around the world. Sending it out of Canada in stolen car exports, layering it into casino and hotel developments [Trumps?] in Vietnam and Cambodia, building towers in Mainland China, selling real estate across Asia, wiring funds back into Canada through import-export companies, mixing it into casino chips and homes in Vancouver and Richmond and Burnaby. (78)

[A police wiretap revealed that] It was no problem for the Chinese cartel to look into Canadian driving licence records. The Big Circle Boys were able to peer into Canadian residents’ lives and travel schedules and track them down if they wanted to. (82) It was something that citizens in the U.S. and Canada just couldn’t grasp. China’s government was directing the gangs. (82)

“And again, I have to hammer this point. Assessments from the Sidewinder report that were scorned in Ottawa power circles are supported by Canadian police wiretaps. China’s government is in fact controlling drug cartels.” (87) 

Cooper tracks and explains “China’s so-called white gloves system and the Chinese Communist Party’s leveraging of criminal to gather intelligence.” (125) Lai [a Triad gangster] was allowed to monopolize China’s oil trade with his access to the country’s military vessels and ports. He robbed China’s economy and paid the dividends to himself and its leaders. But corruption of this scale can’t occur unless extremely powerful leaders pull the string. This is the white gloves system.” (125)

“In order to conceal their ownership of privatized state assets, Red Princelings use the ‘white gloves’ of People’s Liberation Army figures like Lai. In fact, after Lai fled to Canada, a young Fujian man named Ye Jianming who is believed to have Chinese intelligence connections, “bought” Lai’s oil assets at auction and built a transnational oil conglomerate worth about US$40 billion. That was before Ye was disappeared in March, 2018…

…”organized crime, espionage and corruption converge in China’s system”. 

Dr. James Mulvenon, a Chinese military and espionage expert who has testified before a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee: “There is widespread reports of rampant smuggling by the military of crude oil, petrochemical products, plastics, telecommunications equipment, guns, ammunition, chemical raw materials, steel, computers, cars, semiconductors, counterfeit money, drugs, cigarettes, electronics, and food.” (126) 

[Some of their money found its way into U.S. politics] “The $300,000 was ultimately forwarded to Chinese agents and Macau casino bosses involved in fundraising for President Bill Clinton in the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election effort.” (126) 

In 2011 an elite cyberwar team operated from the PLA General Staff Department in Shanghai was monitored by U.S. investigators while mounting persistent attacks on corporate and national security assets in the United States and Canada. The team, called Unit 61398, is directed by the CCPs most elite leaders. It hacked into U.S. nuclear assets, United Nations computers, Canadian and U.S. government offices, and critical telecommunications infrastructure. (127)

Unit 61398 also hacked into Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board adjudicator’s computer. This was the adjudicator handling Lai’s case. The impact of the hack is unknown. Obviously, though, the hack was important for China. Unit 61398’s other famous target in Canada was Nortel, the world’s dominant Internet technology provider, until it collapsed in 2009 and China’s 5G champion Huawei rose in its place. (127)

In the 2004 Texas court case, Avramovic also alleged that casino staff were coached on how not to report loan sharking. Avramovic pointed directly to a former BC Gaming Policy Enforcement Branch (GPEB) employee who took a job with Great Canadian Gaming. “He’s been explaining how to avoid to report everything to the authorities.” His reward for blowing the whistle in 2004, according to Avramovic, was that the minister responsible for BC Lottery casinos, Solicitor-General Rich Coleman, harshly discredited him. (148) 

BC’s Senator-General Rich Coleman oversaw both arms, the casino administrator and the regulator. He was a hulking man, about 6’4” and built like an NFL lineman. He was a former RCMP officer turned real estate developer turned politician. And people who have disagreed with him say he has little time for disagreements. (149) 

It was insane when you turned it over in your mind. RCMPs special gambling enforcement unit was barred from entering government casinos. But big loan sharks were not. (150)

Pinnock believed he had accomplished something impossible in a supposed country of law like Canada. For having the temerity to suggest the RCMP should target organized crime in BC Lottery Corp. casinos, he’d become the whipping boy of BCs justice establishment. 

There were at least seven major loan-sharking rings operating in Metro Vancouver casinos—about 50 known loan sharks—and they perpetrated horrific violence. (158)

Days later, a gambler walked into River Rock Casino with $460,000 in $20 bills and bought chips. The casino reported the large cash transaction, but stated “none of [the man’s] actions are suspicious.” (168) 

“We’re suspicious that it’s dirty money,” Baxter said. “The casino industry, in general, was targeted during that time period for what may well be some sophisticated money-laundering activities by organized crime.” But Baxter’s highly public comments made BC’s solicitor-general Rich Coleman livid. “Yeah, I know what he said, and I don’t agree with him, and neither do all the superiors of his in the RCMP,” Coleman told the CBC. This was not true. Baxter’s superiors were aware of his comments, and they were approved. Baxter had seen videos of VIPs bringing stacks of cash into private casino cash cages. The GPEB investigators had trailed these VIPs from the casinos to nearby restaurants, luxury vehicles, and parking lots where they took delivery of bags of cash. (169) 

The Chinese underground banking networks actually had taken over the so-called black market peso exchange from Columbian and Mexican money launderers. Jin and his gang were one piece of an incredibly complex shadow banking system that leveraged drug cash and international trade to launder Latin American cartel money from BC to China and back to Mexico and beyond. They were moving almost all of the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl proceeds on the west coast of North America. 

And as far-fetched as the premise of the joke—BC actually welcomes drug cash—GPEB and BCLC investigators had heard senior officials express similar thoughts. It was selective reasoning. The thinking was: crime and money-laundering will happen whether the government is running legal casinos or organized crime is running underground casinos. All societies have crime. You can’t stop people from gambling. So, the officials argued, the government should crack down on illegal casinos, and divert criminals into legal casinos, and vacuum up the dirty money, just like the tax. With the criminal proceeds reclaimed by government casinos, ‘profits’ could be used to pay for schools, hospitals and social programs. In other words, government casinos would become the ultimate money-laundering machine. In a banana republic narco state economy. It was insane. (177) 

“The crime groups in Southeast Asia and the Far East operate with seamless efficiency,” Reuters quotes one police officer familiar with Sam Gor. “They function like a global corporation.” (196) And my network investigations showed his ‘global corporation’ could always be traced back to the gambling, real estate and construction businesses in Macau and Hong Kong and the casino gangsters in Vancouver and Toronto. (197) 

Police were finding street labs producing illicit fentanyl, and it wasn’t just going to heroin addicts. Gangs were mixing it into drugs like ecstasy and methamphetamine. Unsuspecting teens were ingesting potentially deadly party pills. (206) 

Kendall told me in 2012, there had been only 20 fentanyl deaths in BC. But in the first four months of 2013, there already 23 deaths. The fentanyl death rate started rising exponentially. And a BC public health emergency was declared in 2016. From 2016 through 2018 over 3600 people overdosed in BC, mostly in the Downtown Eastside. (207) how many today?  

Adam Ross—author of a 2016 study for Transparency International Canada that showed about 50 percent of Vancouver’s luxury homes are owned through opaque legal structures—told me Canadian lawyers had failed at “self-policing.” (238) “The law societies claim to have rules in place to prevent money-laundering, but they are weak, non-transparent and almost never enforced,” Ross said. “Unless the law societies demand more of their members and start enforcing those rules, billions of dollars will continue to be washed through lawyers’ trust accounts without any consequences.” (239) 

These were the business giants who owned mines and skyscrapers and ships and forests and highways in China. Men well-connected to China’s state and military and judicial elite. Men with access to ports in Qingdao, Harbin, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. To put it another way, an intelligence source told me, a sort of power shift was playing out in Canada. The southern, Cantonese-speaking cartels may have had more autonomy in the early days of the Vancouver Model. But after 2008, the state-sponsored heavyweights of northern China appeared to gain influence over their networks in Vancouver and Toronto. (256)

Business relationships in Canada were formed in playgrounds of vice, Chinese community and RCMP intelligence sources explained to me. It was powerful guanxi. You want to come to my spa in Richmond and play with some girls? No problem. Want to play baccarat in government casinos—even better, lay bets in our own private VIP lounges and cash out winnings at Richmond currency exchange shops? How about a guided safari to kill some black bears? We have “special” relations with some Canadian officials, so don’t worry, it’s all taken care of. We can even ship polar bear mounts and hunting guns back to you in China. You’d like to develop some Vancouver real estate? Easy. Mingle with elite Canadian politicians in our China-Canada friendship association fundraisers? Done! (257)

According to my documents and a Mandarin speaker in Richmond who knew Paul Jin and saw him in action—Jin had found his true calling in life. A broker of vice for powerful men. [Sound familiar? Yet another Epstein] And a facilitator for their Chinese state activity in Canada. (257)

It was a simple equation. If betting limits for baccarat in Vancouver and Richmond could compete with Macau, BC government casinos would become attractive to the transnational whales. And so, limits were raised exponentially in British Columbia from the late 1990s to 2014. Baccarat bets starting at $25 per hand before 2000, despite many money-laundering warnings, peaked at a devastating $100,000 per hand in 2014. Of course, suspicious cash transactions rose exponentially too. (258)

In late 2017, two years after RCMP tactical units raided Silver [Silver International, the underground bank], in a Vancouver conference room Insp. Bruce Ward briefed a private audience. The crowd included U.S. Secret Service agents, financial professionals and Canadian police. This was information important to the Five Eyes intelligence allies, especially Australia, the U.S. and Canada. And I obtained a secret audio recording of Ward’s presentation. (259)

This is not an organized structure with comman and control,” Ward said, “It is more about business relationships. Because it operates very much parallel to the normal business community.” And as I learned about these networks, I honed my techniques for following the actors. Pictures can be a very important advertisement of guanxi between gangsters, politicians and professionals. And these network actors loved to post pictures of themselves raising glasses of red wine at galas attended by Chinese consulate officials and Canadian politicians. The political element would be something I delved into after understanding the narco element. (260)

“So this networking is what facilitated the business for Silver International,” Ward said. “Because they were able to start a profession of money-laundering for their friends in drug dealing, who needed the service of converting cash into bankable instruments.” But Silver first had to collect the cash. A number of businesses clustered into a few downtown Richmond blocks were seen by RCMP intelligence as the geographical supernode of drug-trafficking circuits in North America. (261)

And that is where the genius of Silver came into play. In Mainland China each citizen is barred from exporting more than $50,000 per year. There is incredible pent up supply in China’s banking system seeking to break that financial wall. And Paul King Jin, Silver International, and some Chinese industrialists had a solution, and a business model called Macau. (261)

The glittering city on the western shore of the Pearl River delta is called the Las Vegas of China for obvious reasons. Macau has been the hub of international transactions for centuries, a former colony of Portugal, transformed into an outlet valve for vices banned in China. It is a special administrative region for the Chinese Communist Party where casinos are legalized, the majority of GDP is derived from casinos, and the opulent gambling palaces have eclipsed Las Vegas in profitability, producing from $30 to $40 billion USD each year in revenue [much higher now, years after this book was published], at least three times more than the casinos in Nevada. This is where China’s 1 percent, elite state figures and Red princelings come to gamble and shop. (262) 

In China, it is widely reported that corrupt officials have colluded with Hong Kong and Macau Triads to transfer state funds in and out of Macau through underground gambling junkets. And the scandals have reached all the way into China’s Politburo—the handful of CCP bosses who run the world’s second-largest economy—as illustrated by the cases of China’s former national security chief, Zhou Yongkang, and Bo Zilai, a north China governor so popular that he was considered a rival to Xi Jinping. Both leaders were linked in reports to Macau gangs and organized crime junket operators before each was convicted on corruption charges. In the case of Zhou Yongkang, who had control of China’s police and security forces, investigators linked his family to the flamboyant real estate and mining tycoon named Liu Han. (262)

Li Han had amassed a fortune of $6.4 billion and operated mines in Australia and the United States before he was tried and executed in 2015 on allegations that he had risen from “petty thug to billionaire”. His mistake had been his brashness and violence; with his fleet of luxury vehicles and mink coats, the facade of an industrialist was easy to see through. And before his death, the public learned he ran a cartel operating illegal casinos in China and laundering money through legal casinos in Macau, as well as trafficking weapons and providing contract-killing services. (263) 

Zhou Yongkang, Liu Han and Bo Xilai were all taken down in sweeping corruption probes launched by China’s president, Xi Jinping. 

In 2015, Macau’s GDP fell by 26 percent as fear of Xi’s corruption probes expanded. But even Xi’s family has been linked to the vices of corruption, offshore wealth, and foreign casinos. A joint investigation in 2019 by Australian media revealed that Xi’s cousin, an official named Ming Chai, was identified as a VIP gambler in Australian casinos, with links to prominent organized crime junket boss. And these junkets were connected to Chinese foreign influence and espionage networks. So this is the demographic of VIP gamblers that have helped build Macau’s wealth for decades by skimming funds from China’s underclass and making alliances with narcos and loan sharks and spies abroad. (263)

Me: A big RCMP raid of a Richmond underground casino failed; when they arrived at the $10 million mansion, it was abandoned and the date on a wall calendar was circled] (272) 

Ward: “So this is a typical request. A direction from Silver International to move money from their own account to a drug dealer’s account. And we saw evidence of over 600 accounts in China that were controlled or fed by Silver International. So they would do that on your behalf. They would open up an account in China. You give them $100,000 cash in Richmond, and they wire transfer you $95,000 in China. [$5K is their fee]. In Vancouver, drug dealers with fentanyl precursor suppliers in Wuhan or Guangzhou could have Silver wire transfer funds to cartel accounts in China. These funds would result in more fentanyl arriving in Vancouver. Drugs would be sold, cash collected, funds wired to China, and the cycle repeated. And if the dealers had cocaine suppliers in Mexico or Peru, they could have Canadian banks wire transfer funds to drug dealer accounts in Latin America. (275)

July 2019. Canada’s Public Health Agency had put out brutal new statistics. Opioid overdoses had killed 10,300 Canadians from January 2016 to September 2018. There were almost 4,000 deaths in 2018 alone. Most of the fentanyl overdoses were in BC, Alberta and Ontario. 

[Alderson] gave me the key to exposing the Vancouver Model. I took the 36 Jin VIP names and ran their I.D.s through BC land title and BC Supreme Court databases. I was looking for land ownership patterns, civil forfeiture cases, and disputes between investors. When flags came back connecting whale gamblers to various shell corporations, I could identify company directors and lending arrangements. I could tie in luxury auto leases, criminal record searches, associations with real estate lawyers, and the structure of land assembly and condo development deals. (296)

RCMP researchers cross-referenced these property documents with databases of criminal records and confidential police intelligence regarding ongoing investigations and networks of suspected criminals. And the results that came back were a blistering indictment of BCs economy. (302) 

As the drug kingpins have raked in profits and the city’s real estate prices have surged, the fentanyl crisis has spread from its epicenter among addicts in Vancouver’s impoverished Downtown Eastside to communities across the country, leaving behind a devastating body count.” (308)

Since 2008 DEA had been running undercover agents into Hezbollah narco-launderers’ cells in Medellin, Dubai, Panama City. Agents discovered a web of businessmen just like Mehdizdeh collecting drug cash for Iranian state-sponsored criminals in cities worldwide. 

In September 2019, when CSIS agents scoured the Ottawa condo of Cameron Ortis, a civilian RCMP intelligence official, they found dozens of encrypted computers. They also found evidence that Ortis was planning to leak Five Eyes operations plans to Altaf Khanani’s network (Iranian bros).

In basic terms, the United Front is “political warfare”, Manthorpe said. He said that Beijing had installed United Front agents in all Chinese consulates and embassies worldwide. These agents take orders from Beijing and control United Front Groups in cities worldwide. In Canada, United Front agents attempt to infiltrate all levels of government by influencing elected officials, sponsoring candidates for elections, and persuading business and academic elites to adopt the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy. Equally concerning, Manthorpe said, was the CCPs ideological usage of the United Front efforts to demand racial loyalty from all Chinese immigrants worldwide. (340)

…the United Front’s harassment in the Chinese diaspora aims to do. Silence dissent against the CCP and create a false image of unanimous support for Beijing’s policies. (350)

I have learned more about the outbreak in Wuhan. The evidence dovetails with an increasing number of statements from U.S. intelligence disease control officials, asserting that a disease matching the nature of the coronavirus was found to be spreading in Wuhan as early as October 2019. About 10,000 soldiers were at the World Military Games in Wuhan in October. And I learned from soldiers at the games that about one-quarter of Canada’s team became severely sick in late October, and they flew back to Canada under quarantine. These are extremely fit people. For such a large number of athletes to become sick at once is odd, to say the least. And there are open-source records and accounts from my military and intelligence sources indicating that Wuhan was significantly depopulated during the Military Games, and the Chinese state was engaged in strange behaviours. (359) 

Empty highways, no construction workers, 1000s of empty high-rise apartments. All empty, the Canadian soldier wrote to me. Yes, there were a few people you would see, but this was a rarity. The explanation given by the staff at the World Military Games was that the CCP ordered everyone to leave the city to ‘make room for the athletes’. (359)  

Underground banking and trade-based money-laundering run by transnational gangs connected to the Chinese state is the Canada Model, not the Vancouver Model. And opioid cartels from across Mainland China have merged into super cartels run out of Canada. These cartels have support from the Chinese Communist Party. They are key tools in Xi Jinping’s magic weapon. What I’m suggesting  is that this information warrants a national inquiry in Ottawa. (382) 

Sidewinder said that tycoons with connections to heroin Triads and the Chinese Communist Party and United Front were gaining a major foothold in Canadian real estate and hotels. And Ottawa’s response essentially was to shoot the messengers and ignore their warning. (383)

David Mulroney, Canada’s former ambassador to Beijing: “The Party is not squeamish about using any tool. If they catch someone doing something illegal, they will trade off a vicious sentence, perhaps a death sentence, in exchange for the criminal’s compliance. They hold this over the heads of people they are trying to co-opt. There is a very tight, incestuous relationship between organized crime in China and within diaspora communities, and the United Front. Co-opting criminal networks is one of the Party’s preferred tools for the infiltration of target organizations and communities and for foreign interference.” (384)

…China intends to not only profit from fentanyl production but to weaponize it, too. But what the sources are ultimately saying is the Chinese regime is purposefully using fentanyl against other states. And they are saying Canadians need to recognize the ruthlessness of Beijing’s compact with opioid cartels. Who are these sources? Some are RCMP criminal intelligence. Some are current and former CSIS agents. Some are from the DEA. Some are from the U.S. national security community.   (385) 

Australian federal police can get approvals to wiretap transnational narcos in several days. US police can “go up” on narco phone lines within a week. But after seven months in Canada, the RCMP could not get court approvals to tap the Sinaloa Cartel’s communications in Vancouver. This is why Vancouver has become one of the world’s most infiltrated narco, money-laundering and foreign intelligence hubs, and why Canada’s political and financial institutions are at grave risk of corruption. (387)

Powerful people decided the public should be kept in the dark. And so, in this book, I have tried to shine a light on this roiling pit of vipers. I have tried to show the public what police in Canada know, but can’t say. Canada lacks thee legal framework to cast a net over state-sponsored crime. Federal prosecutors need to start making big international cases like their counterparts in other Five Eyes countries. Australia is leading by example and facing harsh backlash from Beijing. Ottawa needs to start carrying its weight. But this will be very heavy lifting, sources say. Because Xi Jinping’s United Front has penetrated Canada deeply. (388) 

“The tentacles of this thing. We are not talking about an emerging crime problem,” a source said. “This is 30 years of a crime trend that has entrenched itself into our upper levels of Canadian society. It’s frightening. The connectivity onto our business elites and corridors of power in Ottawa. It will take a long time to turn the tide.” (388)

-30-