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.]

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