Introduction to the Article Series
At the end of the Vietnam War the United States faced a crossroads; either continue along the bloody road to empire or reinvent its democracy. The focus of that struggle centered around the 1976 presidential campaign. With the election of Jimmy Carter it was assumed that the administration would reassess the U.S. role on the world stage and reinvest its energies in re building a war-weary nation. But with the selection of Zbigniew Brzezinski as his national security advisor, President Carter guaranteed that would never be.
Plotting to overthrow the old rules before even gaining access to the Oval office Brzezinski would play a pivotal role in the rise of the neoconservative agenda and their politicization of American foreign policy. And by stage-managing perceptions of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he would permanently shift the management of the national security state from the pragmatic to the ideological. As journalists we followed this transformation for over 40 years as the Brzezinski agenda to weaponize extremist Islam on behalf of American empire spread across the globe while documenting the course of a deep-state movement that led to 9/11 and endless war.
In the end Brzezinski honored his duty to the elites by warning them in 2010 that for the first time in history a totally new reality had taken hold. Mankind was now politically awake and aware of their economic inequalities and politically active for the first time in human history.
Brzezinski was already concerned about the public’s growing dissatisfaction following the 2008 financial catastrophe. He warned the elites that bailing out failed banks while ignoring human suffering would not end well. But his 2010 lecture revealed that something even more profound was underway and that despite their mastery of the world’s economy, the global elitists he’d spent his career advancing were facing something beyond their control.
Ironically it was Brzezinski who guaranteed this tragic ending by merging the political objectives of the global elites to extremist Islam and in so doing, undid the very empire he thought he was advancing. But beyond the impacts of 9/11and the so called “war on terror,” Brzezinski’s involvement helped us uncover hints of a deeper agenda and as we traced its roots we discovered that it led to the ancient past.
We are posting articles we have researched, written and published at different stages of our understanding. These articles not only form the basis of our discoveries, but have become more relevant than when they were originally published. In a unique way, each article plays a part that is revealed in The Valediction, Three Nights of Desmond.
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, August 2021
Dateline: First run, October 6, 2020, on World BEYOND War
President Carter, Do You Swear to Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth?
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
Conor Tobin’s January 9, 2020 Diplomatic History[1] article titled: The Myth of the ‘Afghan Trap’: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan[2] attempts to “dismantle the notion that President Jimmy Carter, at the urging of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, aided the Afghan Mujahedin intentionally to lure the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan in 1979.” As Todd Greentree acknowledges in his July17, 2020 review of Tobin’s article, the stakes are high because the “the notion” calls into question not just President Carter’s legacy, but the conduct, the reputation and the “strategic behavior of the United States during the Cold War and beyond.”[3]
Central to the issue of what Tobin refers to as “the Afghan Trap thesis,” is French journalist Vincent Jauvert’s infamous January 1998 Nouvel Observateur interview with Brzezinski in which he brags about a secret program launched by him and President Carter six months before the Soviet invasion “that had the effect of drawing the Russians into the afghan trap…” “According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise.” Brzezinski is on record as saying. “Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”[4]
Despite the fact that the secret program had already been revealed by the CIA’s former chief of the directorate of Operations for the Near East and South Asia Dr. Charles Cogan and former CIA Director Robert Gates and was largely ignored, Brzezinski’s admission brings attention to a glaring misconception about Soviet intentions in Afghanistan that many historians would rather leave unexplained. From the moment Brzezinski’s interview appeared in 1998 there has been a fanatical effort on both the left and the right to deny its validity as an idle boast, a misinterpretation of what he meant, or a bad translation from French to English. Brzezinski’s admission is so sensitive amongst the CIA’s insiders, Charles Cogan felt it necessary to come out for a Cambridge Forum discussion of our book on Afghanistan (Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story)[5] in 2009 to claim that even though our view that the Soviets were reluctant to invade was authentic, Brzezinski’s Nouvel Observateur interview had to be wrong.
Tobin expands on this complaint by lamenting that the French interview has so corrupted the historiography as to have become the almost sole basis to prove the existence of a plot to lure Moscow into the “Afghan Trap.” He then goes on to write that since Brzezinski asserts the interview was technically not an interview but excerpts from an interview and was never approved in the form it appeared and that since Brzezinski has subsequently repeatedly denied it on numerous occasions—“the ‘trap’ thesis has little basis in fact.”[6] Tobin then proceeds to cite official documents to prove “Brzezinski’s actions through 1979 exhibited a meaningful effort to dissuade [emphasis added] Moscow from intervening… In sum, a Soviet military intervention was neither sought nor desired by the Carter administration and the covert program initiated in the summer of 1979 is insufficient to charge Carter and Brzezinski with actively attempting to ensnare Moscow in the ‘Afghan trap.’”
So what does this reveal about a secret U.S. government operation taken six months prior to the Soviet invasion of December 1979 and not bragged about by Brzezinski until January of 1998?
To summarize Tobin’s complaint; Brzezinski’s alleged boast of luring the Soviets into an “Afghan trap” has little basis in fact. Brzezinski did say something but what—is not clear, but whatever he said, there is no historical record of it and anyway it wasn’t enough to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan because he and Carter didn’t want the Soviets to invade anyway because it would jeopardize détente and the SALT II negotiations. So what’s all the fuss about?
Tobin’s assumption that the President of the United States and his CIA would never intentionally set out to exacerbate the Cold War in the middle of such a hostile environment, may reveal more about Conor Tobin’s bias than his understanding of what Brzezinski’s strategy of confrontation was all about. To read his article is to step through the looking glass into an alternative universe where (to paraphrase T.E. Lawrence) facts are replaced by daydreams and the dreamers act-out with their eyes wide open. From our experience with Afghanistan and the people who made it happen, Tobin’s “valuable service of traditional diplomatic history” (as quoted from Todd Greentree’s review) does no service to history at all.
Looking back at what Brzezinski admitted to in 1998 doesn’t require a top secret clearance to verify. The Great Game-like motivations behind the Afghan trap thesis were well known at the time of the invasion to anyone with an understanding of the history of the region’s strategic value.
M.S. Agwani of the Jawaharlal Nehru School of International Studies stated as much in the October-December 1980 issue of the Schools Quarterly Journal citing a number of complicating factors that support the Afghan trap thesis: “Our own conclusion from the foregoing is twofold. First, the Soviet Union had in all probability walked into a trap laid by its adversaries. For its military action did not give it any advantage in terms of Soviet security which it did not enjoy under the previous regimes. On the contrary, it can and does affect its dealings with the Third World in general and the Muslim countries in particular. Secondly, the strong American reaction to Soviet intervention cannot be taken as proof of Washington’s genuine concern about the fate of Afghanistan. It is indeed possible to argue that its vital interests in the Gulf would be better served by an extended Soviet embroilment with Afghanistan inasmuch as the latter could be taken advantage to ostracize the Soviets from that region. The happenings in Afghanistan also seem to have come in handy for the United States to increase its military presence in and around the Gulf substantially without evoking any serious protest from the littoral states.”[7]
Whenever questioned over the nearly two decades after the Nouvel Observateur article appeared until his death in 2017, Brzezinski’s responses to the accuracy of the translation often varied from acceptance to rejection to somewhere in between which should raise questions about relying too heavily on the veracity of his reflections. Yet Conor Tobin chose to cite only a 2010 interview with Paul Jay of the Real News Network [8] in which Brzezinski denied it, to make his case. In this 2006 interview with filmmaker Samira Goetschel[9] he states that it’s a “very free translation,” but fundamentally admits the secret program “probably convinced the Soviets even more to do what they were planning to do.” Brzezinski defaults to his long held ideological justification (shared with neoconservatives) that since the Soviets were in the process of expanding into Afghanistan anyway as part of a master plan for achieving hegemony in Southwest Asia and the Gulf oil-producing states, [10] (a position rejected by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance) the fact that he might have been provoking an invasion was of little significance.
Having dispensed with the implications of Brzezinski’s exact words, Tobin then blames the growth and acceptance of the Afghan trap thesis largely on an over-reliance on Brzezinski’s “reputation” which he then proceeds to dismiss by citing Brzezinski’s “post-invasion memos [which] reveal concern, not opportunity, which belies the claim that inducing an invasion was his objective.”[11] But to dismiss Brzezinski’s well known ideological motivation to undermine U.S./Soviet relations at every turn is to miss the raison d’être of Brzezinski’s career prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Accepting his denials at face value ignores his role in bringing the post-Vietnam neoconservative agenda (known as Team B) into the White House not to mention the opportunity to permanently shift American foreign policy into his anti-Russian ideological world view by provoking the Soviets at every step.
Anne Hessing Cahn, currently Scholar in Residence at American University who served as Chief of the Social Impact Staff at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1977–81 and Special Assistant to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense 1980–81, had this to say about Brzezinski’s reputation in her 1998 book, Killing Détente: “When President Carter named Zbigniew Brzezinski as his national security advisor, it was foreordained that détente with the Soviet Union was in for rough times. First came the March 1977 ill-fated arms control proposal, which departed from the Vladivostok Agreement[12] and was leaked to the press before it was presented to the Soviets. By April Carter was pressing NATO allies to rearm, demanding a firm commitment from all NATO members to start increasing their defense budgets by 3 percent per year. In the summer of 1977 Carter’s Presidential Review Memorandum-10[13]called for an ‘ability to prevail’ if war should come, wording that smacked of the Team B view.” [14]
Within a year of taking office Carter had already signaled the Soviets multiple times that he was turning the administration away from cooperation to confrontation and the Soviets were listening. In an address drafted by Brzezinski and delivered at Wake Forest University on March 17, 1978, “Carter reaffirmed American support for SALT and arms control, [but] the tone was markedly different from a year earlier. Now he included all the qualifiers beloved by Senator Jackson and the JCS… As for détente—a word never actually mentioned in the address—cooperation with the Soviet Union was possible to meet common goals. ‘But if they fail to demonstrate restraint in missile programs and other force levels or in the projection of Soviet or proxy forces into other lands and continents then popular support in the United States for such cooperation with the Soviets will certainly erode.’”
The Soviets got the message from Carter’s address and immediately responded in a TAAS News Agency editorial that: “‘Soviet goals abroad’ had been distorted as an excuse to escalate the arms race.’” [15]
At a Nobel conference on the Cold War in the fall of 1995, Harvard/MIT Senior Security Studies Advisor, Dr. Carol Saivetz addressed the tendency to neglect the importance of Brzezinski’s ideology in the Cold War decision-making process and why that led to such a fundamental misunderstanding of each side’s intentions. “What I learned over the last couple of days was that ideology—a factor which we in the West who were writing about Soviet foreign policy tended to dismiss as pure rationalization… To some extent, an ideological perspective—an ideological world view, let us call it—played an important role… Whether or not Zbig was from Poland or from someplace else, he had a world view, and he tended to interpret events as they unfolded in the light of it. To some extent, his fears became self-fulfilling prophecies. He was looking for certain kinds of behaviors, and he saw them—rightly or wrongly.”[16]
To understand how Brzezinski’s “fears” became self-fulfilling prophecies is to understand how his hard line against the Soviets in Afghanistan provoked the results he wanted and became adopted as American foreign policy in line with Team B’s neoconservative objectives; “to destroy détente and to steer U.S. foreign policy back to a more militant stance viz-à-viz the Soviet Union.”[17]
Although not generally considered a neoconservative and opposed to linking Israel’s objectives in Palestine with American objectives, Brzezinski’s method for creating self-fulfilling prophecies and the neoconservative movement’s geopolitical aims of moving the U.S. into a hardline stance against the Soviet Union found a common objective in Afghanistan. Their shared method as Cold warriors came together to attack détente and SALT II wherever possible while destroying the foundations of any working relationship with the Soviets. In a 1993 interview we conducted with SALT II negotiator Paul Warnke, he affirmed his belief that the Soviets would never have invaded Afghanistan in the first place had President Carter not fallen victim to Brzezinski and Team B’s hostile attitude toward détente and their undermining of Soviet confidence that SALT II would be ratified.[18] Brzezinski saw the Soviet invasion as a great vindication of his claim that the U.S. had encouraged Soviet aggression through a foreign policy of weakness which therefore justified his hardline position inside the Carter administration. But how could he claim vindication for Soviet actions when he had played such a crucial role in provoking the circumstances to which they reacted?[19]
President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s science advisor George B. Kistiakowsky and former deputy director of the CIA, Herbert Scoville answered that question in a Boston Globe Op-ed barely two months after the event. “In reality, it was actions by the President designed to appease his hardline political opponents at home that destroyed the fragile balance in the Soviet bureaucracy… The arguments that stilled the voices of the Kremlin moderates grew out of the approaching demise of the SALT II treaty and the sharply anti-Soviet drift of Carter’s policies. His increasing propensity for accepting the views of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski led to the anticipation of dominance in the United States by the hawks for many years to come…”[20]
In an April 1981 article in the British journal The Round Table, author Dev Murarka reveals that the Soviets had refused to intervene militarily on thirteen separate occasions after being asked by the Afghan government of Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin—knowing a military intervention would provide their enemies with exactly what they had been seeking. Only on the fourteenth request did the Soviets comply “when information was received in Moscow that Amin had made a deal with one of the dissident groups.” Murarka observes that “A close scrutiny of the circumstances of the Soviet decision to intervene underlines two things. One, that the decision was not taken in haste without proper consideration. Two, that an intervention was not a predetermined inevitable consequence of growing Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. In different circumstances it could have been avoided.”[21]
But instead of being avoided, the circumstances for a Soviet invasion were fostered by covert action taken by Carter, Brzezinski and the CIA directly and through proxies in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt ensuring that Soviet intervention was not avoided but encouraged.
Additionally absent from the Tobin analysis is the fact that anybody who tried to work with Brzezinski at the Carter White House—as testified to by SALT II negotiator Paul Warnke and Carter CIA Director Stansfield Turner—knew him as a Polish nationalist and a driven ideologue.[22] And even if the Nouvel Observateur interview did not exist it wouldn’t alter the weight of evidence that without Brzezinski and Carter’s covert and overt provocations, the Soviets would never have felt the need to cross the border and invade Afghanistan.
In a January 8, 1972 article in the New Yorker Magazine, titled Reflections: In Thrall To Fear,[23] Senator J. William Fulbright described the neoconservative system for creating endless war that was keeping the U.S. bogged down in Vietnam. “The truly remarkable thing about this Cold War psychology is the totally illogical transfer of the burden of proof from those who make charges to those who question them… The Cold Warriors, instead of having to say how they knew that Vietnam was part of a plan for the Communization of the world, so manipulated the terms of the public discussion as to be able to demand that the skeptics prove that it was not. If the skeptics could not then the war must go on—to end it would be recklessly risking the national security.”
Fulbright realized that Washington’s neoconservative Cold Warriors had turned the logic for making war inside out by concluding, “We come to the ultimate illogic: war is the course of prudence and sobriety until the case for peace is proved under impossible rules of evidence–or until the enemy surrenders. Rational men cannot deal with each other on this basis.”
But these “men” and their system were ideological; not rational and their drive to further their mandate to defeat Soviet Communism only intensified with the official loss of the Vietnam War in 1975. Because of Brzezinski, U.S. policy formation surrounding the Carter administration on Afghanistan, SALT, détente and the Soviet Union lived outside the realm of what had passed for traditional diplomatic policy-making in the Nixon and Ford administrations while succumbing to the toxic neoconservative influence of Team B that was gaining control at the time.
Tobin ignores this glaring historical conjunction of likeminded ideologists. He insists on relying on the official record to come to his conclusions but then ignores how that record was framed by Brzezinski and influenced by Washington’s cult of neoconservatives to deliver on their ideological self-fulfilling prophecy. He then cherry-picks facts that support his anti-Afghan trap thesis while ignoring the wealth of evidence from those who opposed Brzezinski’s efforts to control the narrative and exclude opposing points of view.
According to numerous studies Brzezinski transformed the role of national security advisor far beyond its intended function. In a planning session with President Carter on St. Simon Island before even entering the White House he took control of policy creation by narrowing access to the president down to two committees (the Policy Review Committee PRC, and the Special Coordinating Committee SCC). He then had Carter transfer power over the CIA to the SCC which he chaired. At the first cabinet meeting after taking office Carter announced that he was elevating the national security advisor to cabinet level and Brzezinski’s lock on covert action was complete. According to political scientist and author David J. Rothkopf, “It was a bureaucratic first strike of the first order. The system essentially gave responsibility for the most important and sensitive issues to Brzezinski.” [24]
According to one academic study,[25] over the course of four years Brzezinski often took actions without the knowledge or approval of the president; intercepted communications sent to the White House from around the world and carefully selected only those communications for the president to see that conformed to his ideology. His Special Coordinating Committee, the SCC was a stovepipe operation which acted solely in his interest and denied information and access to those who might oppose him, including Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and CIA Director Stansfield Turner. As a cabinet member he occupied a White House office diagonally across the lobby from the Oval Office and met so often with the President, the in-house record-keepers stopped keeping track of the meetings.[26] By agreement with President Carter, he would then type up three page memos of these and any meetings and deliver them to the president in person.[27] He used this unique authority to single himself out as the primary spokesman for the administration and a barrier between the White House and the president’s other advisors and went so far as to create a press secretary to convey his policy decisions directly to the Mainstream Media.
He was also on the record as singlehandedly establishing a rapprochement with China in May of 1978 on an anti-Soviet basis which ran counter to U.S. policy at the time while renowned for misleading the president on critical issues to falsely justify his positions.[28]
So how did this work in Afghanistan?
Tobin rejects the very idea that Brzezinski would ever advise Carter to actively endorse a policy that would risk SALT and détente, jeopardize his election campaign and threaten Iran, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf to future Soviet infiltration—because to Tobin “it is largely inconceivable.”[29]
As proof of his support for Brzezinski’s belief in the Soviet’s long term ambitions to invade the Middle East through Afghanistan, Tobin cites how Brzezinski “reminded Carter of ‘Russia’s traditional push to the south, and briefed him specifically on Molotov’s proposal to Hitler in late 1940 that the Nazis recognize the Soviet claims of pre-eminence in the region south of Batum and Baku.’” But Tobin fails to mention that what Brzezinski presented to the president as proof of Soviet aims in Afghanistan was a well-known misinterpretation[30] of what Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentropp had proposed to Molotov—and which Molotov rejected. In other words, the very opposite of what Brzezinski presented to Carter—yet Tobin ignores this fact.
From the moment Afghanistan declared its independence from Britain in 1919 until the “Marxist coup” of 1978 the main goal of Soviet foreign policy had been to maintain friendly but cautious relations with Afghanistan, while preserving Soviet interests.[31] U.S. involvement was always minimal with the U.S. represented by allies Pakistan and Iran in the region. By the 1970s the U.S. considered the country to already be within the Soviet sphere of influence having defacto signed on to that arrangement at the start of the Cold War. [32] As two long term American experts on Afghanistan explained quite simply in 1981, “The Soviet influence was predominant but not intimidating until 1978.”[33] Contrary to Brzezinski’s claim of a Soviet grand design, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance saw no evidence of Moscow’s hand in the 78’overthrow of the previous government but much evidence to prove the coup had caught them by surprise.[34] In fact it appears the coup leader Hafizullah Amin feared the Soviets would have stopped him had they discovered the plot. Selig Harrison writes, “The overall impression left by the available evidence is one of an improvised ad hoc Soviet response to an unexpected situation… Later, the KGB ‘learned that the Amin’s instructions about the uprising included a severe ban on letting the Russians know about the planned actions.’”[35]
Moscow considered Hafizullah Amin to be aligned with the CIA and labelled him “‘a commonplace petty bourgeois and extreme Pashtu nationalist… with boundless political ambitions and a craving for power,’ which he would ‘stoop to anything and commit any crimes to fulfill.’”[36] As early as May 1978 the Soviets were engineering a plan to remove and replace him and by the summer of 1979 contacting former non-communist members of the King and Mohammed Daoud’s government to build a “non-communist, or coalition, government to succeed the Taraki-Amin regime,” all the while keeping U.S. embassy charge d’affaires Bruce Amstutz fully informed.[37]
To others who had a personal experience in the events surrounding the Soviet invasion, there is little doubt that Brzezinski wanted to raise the stakes for the Soviets in Afghanistan and had been doing it at least since April of 1978 with the help of the Chinese. During Brzezinski’s historic mission to China only weeks after the Marxist takeover in Afghanistan, he raised the issue of Chinese support for countering the recent Marxist coup. [38]
In support of his theory that Brzezinski was not provoking a Soviet invasion, Tobin cites a memo from NSC director for South Asian Affairs, Thomas Thornton on May 3, 1978 reporting that “the CIA was unwilling to consider covert action”[39] at the time and warned on July 14, that “no official encouragement” be given to “coup plotters.”[40] The actual incident to which Thornton refers regards a contact by the second highest Afghan military official who probed the U.S. embassy chargé d’Affaires Bruce Amstutz on whether the U.S. would support overthrowing the newly installed “Marxist regime” of Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin.
Tobin then cites Thornton’s warning to Brzezinski that the result of “giving a helping hand… would likely be an invitation for massive Soviet involvement,” and adds that Brzezinski wrote “yes” in the margins.
Tobin assumes the warning from Thornton is further evidence that Brzezinski was discouraging provocative action by signaling a “yes” to his warning. But what Brzezinski meant by writing in the margin is anybody’s guess, especially given his bitter policy conflict over the issue of destabilizing the regime with the incoming U.S. ambassador Adolph Dubs who arrived that July as well.
“I can only tell you that Brzezinski really had a struggle for American policy toward Afghanistan in 1978 and 79 between Brzezinski and Dubs” journalist and scholar Selig Harrison told us in an interview we conducted in 1993. “Dubs was a Soviet specialist… with a very sophisticated conception of what he was going to do politically; which was to try to make Amin into a Tito – or the closest thing to a Tito – detach him. And Brzezinski of course thought that was all nonsense… Dubs represented a policy of not wanting the U.S. to get involved with aiding antagonistic groups because he was trying to deal with the Afghan Communist leadership and give it off-setting and economic help and other things that would enable it to be less dependent on the Soviet Union… Now Brzezinski represented a different approach, which is to say was all part of a self-anointed prophecy. It was all very useful to the people who, like Brzezinski had a certain conception of the overall relationship with the Soviet Union.”[41]
In his book with Diego Cordovez Out of Afghanistan, Harrison recalls his visit with Dubs in August of 1978 and how over the next six months his conflict with Brzezinski made life extremely difficult and dangerous for him to implement the State Department’s policy. “Brzezinski and Dubs were working at cross purposes during late 1978 and early 1979.” Harrison writes. “This control over covert operations enabled Brzezinski to take the first steps toward a more aggressive anti-Soviet Afghan policy without the State Department’s knowing much about it.”[42]
According to the State Department’s 1978 “Post Profile” for the ambassador’s job, Afghanistan was considered a difficult assignment subject “to unpredictable – possibly violent – political developments affecting the stability of the region… As Chief of mission, with eight different agencies, almost 150 official Americans, in a remote and unhealthful environment,” the ambassador’s job was dangerous enough. But with Ambassador Dubs directly opposed to Brzezinski’s secret internal policy of destabilization it was becoming deadly. Dubs was clearly aware from the outset that the ongoing program of destabilization might cause the Soviets to invade and explained his strategy to Selig Harrison. “The trick for the United States, he [Dubs] explained would be to sustain cautious increases in aid and other links without provoking Soviet counter pressures on Amin and possibly military intervention.”[43]
According to former CIA analyst Henry Bradsher, Dubs attempted to warn the State Department that destabilization would result in a Soviet invasion. Before leaving for Kabul he recommended that the Carter administration do contingency planning for a Soviet military response and within a few months of arriving repeated the recommendation. But the State Department was so out of Brzezinski’s loop, Dubs’ request was never taken seriously.[44]
By early 1979 the fear and confusion over whether Hafizullah Amin was secretly working for the CIA, had so destabilized the U.S. embassy, Ambassador Dubs confronted his own station chief and demanded answers, only to be told Amin had never worked for the CIA.[45] But rumors that Amin had contacts with Pakistan’s Intelligence Directorate the ISI and the Afghan Islamists backed by them, especially Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are most likely true.[46] Despite the obstacles Dubs persisted in advancing his plans with Hafizullah Amin against the obvious pressure coming from Brzezinski and his NSC. Harrison writes. “Dubs meanwhile was arguing vigorously for keeping American options open, pleading that destabilization of the regime could provoke direct Soviet intervention.”[47]
Harrison goes on to say; “Brzezinski emphasized in an interview after he left the White House that he had remained strictly within the confines of the President’s policy at that stage not to provide direct aid to the Afghan insurgency [which has since been revealed as not true]. Since there was no taboo on indirect support, however, the CIA had encouraged the newly entrenched Zia Ul-Haq to launch its own program of military support for the insurgents. The CIA and the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence Directorate (ISI) he said, worked together closely on planning training programs for the insurgents and on coordinating the Chinese, Saudi Arabian, Egyptian and Kuwaiti aid that was beginning to trickle in. By early February 1979, this collaboration became an open secret when the Washington Post published [February 2] an eyewitness report that at least two thousand Afghans were being trained at former Pakistani Army bases guarded by Pakistani patrols.”[48]
David Newsom, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs who’d met the new Afghan government in the summer of 1978 told Harrison, “From the beginning, Zbig had a much more confrontational view of the situation than Vance and most of us at State. He thought we should be doing something covertly to frustrate Soviet ambitions in that part of the world. On some occasions I was not alone in raising questions about the wisdom and feasibility of what he wanted to do.” ‘CIA Director Stansfield Turner, for example,’ “was more cautious than Zbig, often arguing that something wouldn’t work. Zbig wasn’t worried about provoking the Russians, as some of us were…”[49]
Although noting Ambassador Dubs’ subsequent murder on February 14 at the hands of the Afghan police as a major turning point for Brzezinski to shift Afghan policy further against the Soviets, Tobin entirely avoids the drama that led up to the Dubs’ assassination, his conflict with Brzezinski and his overtly expressed fear that provoking the Soviets through destabilization would result in an invasion.[50]
By the early spring of 1979 the “Russia’s Vietnam” meme was circulating widely in the international press as evidence of Chinese support for the Afghan insurgency began to filter out. An April article in the Canadian MacLean’s Magazine reported the presence of Chinese army officers and instructors in Pakistan training and equipping “right-wing Afghan Moslem guerillas for their ‘holy war’ against the Moscow-back Kabul regime of Noor Mohammed Taraki.”[51] A May 5 article in the Washington Post titled “Afghanistan: Moscow’s Vietnam?” went right to the point saying, “the Soviets’ option to pull out entirely is no longer available. They are stuck.”[52]
But despite his claim of responsibility in the Nouvelle Observateur article, the decision to keep the Russians stuck in Afghanistan may already have become a fait accompli that Brzezinski simply took advantage of. In his 1996 From the Shadows, former CIA director Robert Gates and Brzezinski aid at the NSC confirms that the CIA was on the case long before the Soviets felt any need to invade. “The Carter administration began looking at the possibility of covert assistance to the insurgents opposing the pro-Soviet, Marxist government of President Taraki at the beginning of 1979. On March 9, 1979, CIA sent several covert action options relating to Afghanistan to the SCC… The DO informed DDCI Carlucci late in March that the government of Pakistan might be more forthcoming in terms of helping the insurgents than previously believed, citing an approach by a senior Pakistani official to an Agency officer.”[53]
Aside from the purely geopolitical objectives associated with Brzezinski’s ideology, Gates’ statement reveals an additional motive behind the Afghan trap thesis: The long term objectives of drug kingpins in the opium trade and the personal ambitions of the Pakistani General credited with making the Afghan trap a reality.
In 1989 Pakistan’s Lieutenant General Fazle Haq identified himself as the senior Pakistani official who’d influenced Brzezinski into backing the ISI’s clients and to get the operation to fund the insurgents underway. “I told Brzezinski you screwed up in Vietnam and Korea; you’d better get it right this time” he told British journalist Christina Lamb in an interview for her book, Waiting for Allah.[54]
Far from absolving Brzezinski of any responsibility for luring the Soviets into an Afghan trap, Haq’s 1989 admission combined with the Gates 1996 revelation confirm a premeditated willingness to use destabilization to provoke the Soviets into a military response and then use that response to trigger the massive military upgrade that was referred to in the Soviet reaction to Carter’s Wake Forest address in March of 1978. It also links Fazle Haq’s motives to President Carter and Brzezinski and in so doing, makes both witting accessories to the spread of illicit drugs at the expense of Carter’s own “Federal strategy for prevention of drug abuse and drug trafficking.”
In late 1977 Dr. David Musto, a Yale psychiatrist had accepted Carter’s appointment to the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse. “Over the next two years, Musto found that the CIA and other intelligence agencies denied the council—whose members included the secretary of state and the attorney general—access to all classified information on drugs, even when it was necessary for framing new policy.”
When Musto informed the White House about the CIA’s lying about their involvement he got no response. But when Carter began openly funding the mujahideen guerrillas following the Soviet invasion Musto told the council. “‘[T]hat we were going into Afghanistan to support opium growers in their rebellion against the Soviets. Shouldn’t we try to avoid what we had done in Laos? Shouldn’t we try to pay the growers if they eradicate their opium production? There was silence.’ As heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan poured into America throughout 1979, Musto noted that the number of drug-related deaths in New York City rose by 77 percent.”[55]
Golden Triangle heroin had provided a secret source of funding for the CIA’s anti-communist operations during the Vietnam War. “By 1971, 34 percent of all US soldiers in South Vietnam were heroin addicts – all supplied from laboratories operated by CIA assets.”[56] Thanks to Dr. David Musto, Haq’s use of the Tribal heroin trade to secretly fund Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s rebel forces was already exposed, but because of Fazle Haq, Zbigniew Brzezinski and a man named Agha Hassan Abedi and his Bank of Commerce and Credit International, the rules of the game would be turned inside out. [57]
By 1981, Haq had made the Afghan/Pakistan border the world’s top heroin supplier with 60 percent of U.S. heroin coming through his program[58]and by 1982 Interpol was listing Brzezinski’s strategic ally Fazle Haq as an international narcotics trafficker.[59]
In the aftermath of Vietnam, Haq was positioned to take advantage of an historic shift in the illicit drug trade from Southeast Asia and the Golden Triangle to South Central Asia and the Golden Crescent, where it came to be protected by Pakistani intelligence and the CIA and where it thrives today.[60]
Haq and Abedi together revolutionized the drug trade under the cover of President Carter’s anti-Soviet Afghan war making it safe for all the world’s intelligence agencies to privatize what had up to then been secret government-run programs. And it is Abedi who then brought in a retired President Carter as his front man to legitimize the face of his bank’s illicit activities as it continued to finance Islamic terrorism’s spread around the world.
There are many who prefer to believe that President Carter’s involvement with Agha Hassan Abedi was the result of ignorance or naiveté and that in his heart President Carter was just trying to be a good man. But even a cursory examination of BCCI reveals deep connections to Carter’s Democratic Party circle that cannot be explained away by ignorance.[61] It can however be explained by a calculated pattern of deception and to a president that to this day refuses to answer any questions about it.
To some members of the Carter White House who interacted with Brzezinski during his four years at the wheel from 1977 to 1981 his intention to provoke the Russians into doing something in Afghanistan was always clear. According to John Helmer a White House staffer who was tasked with investigating two of Brzezinski’s policy recommendations to Carter, Brzezinski would risk anything to undermine the Soviets and his operations in Afghanistan were well known.
“Brzezinski was an obsessive Russia-hater to the end. That led to the monumental failures of Carter’s term in office; the hatreds Brzezinski released had an impact which continues to be catastrophic for the rest of the world.” Helmer wrote in 2017, “To Brzezinski goes the credit for starting most of the ills – the organization, financing, and armament of the mujahideen the Islamic fundamentalists who have metastasized – with US money and arms still – into Islamic terrorist armies operating far from Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Brzezinski started them off.”[62]
Helmer insists that Brzezinski exercised an almost hypnotic power over Carter that bent him towards Brzezinski’s ideological agenda while blinding him to the consequences from the outset of his presidency. “From the start… in the first six months of 1977, Carter was also warned explicitly by his own staff, inside the White House… not to allow Brzezinski to dominate his policy-making to the exclusion of all other advice, and the erasure of the evidence on which the advice was based.” Yet the warning fell on Carter’s deaf ears while the responsibility for Brzezinski’s actions falls on his shoulders. According to Carter’s CIA Director Stansfield Turner; “The ultimate responsibility is totally Jimmy Carter’s. It’s got to be the President who sifts out these different strains of advice.” [63] But to this day Carter refuses to address his role in creating the disaster that Afghanistan has become.
In 2015 we began work on a documentary to finally clear the air on some of the unresolved questions surrounding America’s role in Afghanistan and reconnected with Dr. Charles Cogan for an interview. Soon after the camera rolled, Cogan interrupted to tell us he had talked to Brzezinski in the spring of 2009 about the 1998 Nouvel Observateur interview and been disturbed to learn that the “Afghan trap thesis” as stated by Brzezinski was indeed legitimate.[64]
“I had an exchange with him. This was a ceremony for Samuel Huntington. Brzezinski was there. I’d never met him before and I went up to him and introduced myself and I said I agree with everything you’re doing and saying except for one thing. You gave an interview with the Nouvel Observateur some years back saying that we sucked the Soviets into Afghanistan. I said I’ve never heard or accepted that idea and he said to me, ‘You may have had your perspective from the Agency but we had our different perspective from the White House,’ and he insisted that this was correct. And I still… that was obviously the way he felt about it. But I didn’t get any whiff of that when I was Chief Near East South Asia at the time of the Afghan war against the Soviets.
In the end it seems that Brzezinski had lured the Soviets into their own Vietnam with intent and wanted his colleague—as one of the highest level CIA officials to participate in the largest American intelligence operations since WWII—to know it. Brzezinski had worked the system to serve his ideological objectives and managed to keep it secret and out of the official record. He had lured the Soviets into the Afghan trap and they had fallen for the bait.
For Brzezinski, getting the Soviets to invade Afghanistan was an opportunity to shift the Washington consensus toward an unrelenting hard line against the Soviet Union. Without any oversight for his use of covert action as chair of the SCC, he’d created the conditions needed to provoke a Soviet defensive response which he’d then used as evidence of unrelenting Soviet expansion and used the media, which he controlled, to affirm it, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, once his Russophobic system of exaggerations and lies about his covert operation became accepted, they found a home in America’s institutions and continue to haunt those institutions to this day. US policy since that time has operated in a Russophobic haze of triumphalism that both provokes international incidents and then capitalizes on the chaos. And to Brzezinski’s dismay he discovered he couldn’t turn the process off.
In 2016, the year before his death Brzezinski delivered a profound revelation in an article titled “Toward a Global Realignment” warning that “the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity, but given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.” But after years of witnessing American missteps regarding its use of imperial power, he realized his dream of an American-led transformation to a new world order would never be. Though unapologetic at using his imperial hubris to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan, he did not expect his beloved American Empire to fall into the same trap and ultimately lived long enough to understand that he had won only a Pyrrhic victory.
Why would Conor Tobin eradicate critical evidence regarding the US role in the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan NOW?
In light of what’s been done to the historical record through Conor Tobin’s effort to debunk “the Afghan Trap thesis” and clear Zbigniew Brzezinski and President Carter’s reputations the facts of the matter remain clear. Discrediting Brzezinski’s Nouvel Observateur interview is insufficient to his task in view of our 2015 interview with former CIA chief Charles Cogan and the overwhelming body of evidence that totally disproves his anti “Afghan Trap” thesis.
Were Tobin a “lone scholar” with an obsession to clean up Brzezinski’s reputation for posterity on a school project his effort would be one thing. But to position his narrow thesis in a mainstream authoritative journal of international studies as a definitive rethinking of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan beggars the imagination. But then, the circumstances surrounding the Soviet invasion, President Carter’s premeditated actions beforehand, his overtly duplicitous response to it and his post-presidency participation with the CIA’s covert funder Agha Hassan Abedi, leave little to the imagination.
Of all the evidence disproving Tobin’s anti-Afghan Trap thesis, the most accessible and problematic for the managers of the ‘official narrative’ regarding the U.S. role in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan remains journalist Vincent Jauvert’s 1998 Nouvel Observateur interview. Whether this effort to wipe the record clean is the motive behind Conor Tobin’s essay remains to be determined. It is likely that the distance between now and Brzezinski’s death signaled that the time was right for redefining his public statements for the official record.
It was fortunate that we were able to discover Conor Tobin’s effort and correct it as best we could. But Afghanistan is only one instance of where Americans have been misled. We all must become far more aware of how our narrative-creation process has been coopted by the powers-that-be from the start. It is critical that we learn how to take it back.
Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
“If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We’d see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn’t always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice. Visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk.
[1] Diplomatic History is the official journal of Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). The journal appeals to readers from a wide variety of disciplines, including American studies, international economics, American history, national security studies, and Latin-American, Asian, African, European, and Middle Eastern studies.
[2] Diplomatic History, Volume 44, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 237–264, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhz065
Published: 09 January 2020
[3] H-Diplo Article Review 966 on Tobin.: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan, 1978-1979.” Review by Todd Greentree, Oxford University Changing Character of War Centre
[4] Vincent Jauvert, Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p.76 *(There are at least two editions of this magazine; with the perhaps sole exception of the Library of Congress, the version sent to the United States is shorter than the French version, and the Brzezinski interview was not included in the shorter version).
[5] Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009).
[6] Conor Tobin, The Myth of the ‘Afghan Trap’: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan, 1978—1979 Diplomatic History, Volume 44, Issue 2, April 2020. p. 239
https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhz065
[7] M.S. Agwani, Review Editor, “The Saur Revolution and After,” QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF THE SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY (New Delhi, India) Volume 19, Number 4 (October-December 1980) p. 571
[8] Paul Jay interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brzezinski’s Afghan War and the Grand Chessboard (2/3) 2010 – https://therealnews.com/stories/zbrzezinski1218gpt2
[9] Samira Goetschel interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Our Own Private bin Laden 2006 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVgZyMoycc0&feature=youtu.be&t=728
[10] Diego Cordovez, Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.34.
[11] Tobin “The Myth of the ‘Afghan Trap’: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan,” p. 240
[12] Vladivostok Agreement, November 23-24, 1974, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU L. I. Brezhnev and President of the USA Gerald R. Ford discussed in detail the question of further limitations of strategic offensive arms. https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/treaties/vladivostok.html
| [13] PRM 10 | Comprehensive Net Assessment and Military Force Posture Review |
February 18, 1977
[14] Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Détente: The Right Attacks the CIA (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p.187.
[15] Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994 Revised Edition), p. 657
[16] Dr. Carol Saivetz, Harvard University, “The Intervention in Afghanistan and the Fall of Détente” conference, Lysebu, Norway, September 17-20, 1995 p. 252-253.
[17] Cahn, Killing Détente: The Right Attacks the CIA, p. 15.
[18] Interview, Washington D.C. , February 17, 1993.
[19] See MEETING OF THE POLITBURO OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION March 17, 1979 https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/113260
[20] G.B. Kistiakowsky, Herbert Scoville, “The Kremlin’s lost voices,” The Boston Globe , February 28, 1980, p. 13.
[21] Dev Murarka, “AFGHANISTAN: THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION: A MOSCOW ANALYSIS,” THE ROUND TABLE (London, England), No. 282 (APRIL 1981), p. 127.
[22] Interview with Paul Warnke, Washington, D.C., February 17, 1993. Admiral Stansfield Turner, Former Director of Central Intelligence, “The Intervention in Afghanistan and the Fall of Détente” conference, Lysebu, Norway September 17-20 p. 216.
[23] J. William Fulbright, “Reflections in Thrall To Fear,” The New Yorker, January 1, 1972 ( New York, USA), January 8, 1972 Issue p. 44-45
[24] David J. RothKopf – Charles Gati Editor, ZBIG: The Strategy and Statecraft of Zbigniew Brzezinski (Johns Hopkins University Press 2013), p. 68.
[25] Erika McLean, Beyond the Cabinet: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Expansion of the National Security Advisor Position, Thesis Prepared for the Degree of Master of the Arts, University of North Texas, August 2011. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc84249/
[26] Ibid p. 73
[27] Betty Glad, An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, His Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, 2009), p. 84.
[28] Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994 Revised Edition), p 770.
[29] Tobin “The Myth of the ‘Afghan Trap’: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan,” p. 253
[30] Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation, (Revised Edition), p. 1050. Note 202. Garthoff later describes the incident as Brzezinski’s “misbegotten history lesson on the Molotov-Hitler talks in 1940.” (Which Carter made the mistake of accepting at face value) p. 1057.
[31] Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89, (Oxford University Press, New York 2011), p. 29-36.
[32] Dr. Gary Sick, Former NSC staff member, Iran and Middle East expert, “The Intervention in Afghanistan and the Fall of Détente” conference, Lysebu, p. 38.
[33] Nancy Peabody Newell and Richard S. Newell, The Struggle for Afghanistan, (Cornell University Press 1981), p. 110-111
[34] Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy, p. 41
[35] Diego Cordovez, Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, p. 27 Citing Alexander Morozov, “Our Man in Kabul,” New Times (Moscow), September 24, 1991, p. 38.
[36] John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, (Pluto Press, London 1999) p. 12 citing Kremlin senior diplomat Vasily Safronchuk, Afghanistan in the Taraki Period, International Affairs, Moscow January 1991, pp. 86-87.
[37] Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation, (1994 Revised Edition), p 1003.
[38] Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation, p. 773.
[39] Tobin “The Myth of the ‘Afghan Trap’: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan,” p. 240.
[40] Ibid p. 241.
[41] Interview with Selig Harrison, Washington, D.C., February 18, 1993.
[42] Diego Cordovez – Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York, Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1995), p. 33.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Henry S. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, New and Expanded Edition, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), p. 85-86.
[45] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 47-48.
[46] Authors’ conversation with Malawi Abdulaziz Sadiq, (a close friend and ally to Hafizullah Amin) June 25, 2006.
[47] Diego Cordovez – Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, p. 34.
[48] Cordovez – Harrison, Out of Afghanistan p. 34 Citing Peter Nieswand, “Guerillas Train in Pakistan to oust Afghan Government,” Washington Post, February 2, 1979, p. A 23.
[49] Ibid. p. 33.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Peter Nieswand, “Peking’s finest fuel a holy war,” MacLean’s, (Toronto, Canada) April 30, 1979 p. 24
[52] Jonathan C. Randal, Washington Post, May 5, 1979 p. A – 33.
[53] Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of five Presidents And How They Won the Cold War (New York, TOUCHSTONE, 1996), p.144
[54] Christina Lamb, Waiting for Allah: Pakistan’s Struggle for Democracy (Viking, 1991), p. 222
[55] Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, (Harper & Row, New York – Revised and Expanded Edition, 1991), pp. 436-437 Citing New York Times, May 22, 1980.
[56] Alfred W. McCoy, “Casualties of the CIA’s war against communism,” Boston Globe, November 14, 1996, p. A-27
[57] Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, (Expanded Edition), pp. 452-454
[58] Alfred W. McCoy, “Casualties of the CIA’s war against communism,” Boston Globe, November 14, 1996, p. A-27 https://www.academia.edu/31097157/_Casualties_of_the_CIAs_war_against_communism_Op_ed_in_The_Boston_Globe_Nov_14_1996_p_A_27
[59] Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Block (ed.) War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U.S. Narcotics Policy, (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992), p. 342
[60] Catherine Lamour and Michel R. Lamberti, The International Connection: Opium from Growers to Pushers, (Penguin Books, 1974, English Translation) pp. 177-198.
[61] William Safire, “Clifford’s Part In Bank Scandal Is Only Tip Of Iceberg,” Chicago Tribune, July 12, 1991 https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1991-07-12-9103180856-story.html
[62] John Helmer, “Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Svengali of Jimmy Carter’s Presidency is Dead, But the Evil Lives On.” http://johnhelmer.net/zbigniew-brzezinski-the-svengali-of-jimmy-carters-presidency-is-dead-but-the-evil-lives-on/
[63] Samira Goetschel – Our own Private bin Laden, 2006. At 8:59
[64] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNJsxSkWiI0
Dateline: First run, November, 2016
Focus: JFK’s legacy confronts the modern heretics
Part IV: America’s Late Stage Imperial Dementia
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
(Parts I, II & III are linked at the end of the article)
Photo caption: The 1854 painting of the 12th cc. Marriage of Aoife and Strongbow (Daniel Maclise [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
The 12th cc. Norman Invasion of Ireland, led by Strongbow, brought with it the Fitzgerald’s genetic connection to the Camelot mythology (via the marriage of Gerald of Winsor to Princess Nest). JFK brought this connection to the White House thereby challenging the Anglo/American political establishment to its roots. It has continued to haunt the establishment to this day.
America, an Empire in Twilight Series
In 2005 when a historian in Wexford Ireland discovered that President George W. Bush was a descendent of the 12thcentury Earl Richard de Clare, “Strongbow” it caused something of a commotion in the British press. Ever since John Fitzgerald Kennedy, tracing a presidential candidate’s lineage to Ireland has become a common theme. But according to the Guardian having Strongbow as an ancestor, “a desperate land-grabbing warlord whose calamitous foreign adventure led to the suffering of generations” was something of an embarrassment.
As an Anglo-Norman Earl with Viking lineage from one of the most powerful Norman/French families in 12thcentury England, NOT being a land-grabbing warlord was probably a death sentence. In a world where might meant right Strongbow’s real crime was his challenge to the authority of the Anglo/French King Henry II’s House of Anjou and his threat to set himself up as a rival Norman King of Ireland. Also unmentioned in this Guardian article titled, “Scion of traitors and warlords: why Bush is coy about his Irish links” is Strongbow’s even stronger genetic links to the Fitzgerald antecedents to JFK, who as a family of mercenary soldiers in service to numerous European royal houses, made Strongbow’s English and Irish conquests possible and married directly into the de Clare family line shortly after coming to Ireland.
Chafing under the rule of the Angevin King Henry II of England, the ambitious Strongbow pictured himself on a par with the English King. His marriage to the daughter of Irish King Dermot MacMurrough was intended to seal the deal but Henry soon scuttled the plan.
Strongbow was a Crusader, served in the Holy Land and was a known to be a generous supporter of the infamous Knights Templar, the warrior monks for whom the Cistercian Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux penned De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the new Knighthood) thereby redefining the very nature of murder when done in the name of Christ.
Strongbow’s daughter Isabel was married off by King Richard I to William Marshall in 1189. Considered the greatest knight in Christendom, he was installed as a Knight Templar on his deathbed in 1219. Marshall stayed loyal to the Angevin king John during the baron’s rebellion and was present at the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. The Magna Carta defused a rebellion by England’s powerful barons by setting limits on royal power and placing all future sovereigns under the rule of law. Alongside Habeas Corpus, it stood as an abiding principle of Western and international law until being subsumed by the events of 911.
Upon Strongbow’s death in April of 1176, the equally ambitious Fitzgerald family assumed Strongbow’s original mission in Ireland but their challenge to Britain’s royalty had already begun a century before.
After taking part in the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the family and their extended clans had become deeply entwined in Angevin family politics as part of the Norman invasion force of South Wales. The marriage (arranged by Henry I) of the patriarch of the Fitzgerald family, Gerald FitzWalter of Windsor to Nest, daughter of Rhys Ap Tewdwr (Tudor) who is considered the last king of the Britons, cemented the Fitzgeralds to an ancient British dynasty of kings and the Arthurian legends surrounding them.
Known for their loyalty to a Catholic Rome, their embrace of Ireland’s Celtic culture and their fierce desire to establish their control over Ireland, the next four hundred years found the Fitzgerald family drawn deeply into English as well as European politics with numerous Fitzgerald kin interned in the Tower of London. The coming of the Reformation to England in the 16th century turned four hundred years of border disputes and jurisdictional feuding into holy war. In 1580, the Holy See in Rome sent an army of Italians and Spaniards to help the Fitzgeralds fight Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant forces under the authority drafted by the “Just War Doctrine.”
Dubbed by author Richard Berleth as the “Twilight Lords” for their role as the last doomed, feudal barons of Ireland, the Fitzgeralds’ struggle against the Elizabethans and the Renaissance Neoplatonism of men such as Edmund Spencer and Walter Raleigh presents a dark moment in British history. But it also offers a window into a thousand year old factional struggle of a European “deep state” that exploded openly in Ireland in the 16th century before spreading to the four corners of the earth through imperial expansion.
Allegorized as the embodiment of evil in Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene, the Fitzgeralds were transformed into the “Other” in the English propaganda of the day, while Elizabeth and her Red Cross Templar knights followed in the tradition of King Arthur and the Round Table.
Far from being only a war over ecclesiastical principles, this “holy war” fought between the Catholic Fitzgerald clans and their Calvinist opposites was also a war against economic domination and colonization from London. From London’s perspective, the war was a just war because it was a struggle to the death against the Papal forces of the Counter Reformation, which were encircling it militarily and economically and rolling back Protestant reforms. In the end, the war devastated Ireland, depopulated the Irish countryside, shifted power from local landowners to mercantilists in London and instilled a lasting fear and anger between Protestants and Catholics. Ireland set the standards of behavior that marked the beginnings of Britain’s empire that live on as much today in the neighborhoods of Kabul, Kandahar and Peshawar as they do in Derry and Belfast. But it also marked a turning point in Rome’s ability to manage world events through military force and a shift from the ecclesiastically sanctioned violence of “just war” to the secular/state sanctioned violence of “just war.”
We have illustrated in our multi-part series An Empire in Twilight that whatever America once appeared to be, at least since World War II, it never was the country we thought.
Although once assumed to be governed by rules, democratic laws and financial regulations, today’s America operates not unlike Strongbow’s feudal state ruled by the private and personal agendas of a handful of individuals and the vast majority of the American public disapproves of it. Over the years, organizations such as the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group and the Club of Rome are known to have exerted a decisive role over government policies and mass media. We have known for a century or more of the secret financial power groups that work behind the scenes. Such family lines as Rockefeller, Carnegie and Rothschild and their desire to control the world through financial manipulation are the stuff of legend. Yet, despite their monopolistic and anti-democratic efforts their power and their money continue to fuel popular allure. We have written of secret intelligence organizations such as Le Cercle, the Safari Club and the 6I which at the behest of international business cartels both legal and illegal have secretly undermined democratic elections, overthrown governments and redirected the world’s economy for the benefit of a chosen few.
But what are their plans now that they have transformed the world into a financial and geopolitical shipwreck? Our personal understanding of the present dilemma starts with another shipwreck, this one off the coast of Ireland in the year 1577. That was the year a notorious English pirate and slave trader named Martin Frobisher ran aground with a cargo of “gold” off the isolated, rocky, western coast of Ireland at a place known as Smerwick. According to one account, Frobisher’s mission was intended to find the fabled Northwest Passage to China as part of a
“Protestant adventure that would rival the Catholic quest as well as enrich the queen’s [Elizabeth I] treasury.” Unfortunately for Frobisher and the queen, the gold was soon revealed to be nothing more than iron pyrites (fool’s gold).
An Irish rebel-captain by the name of James Fitzmaurice raised a fort at the summit of the cliffs and named it Fort Del Oro, (Fort of Gold) to mock Queen Elizabeth for her vain challenge to Rome for wealth and power. At the time Britain was not yet an Empire but with the capture and beheading of the last Fitzgerald Earl of Desmond in 1583 that would quickly change. The next four centuries saw Britain expand both east and west, to India and America and dominate the world.
In America, Strongbow’s descendants established dynasties of their own and continued on through the political process; in the modern era through the Bush family and the Fitzgerald branch of the Kennedy clan.
As a Fitzgerald it came as a shock when I learned that my ancestors had once invoked the “Just War Doctrine” to justify their role in a suicidal conflict with Queen Elizabeth I. When in 1980 Colin Gray and Keith Payne attempted to stretch the concept to justify nuclear war-fighting, it came as a cruel awakening that despite the gulf of four hundred years little had changed in the need to bend reality to justify war.
Thirty six years later the medieval nature of America’s political system is more obvious than ever. The ambitions of the Fitzgerald/Kennedy dynasty were thwarted by World War II, assassinations and then by the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s son John Junior. George W. Bush’s legacy still smolders in the ashes of Iraq and the collapse of the world economy while brother Jeb has been lost in the stampede for Donald Trump. The newcomer-Clintons have been dubbed heirs to the throne in the hope of extending the legacy to at least one more generation. But despite the saber rattling and the constant demonizations, the nuclear upgrades and the media disinformation, it’s becoming clear they cannot avoid the bloody handwriting on the wall.
The United States crossed through the mirror with the creation of the national security state in 1947 and never came back. By embracing the Wolfowitz doctrine and defining everyone as the enemy after 9/11 it proudly completed its long journey into the darkness and has since become lost in it. Whatever justification Strongbow and his fellow knights had when crusading to Jerusalem in the 12thcentury the true meaning of “Just War” has now finally disappeared into “the dark matter” that can’t be seen”.
No one less than the ancient founders of civilization, the Sumerians experienced a similar fall from the heights as their obsession with victory, superiority and prestige consumed everything they stood for. “Sumer became a ‘sick society’ with deplorable failings and distressing shortcomings,” writes Samuel Noah Kramer, in Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth. “It yearned for peace but was constantly at war; it professed such ideals as justice, equity and compassion but abounded in injustice, inequality and oppression; materialistic and short sighted, it unbalanced the ecology essential to its economy” And so Sumer came to a cruel, tragic end.”
When the smoke clears following the presidential election of 2016, Americans will at last see through the cover of darkness and realize that we have been witnessing an empire in the midst of its death throes.
Regardless of what the election brings we must now rid ourselves of the delusions of empire that have been driving our leadership toward self-annihilation for millennia and build, from the ground up, a democracy we can be proud of.
Copyright 2016 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
PART I: When America Became the Dark Force
PART II: How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Have Been Rendered Irrelevant
PART III: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American Empire
PART IV: America’s Late Stage Imperial Dementia
Dateline: First run December, 2018
Focus: Our 1970 Tribal Love-Rock Musical HAIR Story
We’re all CIA assets! What can be done, a personal story
by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
Photo caption: A 2011 production of HAIR; the wildly popular 1968 anti-war American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. Was the CIA behind HAIR too? (Image by GisleHaa) Permission Details DMCA
“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.”
— Hermann Goering, Nazi Reichsmarshall, Luftwaffe-Chief and founder of the Gestapo, at the Nuremberg trials
The CIA and the 1960s West Coast Music Scene We had written an article about mind control that included the role of a top-secret CIA research project known as Project MK-ULTRA. MK-ULTRA operated from the early1950s through the1960s by using Americans, (without their consent) as guinea pigs in an illicit research project to alter mental states and brain function. The project remained secret for two decades until 1975 when the Church Committee Hearings revealed the CIA’s illegal activities. We knew that MK-ULTRA was involved in experiments in sensory deprivation and sexual abuse. But what really got our attention back then was the confirmation that MK-ULTRA had infiltrated the New Age anti-Vietnam War Movement to undermine its legitimacy which included the widespread distribution of psychedelic drugs.
As teenagers growing up in the1960s the San Francisco and Laurel Canyon music scenes and the antiwar movement were synonymous. A new age was dawning and our generation wanted to believe that we could keep war from becoming part of it. What we didn’t know until recently was how much influence military intelligence and the CIA had in forming what we believed was an organic outgrowth of popular sentiment.
The Laurel Canyon Connection Before bands such as The Mothers of Invention, The Byrds, The Mamas and The Papas and The Doors became famous; the songwriters, musicians and singers who would form those bands flocked from all over North America to Laurel Canyon. What was strange about this sudden migration of musical talent to Laurel Canyon was the absence of a music industry in the area at the time. What it did have though was Vito Paulekas and the Freaks; a regular feature of the Sunset Boulevard Club scene starting in 1964. Paulekas became well known for supplying a corps of wildly frenzied dancers to stir up interest in the new Laurel Canyon bands and is credited with their early success. Having materialized a musical revolution out of thin air, he has also been credited as the inspiration for the Hippie movement, its fashion and its free love communal lifestyle.
Another oddity of the Laurel Canyon phenomenon was that a large percentage of the artists who arrived descended from America’s most influential ruling families, came with military or intelligence backgrounds or were somehow connected to high ranking military personnel or intelligence operatives. One example of this unusual confluence of talent is Frank Zappa, (Mothers of Invention) who spent his youth at the Edgewood Arsenal Chemical Biological Center where his father worked as a chemical warfare specialist. It also happens that the Edgewood Arsenal was connected to MK-Ultra‘s chemical mind control program.
Major Floyd Crosby, father of David Crosby (Crosby, Stills and Nash) was an Annapolis graduate and WWII military intelligence officer descended from a prominent New York elite founding family, the Van Rensselaers. Crosby’s mother’s family the Van Cortlandts started their American adventure in 1637.
And then there were The Doors. According to Wikipedia, keyboardist Ray Manzarek served in “the highly selective Army Security Agency as a prospective intelligence analyst in Okinawa and then Laos” in the run up to the Vietnam War. The Doors producer for their first five albums, Paul Rothchild also served a stint in the same elite Military Intelligence Corps in 1959.
When the Music’s Over Turn out the Lights The most enigmatic of all, Jim Morrison, was the son of U.S. Navy Admiral George Morrison. In August of 1964, U.S. warships, under Morrison’s command, claimed to have been attacked while patrolling Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf. Although the claim was false, it resulted in the U.S. Congress passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which provided the pretext for an immediate escalation of American involvement in the emerging Vietnam quagmire. Morrison never spoke publicly of his father’s role in creating the “false flag” that was used to deceive the American people into accepting a war against Vietnam.
More intriguing still was Morrison’s apparent lack of interest in music until he suddenly transformed himself into one of the most glorified rock stars of all time! Along with becoming the Door’s lead singer, Morrison also played a major role in forming the band’s identity. He chose the band’s name from one of his favorite books, Aldous Huxley‘s The Doors of Perception. It turns out that Huxley’s “doors” opened through the use of psychedelic drugs. Not so coincidentally it also happens that Huxley was a key player behind MK-Ultra as one of the original promoters of the use of psychedelic drugs for social control. In a letter to George Orwell in 1949 Huxley described their use as “more efficient” than prisons.”
As an avowed acolyte of the Greek god Dionysus and the Dionysian Mysteries – the most famous religious rites of ancient Greece – Morrison reveled in the use of drugs, drink and frenzied dancing. Morrison was so enamored of this Greek god he almost named the band after him, until settling on The Doors.
MKUltra’s objectives had much in common with the Dionysian Mysteries and with Jim Morrison’s philosophy of life who once said of his own behavior “I believe in a long, prolonged, derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown.” Morrison was also described by those who knew him as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Doors Manager Paul Rothchild explained it this way, “You never knew whether Jim would show up as the erudite, poetic scholar or the kamikaze drunk.” Given his lineage, the question remains; was Jim Morrison in control of his own mind?
In view of current New Cold War plans to mount a full scale global war against China and Russia, Americans need to look back and reconsider the turning points that brought our country to this crossroads. How did we as Americans come from being so much against war in Vietnam in the 1960s into preparing for a world war against just about everyone on the planet today? Was the Laurel Canyon scene the only operation subtly sabotaging the legitimacy of the anti-war movement by co-opting its message? Or was the CIA responsible for another popular piece of counter-culture showmanship intended to permanently wrap the anti-war movement and public dissent in a beaded cloak of freaked out hippies, communal sex and acid trips on LSD?
The 1950s and 60s saw the United States in direct competition with the Soviet Union not only for military superiority but also for the world’s hearts and minds. With an emphasis on “freedom of expression”, the Cultural Cold War waged by Washington embraced a broad swath of cultural activities that were intended to outshine anything done by its communist rival. Given the nature of this cultural competition in literature, music and the arts, is it so surprising that the American intelligence community should have had a hand in the creation of uninhibited performance, free from the rules and strictures of the past? A successful psychological warfare campaign to break down traditional patterns of behavior would require a willingness to participate and the blueprint had already been laid out in 1953 by the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board‘s comprehensive doctrine for social control known as PSB D-33/2. With an emphasis on the strange and the avant-garde, the CIA began bringing artists, writers and musicians into what was known as its “Freedom Manifesto”.
The CIA would come to view the entire program, beginning with the 1950 Berlin conference, to be a landmark in the Cold War, not just for solidifying the CIA’s control over the non-communist left and the West’s “free” intellectuals, but for enabling the CIA to secretly disenfranchise Europeans and Americans from their own political culture in such a way they would never really know it.
As historian Christopher Lasch wrote in 1969 of the CIA’s secret co-optation of America’s non-communist left, “The modern state” is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument that can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as ‘free’ intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions.”
While declaring itself as an antidote to communist totalitarianism, one internal CIA critic of the program, PSB officer Charles Burton Marshall, viewed PSB D-33/2 itself as frighteningly totalitarian, interposing “a wide doctrinal system” that “accepts uniformity as a substitute for diversity,” embracing “all fields of human thought — all fields of intellectual interests, from anthropology and artistic creations to sociology and scientific methodology.” He concluded: “That is just about as totalitarian as one can get.”
The evidence that the birth of the psychedelic 1960s West Coast New Age music scene was guided by the invisible hand of military and intelligence operatives is well documented. But what about the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical HAIR that swept the world from its debut in 1968 after opening to rave reviews on Broadway?
We lived our personal experience with HAIR when we became a part of the Boston production in 1970 while college students. HAIR was on the front lines of the anti-war movement and we waved the banner every night for a year before sold-out audiences. To us, the Vietnam War was nothing more than what Daniel Ellsberg described as a neocolonial enterprise repeating France’s mistakes. America’s Winter Soldiers applauded our efforts and joined us on stage to celebrate our right to dramatize the undoing of American society by the terror being inflicted on Southeast Asia. Boston’s old guard wanted the production shut down. The challenge went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Their effort failed but in the end our victory was not what it appeared.
HAIR was a worldwide phenomenon with original casts in every major U.S. city and nineteen productions outside North America. Its main theme was strongly anti-war and was shared by the millions of Americans who watched and participated in it. Every HAIR cast was local to the city it performed in and established new standards for racial diversity unheard of at the time. Almost 50 years on we still receive letters from people whose lives were profoundly changed by the performance. HAIR made the war and its impact on human beings personal in ways that nothing else could. But that impact and the anti-war momentum it had accrued was soon lost and within a short time channeled away from the universal peace we believed was possible. Was HAIR’s popularity just a fluke; the beneficiary of some temporary anti-war fad? Or was it part of a cultural cold war experiment to influence public opinion that succeeded beyond expectations and was then made to go away. A post-Vietnam 1977 revival at the Biltmore Theatre where it had run for 1750 consecutive performances from 1968 to 1972 was attacked by the New York Times as “too far gone to be timely; too recently gone to be history or even nostalgia.”
With its antiwar message derided and dismissed as reminiscent of “something of the old battles refought quality of an American Legion reunion,” and with President Carter’s Russo phobic National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski taking over foreign and national security policy at the Carter White House, the new message was clear. The antiwar movement would not be coming to power in Washington in 1977 and never would be.
When the film version of HAIR by Czechoslovakian New Wave director Milos Forman was released in March of 1979 – completely rewritten and fundamentally detached from the original Broadway version – the show’s passionate and prominent anti-war theme was gone. With LBJ, Richard Nixon and Vietnam disposed of; the West’s endless war against Russia could be put back on the fast track.
By the time Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the anti-Vietnam War movement had been reduced to a “Syndrome” and cured with an unprecedented World War II size defense budget that transformed the U.S. from a creditor to a debtor nation.
The earmarks of a PSB D-33/2 cultural operation are hidden in plain sight. HAIR may even have been used as a prototype for the so called color revolutions and Arab Springs that followed in the breakdown of the old Soviet bloc. Alongside authors Jim Rado and Jerry Ragni the celebrity arm of the non-communist left was well represented at our February 22, 1970 HAIR opening night in the presence of Peter, Paul and Mary’s Peter Yarrow and the Broadway show’s executive producer Bertrand Castelli; a member of Europe’s cultural cold war elite that hobnobbed with the likes of Jean Cocteauand Pablo Picasso. Yarrow’s famous song, “Puff, the Magic Dragon” became the anthem of the pot smoking 60s hippie movement and whether by design or coincidence his Ukrainian born father Bernard was a charter member of the CIA’s European cultural front organization known as the National Committee for a Free Europe. Having served during World War II in the OSS (with distinction) and after joining no less than Sullivan and Cromwell, the Dulles brothers’ law firm, Bernard helped to found the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe and became its senior vice president.
Along with numerous members of the early 1960s music scene who wound up in Laurel Canyon, Peter Yarrow played an early and active role in the civil rights and peace movements. He even acted as referee between the Old Left’s Pete Seeger and the New Left at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan decided to move from “folk” music to rock and roll. In a famous confrontation over what many considered Dylan’s sellout, Seeger threatened sound engineer and future Doors’ Manager Paul Rothchild that he would cut the cable with an axe if he didn’t turn off “that” distortion; but the distortion stayed.
Following Vietnam, Yarrow transferred his antiwar activism to the issue of Soviet Jewry and their emigration to Israel— a major component of the rising neoconservative agenda. Through Yarrow’s leadership, by the 1980s the issue had become a key platform of the Reagan administration to use against any détente with the Soviet Union. As for HAIR, stripped of its antiwar message, it was reduced to being the poster child of a 1960s debauched hedonism. Or as Bertrand Castelli, the executive producer of the original Broadway production labelled a revival in 2008, “It’s though everything in ‘Hair’ turned into a nightmare,” “Everything that was joyful and harmless became dangerous and ugly.”
Everything must be rethought Dangerous and ugly is not the way we remember our year-long experience with HAIR. Nuclear war and Vietnam were dangerous and ugly and in the intervening 50 years that danger and ugliness has returned to haunt us.
If HAIR was part of a top secret psychological warfare campaign to energize the youth of America and the world to political action in the pursuit of peace, flowers, freedom and happiness it succeeded. But if the ultimate objective of this Hobbesian campaign was to then crush that freedom and numb us to the growing danger of permanent war in a haze of disease, opioid addiction and suicide, it too has succeeded.
At the time, HAIR’s success helped us believe that we had changed our future for the better. The war ended, the troops came home and life resumed. But we now accept that as of 2018 that new age we sought was nothing more than an illusion.
War is Insane, Endless War is Suicide President Eisenhower warned us what would happen if our country dedicated itself to war. War makes you mad. Endless war puts you in a hell of madness from which there is no escape. The madness of that war on the world has come full circle and is now in our schools, parks, bars and homes. It was of course always there as part of our nature but we have given in to it. We have given in to that part of our nature that should have matured and been processed but instead has remained aloof and separate from our humanity. That part of our nature has remained unlearned and untamed. We are the victims of our own design and therefore we can change it.
Through various means the CIA did succeed in redirecting the American peoples’ anti-war sentiment towards accepting permanent war (clearly illustrated by the longest war ever in American history in Afghanistan). To paraphrase Hermann Goering’s 1946 observation: People don’t want war, nobody does, but people can easily be brought to the bidding of their leaders by instilling fear or denouncing the pacifists for exposing the country to danger, no matter where or when and works the same way in any country.
Our only course is to step outside today’s war narrative and see where we are in the paradigm. The false narratives that control our thinking will fall away as we replace them with the deep knowledge and acceptance of what we have actually lived through. As the past finally becomes prologue; we can imagine the genuine future we truly want and start to make it happen!
Copyright – 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
Dateline: First run July, 2018
Focus: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Pyric Victory
The Grand Illusion of Imperial Power
by Paul Fitzgerald – Elizabeth Gould
All men dream but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but those dreamers of the day are dangerous men for they act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
How the Neocon Dream for Everlasting Hegemony Turned America into a Nightmare
Few Americans today understand how the United States came to be owned by a London-backed neoconservative/right-wing alliance that grew out of the institutional turmoil of the post-Vietnam era. Even fewer understand how its internal mission to maintain the remnants of the old British Empire gradually overcame American democracy and replaced it with a “national security” bureaucracy of its own design. We owe the blueprint of that plan to James Burnham, Trotskyist, OSS man and architect of the neoconservative movement whose exposition of the Formal and the Real in his 1943 The Modern Machiavellians justified the rise of the oligarch and the absolute rule of their managerial elite. But Americans would be shocked to find that our current political nightmare came to power with the willing consent and cooperation of President James Earl Carter and his National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski; aided by intelligence agencies in Europe and the Middle East.
A straight line can be drawn between today’s political hysteria and the 1970s era of right-wing Soviet hysteria as Russia stands accused of “meddling” in American democracy. The merits of those charges have been discussed in depth elsewhere. According to the dean of American intelligence scholars Loch K. Johnson as reported in the New York Times, the United States has done extensive meddling in other nation’s elections.
And then there is that hidden “meddler” behind the meddling; Britain. The extent of British meddling in American politics – at least since – the beginning of the 20thcentury would shock even the most devout cheerleaders of ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele and his “dirty dossier”. In a case reminiscent of America’s current hysteria over Russia, British intelligence even meddled with its own government back in the mid-1970s when right-wing elements of the military plotted a coup d’ etat of Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson based on information generated by their own disinformation campaign about Soviet influence. The 1917 Zimmerman telegram and the creation of the British Security Coordination in 1940 directly intervened in American politics on behalf of Britain. But the 1970 Creation of the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) by British secret agent Brian Crozier marked a key turning point in the transformation of officially sanctioned propaganda.
As presented by Edward Herman and Gerry O’ Sullivan in their 1989 study, The Terrorism Industry, “The London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) provides an especially well-documented case study of the use of a purportedly ‘independent’ institute as a front for propaganda operations of hidden intelligence agency and corporate sponsors.” The purpose of ISC was to give discredited right-wing, anti-Communist and anti-union clichés in Britain the cover of legitimacy. The “Institute” got off to a quick start in the U.S. by forging an alliance with the National Strategy Information Center, NSIC a right-wing neoconservative think tank founded by Frank Barnett, William Casey and Joseph Coors in 1962. ISC’s first major triumph came in collaboration with the ultra-right-wing Pinay Cercle when Crozier and his protégé Robert Moss produced an ISC Special Report attacking the legitimacy of détente with the Soviet Union called European Security and the Soviet Problem. The study, financed by the Pinay group made no bones about its “Soviet problem” actually being the old “Russia problem” that European Imperialists had been hoping to solve since Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812.
As a devoted acolyte of James Burnham, Crozier brought to his secret world of rightwing businessmen, intelligence, police and military officials a strategic plan to use the media to move the West’s democracies to the ideological right by fabricating threats of Communist subversion. Determined to undermine détente, Antoine Pinay was so delighted with Crozier’s double-speak he presented the study in person to President Nixon and Henry Kissinger and by 1975 the group was staged to make their move on Washington. Less than two months before the fall of Saigon, the US Committee of the ISC (USISC) was launched which would act as the parent body of the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict (WISC).
In the vacuum created by Vietnam Crozier and Pinay’s extremism was no longer viewed as extreme. Despite the public scandal over the CIA’s use of Crozier’s Forum World Features as a London-based fake news service, Washington elites were rolling out the red carpet to welcome them, including Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Ball. Under Ball’s Chairmanship WISC appeared a veritable who’s who of high-level ex-CIA, neoconservative and right-wing influencers. From Georgetown University came WISC’s first President James Theberge whose books on Soviet influence in the Caribbean – helped provide the pretexts for overthrowing Chile’s legitimately elected leftist president Salvador Allende. And then there was Richard Pipes, the anti-Soviet history professor from Harvard University, who would soon be hand-picked to lead a neoconservative attack on the CIA known as Team B.
In the words of Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985, Pipes and the Team B were the real reason for the intelligence failures represented by 9/11 because of their biases and unbalanced judgement. But in the end the Team B view gained influence. With the appointment of fellow WISC member Zbigniew Brzezinski as President Carter’s national security advisor, British intelligence agent Brian Crozier’s plan to subvert the détente process with the Soviet Union was complete. Crozier’s belief “[T]hat the entire security apparatus of the United States was in a state of near collapse,” provoked yet another move to interfere in American politics. His solution was a secret off-the books “Private Sector Intelligence agency, beholden to no government, but at the disposal of allied or friendly governments for certain tasks which, for one reason or another, they were no longer able to tackle…” including “[S]ecret counter-subversion operations in any country in which such actions were deemed feasible.” Brian Crozier and Zbigniew Brzezinski were of one mind when it came to disbelieving in “mutual coexistence” or power-sharing with the Soviet Union and Brzezinski’s membership in WISC proved it. Thanks to WISC member Richard Pipes and the Team B, Brzezinski could now bring Britain’s radical right-wing formula for social change right into the Oval Office.
Brzezinski devised a structure that channeled all executive decisions into two committees, the Policy Review Committee (PRC) and the Special Coordination Committee (SCC) chaired by him. Carter then elevated the national security advisor to cabinet level and the palace coup was complete. As recalled by the neoconservative author David J. Rothkopf in Charles Gati’s 2013 book ZBIG, “It was a bureaucratic first strike of the first order. The system essentially gave responsibility for the most important and sensitive issues to Brzezinski.”
Another operation initiated by Brzezinski in 1977 was the Nationalities Working Group (NWG), dedicated to inflaming ethnic tensions among the Islamic populations of the South Asia region. Brzezinski then continued on into nuclear policy where he altered the SALT structure and then rigged the negotiations against Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. With Brzezinski expanding nuclear targeting options from 25,000 to 40,000 and covert action teams sabotaging behind Soviet lines from early 1977 onward the message was clear; SALT and Détente were getting ripped up as well as the very assumptions both were based on.
By 1978, Brzezinski’s plan to use China as a weapon against the Soviets was playing out in Afghanistan. The April, 1978 Marxist coup against the King’s cousin, Mohammed Daoud played into Brzezinski’s “predictions” of a Soviet plan to incorporate Persia and South Central Asia into the Soviet sphere and ultimately take-over The Middle East. Vance rejected Brzezinski’s argument. The coup had caught both the Soviets and the State Department by surprise and the coup leader, Hafizullah Amin raised doubts on both sides of the fence as an unpredictable agent provocateur. Amin had taken money from the CIA and headed up the Afghan Student Association at a time when it was being used as a CIA recruitment tool for future Third World leaders. Amin was now one of those leaders and Vance was sending a tough and savvy American Ambassador to Kabul named Adolph “Spike” Dubs to deal with him. The outcome would change the world and end in tragedy for all.
In an interview we conducted in 1993 with Selig Harrison–former Washington Post foreign correspondent and Carnegie Endowment Senior Associate–Ambassador Dubs came to Kabul in the summer of 1978 with a mission: Bring Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin over to the American side and keep the Russians out. President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski had engineered a grander mission: Pressure Amin to draw the Soviets in through destabilization and then keep them tied down and give them their own Vietnam. By the time Ambassador Dubs arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan had become ground zero for a long anticipated anti-Soviet destabilization campaign organized by Brzezinski and carried out by an off the books intelligence operation known as the Safari Club. The “club” represented the true essence of the CIA ethos; an autonomous covert action organization with global reach, beyond the jurisdiction of American oversight and responsible to no one. A spinoff of the right-wing Pinay Cercle, the Safari Club had been active informally in the Middle East and Africa for years. But the club found its true calling following Watergate and the Church Committee hearings on 30 years of CIA coups, cover-ups and assassinations. Managed by France’s Count Alexandre de Marenches chief of French external intelligence, the club included the Shah of Iran, King Hassan II of Morocco, President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt, Kamal Adham, head of intelligence for Saudi Arabian King Faisal and Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. More to the point, by 1976 the Safari Club had become the real CIA, covertly funded by Saudi Arabia’s chief of intelligence Kamal Adham through the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) and run out of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
Brzezinski, Afghanistan and the End of Emperors
“From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. ”– Napoleon Bonaparte during his retreat from Russia
According to one-time CNN Special Assignment investigator Joe Trento in his 2005 exposé Prelude To Terror, Saudi Arabia’s chief of intelligence Kamal Adham worked alongside the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, BCCI’s founder Agha Hasan Abedi to expand the very concept of covert action by using BCCI to merge the Safari Club with “every major terrorist, rebel, and underground organization in the world.” A 2001 Time magazine report found that the bank functioned as “a vast, stateless, multinational corporation that deploys its own intelligence agency, complete with paramilitary wing and enforcement units, known collectively as the ‘black network:’” that would bribe or assassinate anyone to turn Afghanistan into the place to trap the Soviet Union in their own Vietnam.
Uninformed of the Safari Club’s activities, America’s ambassador proceeded to meet with Amin throughout the fall of 1978 and into the winter of 1979 often in secret meetings. But Brzezinski’s ongoing destabilization, his military relationship with the Chinese and Amin’s antagonism toward the Russians was making life for Dubs increasingly dangerous. He grew alarmed by Amin’s provocative behavior and demanded to know from his CIA station chief whether he was employed by them. He was told no, but by then Afghan rebels were openly training in Pakistan and China’s Xinjiang province. In addition there was what Joe Trento called the CIA’s Saudi-funded stockpile of misfits and malcontents manning the Safari Club’s 1,500-strong army of assassins and enforcers. And last but not least were Chinese-backed Maoist factions Setam-i Melli, Sholah Jaweed and SAMA programmed by Beijing to bring down their Afghan oppressor, Hafizullah Amin. Thanks to Saudi Intelligence chief Kamal Adham and BCCI banker, Agha Hasan Abedi, there were ample incentives for a holy jihad against Russia. Afghanistan offered the opportunity for BCCI to migrate the lucrative heroin business from Southeast Asia to the Pakistani/Afghan border under the protection of Western intelligence agencies. President Carter supported Brzezinski’s cross-border raids into Soviet territory. He also sanctioned Brzezinski’s plan to use Afghanistan to lure the Soviet Union into its own Vietnam; which he lied to the public about when they fell into the trap on December 27, 1979. Joseph Trento writes, “Carter may in fact have signed his directive in July 1979, but the Safari Club’s Islamic fighters had been taunting Moscow into invading for nearly a year before that.”
By January 1979 the newly unstable region was becoming the primary financing source for a terrorist campaign that would spread around the world. But while Dubs was pleading that destabilization would provoke direct Soviet intervention, Brzezinski was promoting armed opposition.
That same month, Brzezinski’s NSC director of South Asian affairs, Thomas P. Thornton, arrived in Kabul to shut Dubs down, yet Dubs continued his mission. Between Dubs’ arrival in July of 1978 and the fall of the Shah on January 16, 1979 American policy in Iran, China and Afghanistan had shifted into the hands of the Pinay Cercle’s right-wing cabal. Run by a consortium of intelligence influencers, the decades-long geopolitical plan to move the United States into alignment with the Pinay Cercle’s old European right-wing was nearing completion.
By mid-February the Shah had fallen and the Afghan countryside was in open revolt. The Marxist regime of Hafizullah Amin was demanding military assistance from Moscow and the only man left to hold back Soviet retaliation was Ambassador Dubs. But on the morning of February 14, 1979 Dubs himself would become the vehicle for the very outcome he had gone to Kabul to prevent when four men abducted him on his way to work and brought him to the Kabul Hotel. Three hours later the ambassador would die in a shootout that has been described as a botched rescue attempt.
The subsequent debate in Washington focused mainly on blaming the Soviets with unnamed “U.S. congressional sources” claiming “the Russians had wanted Dubs to die.” But as described in an interview conducted for Washingtonian Magazine in 2017 with Bruce Flatin, the political counselor dispatched by the U.S. embassy to the hotel that morning, the whole affair just didn’t make sense; unless the kidnapping wasn’t intended as a kidnapping and Dubs’ unfortunate death wasn’t the result of a botched rescue attempt, but was part of a Safari Club operation to remove the last obstacle to their plan. At a 1995 Nobel Symposium on the causes of the Afghan war – in the presence of former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner, the former Director of Soviet affairs at the National Security Council, General William Odom and dozens of former high-level officials – the leading Russian authority, General Alexander Lyakhovsky suggested the existence of a cover up. “Dubs was seen in the company of those same people who kidnapped him later in the same hotel—in the same room—the day before they kidnapped him. And then later Dubs was in his car, with a travel case. He stopped his car when those same people who he saw the day before ordered him to stop, as if they were known to him.”
No one has ever suggested the existence of a non-governmental agency in the death of Adolph Dubs. But the Safari Club’s anti-Communist agenda had been brought directly into the White House with Brzezinski in 1977 and it had been active in Afghanistan long before February 14, 1979. If ever there was an opportunity for their 1,500-strong “black network” of CIA misfits, malcontents, assassins and enforcers to act on Brzezinski’s agenda to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam, it was at room 117 of the Kabul Hotel on February 14, 1979.
The kidnapping and assassination of Ambassador Adolph Dubs ended any meaningful effort by the U.S. to prevent a Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. The death was employed however from that day forward by Brzezinski as the opportunity to increase the level of provocation for luring the Soviets into their own “Vietnam quagmire” and keeping them pinned down for as long as possible. Because of Dubs’ death, Brzezinski got control of foreign policy; got his hard line neoconservative policy toward the Soviet Union pushed through, ended support for détente once and for all and put Strategic Arms Limitation on hold.
Continuing his coup d’état, Brzezinski proceeded with plans for the radical transformation of America’s nuclear doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction – MAD into one of nuclear “war-fighting” through a series of Presidential Directives. But the real irony of the Carter presidency was that his greatest success – the U.S- Egypt-Israeli peace treaty – was also arranged by the Safari Club. The death of Ambassador Dubs, the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979 doomed Carter’s reelection to failure. Afghanistan was soon to become the self-fulfilling prophecy of Soviet iniquity that the right-wing had been trying to create for decades; a permanent, ongoing crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations which it had precipitated and then claimed to uncover and respond to. Brian Crozier’s “ultimate sophistication of subversion” got its candidate Ronald Reagan elected in 1980 while completing the London-backed neoconservative/right-wing takeover of the American government. And they would never give it back.
The pattern and the profile of events parading across our screens today mirrors the pattern and profile of events engineered in the late 1970s by a London-backed neoconservative/right-wing alliance which paralleled the pattern and the profile of the late 1940s and the genesis of the Cold War. The United States, Britain and their post-World War II European creation, the EU continues to manufacture issues with which to demonize Russia as they once demonized the Soviet Union. But in the end, the goal set out by the Pinay Cercle and implemented during the Carter administration can only be said to have failed.
In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the United States “as the sole and, indeed, first truly global power” using France, Germany, Poland and Ukraine as “The Democratic Bridgehead for projecting into Eurasia the international democratic collective order.” Yet even as the United States began to flex its unchallenged global power the ethnic flaw undergirding Brzezinski’s motives began to show.
When asked the real reason why the United States had taken such a hard line toward the Soviet Union on Afghanistan at the 1995 Nobel Symposium, President Carter’s CIA Director Stansfield Turner replied the responsibility could only be located in one individual. “Brzezinski’s name comes up here every five minutes; but nobody has as yet mentioned that he is a Pole,” Turner said, implying that it was ethnic hatred of Russia that had propelled his policy against the Soviet Union; not just geopolitics. Yet anybody who knew Brzezinski at the time knew that is exactly what he was doing, but they had all looked the other way.
The year before he died Brzezinski delivered a profound revelation in an article titled “Toward a Global Realignment” warning that “the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity, but given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.” Zbigniew Brzezinski had expected Poland to be at the center of America’s conquest of Eurasia. But after years of American missteps he realized his dream would never be. Though unapologetic at using his imperial hubris to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan, he did not expect his own beloved American Empire to fall into the same trap and ultimately lived long enough to see that in the end, his use of imperial power had won him only a Pyrrhic victory.
Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
Dateline: First run September, 2018
Focus: The CIA’s Dream Guru secretly goes Mainstream
Weaponized Dreams? The Curious Case of Robert Moss
by Paul Fitzgerald – Elizabeth Gould
After recently finishing a multi-part series on the long history of “fake” news propaganda behind America’s current anti-Russia hysteria, a friend sent an email she’d received from “Bestselling author & Dream Shaman Robert Moss.” Robert Moss currently leads seminars and workshops at some of the best known New Age institutions, such as Omega and Esalen. He had played an important part in our just completed series, but not as a dream coach offering workshops in “advanced shamanic dreaming practices to journey into other realms and receive wisdom and gifts for your life.” The Robert Moss we knew once played a vital role in delivering tailored propaganda, exaggerated threats and outright fabrications to intentionally heighten Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union. The Robert Moss we knew had been a key agent in steering Western Democracies toward extreme rightwing political candidates and policies. The Robert Moss we knew helped lay the groundwork for the rise of the new right-wing neoliberalism, the trickledown economics of Milton Freidman and the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Moss has been described as one of the CIA’s main disinformation assets; having contributed to the military overthrow of Chile’s elected president Salvador Allende in 1973 and the subsequent atomization of Chilean democracy. In his work for British intelligence it was Moss who wrote the famous speech that transformed Margaret Thatcher from a racist anti-immigrant campaigner into Britain’s “Iron Lady” in January 1976. It was Moss who tutored Iran’s top SAVAK agent in a last minute attempt to save the Shah and it was Moss who propagandized on behalf of South Africa’s Apartheid regime. For reasons that are not explained, there is no mention on Moss’s website that before he turned to dream work he was a protégé of notorious CIA and MI6 operative Brian Crozier. Along with the CIA and MI6, Moss left a high level and successful career as a master propagandist working for the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) and Forum World Features, a London-based CIA-backed propaganda news service which operated from 1965 to 1974. Nor is there mention of his relationship to the Pinay Cercle, a secretive international policy group which continues to this day to bring together financiers, intelligence officers and politicians with links to fascist organizations and political factions from around the world. Apparently unknown to his New Age audience, Moss was once infamously well known to the intelligence world. His roman à clef novel The Spike with co-author Arnaud de Borchgrave aimed at undermining the credibility of Vietnam era war correspondents like Seymour Hersh by portraying them as agents of the KGB. And his work on an anti-Palestinian narrative with Crozier, helped to establish the blueprint for the endless war on (Islamic) terror kicked off after 9/11. This comment from Edward Herman and Gerry O’Sullivan’s 1989 The “Terrorism” Industry, makes it clear,
“Robert Moss has been a major figure in the organization of terrorism think tanks and in the dissemination of the right-wing version of the Western model of terrorism. In fact, as Fred Landis has pointed out, “For a price, Moss would go to Rhodesia, South Africa, Iran, and Nicaragua and tailor his standard KGB plot to local circumstances, thereby justifying repression of the political opposition and denial of human rights.”
Moss withdrew from the world of make-believe threat-conjuring in 1987 to write books and run workshops on the power of dreaming. But with his cutting edge expertise in seeding the collective unconscious with lies and fabrications for political and financial purposes, can it really be assumed that Robert Moss’s dream work is only about helping people to receive wisdom and gifts for your life?
Robert Moss’s Students should be asking these questions In the interest of what some might call, “full disclosure” one would think Robert Moss would want to come clean about his past, rather than cast doubt on his motives. Trust is a vital commodity for those engaged in the intimate work of dreaming but Moss’s lack of candor raises questions. Both the CIA and Britain’s MI6 were known for their research into the military uses of psychic phenomena. The techniques for joint dreaming (entering the dream of another person) that Moss offers in his workshops, were explored long ago by the CIA’s Project MKULTRA and Britain’s Tavistock Institute.
Far from being fictional, the theme of the 2010 Leonardo DiCaprio film Inception is the corporate expression of weaponized dream research done by the CIA and MI6. The film deals with the commercial uses of dreaming in order to plant ideas in others for profit. Many viewers may have assumed the film was just fantasy, but if a man with Moss’s capabilities in the collective unconscious has moved with his talents into the dream world, one might ask whether weaponizing the dream world isn’t part of the plan.
MKUltra Anyone? The objectives of Project MKULTRA “involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain function.” The project was kept secret from its unwitting victims for two decades before being exposed, but there is no reason to assume research into the methodologies to manipulate mental states, ended there. The purpose of propaganda is to seed the unconscious with misinformation and what better way to reach the unconscious than dreams. An even better vehicle would be to seed a willing dreamer and it’s here that Robert Moss’s nondisclosure begs the question. Is the New Age movement being secretly penetrated and are the willing victims aware that they may at some future date be used as weapons?
Even more troubling, it makes one wonder how much of the New Age movement itself may have been secretly weaponized without disclosure by other “retired” agents. Could Moss be the only highly trained agent offering spiritual workshops to New Agers without proper acknowledgement regarding their past affiliations? Did Moss get any training or support from the CIA for his dream research? Is Moss really helping New Agers achieve higher consciousness or is he engaging in mind control? These are critical questions that must be asked before attending a Moss workshop or even reading one of his books.
Here are quotes from an internet post from 2007 by a woman who attended a number of Moss’s workshops that raised concerns about his background, sincerity and the purpose of his techniques. Whatever authentic shamanic power Moss might bring to his dream workshops, his lack of transparency left her uneasy and suspicious that the real Robert Moss was someone other than a helpful dream coach.
“He made a point… that a symbol from my dream which held particular significance for me in fact meant nothing at all (how could it mean nothing at all? – it was everywhere in my dream!). This is in direct conflict with his repeated statements that the dreamer is the final authority on their own dream, and that nobody can tell the dreamer what their dream means. I also witnessed him imposing what struck me as an inordinate amount of will when another woman in the circle was…using one of her own experiences. This was a person who had already been doing her own dream work quite well for the last 20 years. I was beginning to get the confirmation of what I had begun to suspect, that this guy is really just in it for the ego gratification, the illusion of power, and the money, and anyone who won’t allow them to be manipulated by him to meet those ends is undesirable. At the break … his new trainee… tell[s] me to leave. The excuse she gave was that I was “too advanced” for this workshop, that this was “for beginners” and that I was “scaring people”. One thing she didn’t understand is that …Robert’s “advanced” workshops are “by invitation only”, and that I had never been extended an invitation to any of these. … It was clear they just wanted to be rid of me.”
CONCLUSION When Moss left the field of intelligence in 1987 to begin writing his books and offering dream workshops; both American and British intelligence had already spent decades developing military uses for psychic phenomena. It is necessary to ask the question before attending one of his workshops; is it possible for Moss to put his previous experience at deceiving the public (through propaganda) behind him. The fact that Moss fails to put his very scary background as an intelligence operative upfront on his website cannot be ignored by anyone, especially his students.
Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved. More articles: Paul Fitzgerald-Elizabeth Gould
