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In August 2022, Ukrainian security service (SBU) operatives hid explosives in a crate intended for a cat in a car driven by a woman and her twelve year old daughter. After the car passed through the Russian border, the SBU planted the bomb in the SUV of Russian journalist Darya Dugina, the daughter of well known philosopher Alexander Dugin, who was tragically killed.[1]

According to a new exposé in The Washington Post, which is based on interviews with more than two dozen Ukrainian, and U.S. intelligence officials, the Dugina bombing operation was part of a “raging shadow war” in which Ukraine’s spy services have twice bombed the bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea, piloted drones into the roof of the Kremlin, and blown holes in the hulls of Russian naval vessels in the Black Sea.[2] 

The key agency helping to run this shadow war—you guessed it—is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which according to The Post, formed, trained and equipped the SBU commando units that were involved in its key operations.

Since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed intelligence services into potent allies against Moscow, officials said.

The agency has provided Ukraine with advanced surveillance systems, trained recruits at sites in Ukraine and in the U.S., built new headquarters for departments in Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, maintained a significant presence in Kyiv, and shared intelligence on a scale that would have been unimaginable before.

These revelations are not particularly surprising in light of what had already been disclosed.Vasily Prozorov, a former SBU officer who defected to Russia, publicly said that the SBU was advised by the CIA since 2014, and that CIA employees have come to the SBU’s central office to plot secret operations.

Plausible Deniability and the Birth of a New Mossad 

As a key part of the shadow war, the SBU and its military counterpart, the GUR, have carried out dozens of assassinations of Russian officials in occupied territories, alleged Ukrainian collaborators, military officers behind the front lines and prominent war supporters deep inside Russia. Those killed include a blogger at a cafe in St. Petersburg. 

A former CIA official was quoted in the The Post stating that “We are seeing the birth of a set of intelligence services that are like Mossad [the Israeli intelligence services known for carrying out assassination] in the 1970s.”

Another U.S. intelligence official emphasized U.S. operational restrictions, stating that their focus was “more on secure communications and tradecraft,” and pursuing new streams of intelligence inside Russia “rather than ‘here’s how you blow up a mayor.’ I never got the sense that we were that involved in designing their ops.”

These latter comments can be seen as a form of plausible deniability in which the U.S. and CIA distances itself from atrocities that it commits by blaming them on its proxy forces.

The Post is generally known as a platform for “controlled leaks.”

Oleg Tsaryov, a member of Ukraine’s parliament from 2002-2014, said that the U.S. attempt to distance itself from the Dugina car bombing and other terrorist acts was disingenuous. He specified that the CIA and British MI6 ran the coup d’état in Kyiv in 2014, and said that he could name the officials in Kyiv who were in the pay of U.S. intelligence.[3]

Parallels with CIA Phoenix Program in Vietnam—with a New Twist

CovertAction Magazine has previously reported on a historical parallel with the CIA’s Vietnam Phoenix Program, where the CIA also claimed plausible deniability, blaming terrorist acts committed in an attempt to “neutralize” civilian officials supportive of the National Liberation Front (NLF) on proxy forces—Vietnamese Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), which were known for their brutality.

The CIA provided the PRU’s working under Phoenix—like their modern-day Ukrainian counterparts—with modern police technologies, trained them in intelligence gathering and interrogation techniques, and set up computerized databases of subversives who were targeted for liquidation.[4]

Though the CIA denies it is involved directly in kill-capture missions, it is doing the same things it did under Phoenix in helping Ukrainian intelligence operatives to collate and organize intelligence and to create blacklists and may be giving direct orders.

Civilian officials considered to be Russian collaborators or propagandists are on the blacklists. In a new twist, the CIA and SBU have made the death lists publicly accessible on the Myrotvorets website, which advertises itself as being run out of Langley.

“Our Little Baby”

The CIA’s close relationship with the SBU intensified right after the February 2014 Maidan coup, which resulted in the overthrow of pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych and empowered a pro-Western regime led by Petro Poroshenko and then Volodymyr Zelensky.

Afterwards, the CIA worked with the SBU to create a new intelligence agency that would focus on “active measures” operations against Russia, whose government the U.S. wanted to remove.

Training sites were located outside Kyiv where handpicked recruits were instructed by CIA personnel. The plan was to form units “capable of operating behind front lines and working as covert groups,” said a Ukrainian official involved in the effort. 

The agency provided secure communications gear, eavesdropping equipment that allowed Ukraine to intercept Russian phone calls and emails, and furnished disguises and separatist uniforms enabling operatives to more easily slip into occupied towns. 

The early missions focused on recruiting informants among Russia’s proxy forces as well as cyber and electronic eavesdropping measures. The SBU also began mounting sabotage operations and missions to capture separatist leaders and Ukrainian collaborators, some of whom were taken to secret detention sites.

Over one three-year stretch, at least half a dozen Russian operatives, high-ranking separatist commanders or collaborators were killed in violence that was often attributed to internal score-settling but in reality was the work of the SBU, Ukraine officials said.

In 2016, Yevgeny Zhilin, the leader of a pro-Russian group in eastern Ukraine—whose people had been besieged by Ukrainians bombardment and atrocities since the Maidan coup and looked to Russia for protection—was gunned down in a Moscow restaurant.

The CIA devoted millions of dollars to building up the GUR, a smaller and more nimble organization which had fewer ex-KGB operatives than the SBU. A former U.S. intelligence official said that “GUR was our little baby. We gave them all new equipment and training.”  

At sites in Ukraine and, later, the U.S., GUR operatives were trained in skills ranging from clandestine maneuvers behind enemy lines to the use of weapons platforms and explosives.

The CIA paid for new headquarters for the GUR’s spetsnaz paramilitary division and helped the GUR acquire state-of-the-art surveillance and electronic eavesdropping systems, as well as mobile equipment that could be placed along Russian-controlled lines in eastern Ukraine, and software tools used to exploit the cellphones of Kremlin officials visiting occupied territory from Moscow.

Ukrainian officers operated the systems but everything gleaned was shared with the Americans. Troves of data were relayed through the new CIA-built facility back to Washington, where they were scrutinized by CIA and NSA analysts. 

In a measure of U.S.-Ukraine trust, officials said, the CIA was permitted to have direct contact with agents recruited and run by Ukrainian intelligence. 

Framing the Narrative

GUR and SBU agent nets have assisted Ukraine in planning terrorist and drone attacks inside Russia proper, including attacks on the Kerch bridge and a May 2023 operation that set fire to a section of the roof in the Kremlin.

GUR’s venture into assassination included the murder of a Russian naval commander, Stanislav Rzhitsky whose location was exposed because of a fitness app that he used on his phone (Rzhitsky was shot dead on his morning run).

A Ukrainian security official told the The Post that this and other high-profile murders were “about narrative,” showing enemies of Ukraine that “punishment is imminent even for those who think they are untouchable.” 

This explanation fits the classic definition of terrorism: an act of violence targeting civilians with the goal of furthering a political agenda or intimidating a population.

The CIA practiced terrorism routinely in the Cold War, displaying the corpses of dead guerrillas on lampposts in town squares for intimidation purposes under the Phoenix Program, for example.[5]

The same modus operandi is being adopted today in Ukraine in another dirty war being co-directed by the CIA. This war is even more dangerous than before because it is being carried out on Russian soil in a country that possesses nuclear weapons.

 

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/11/01/washington-post-lifts-the-veil-on-cias-shadow-war-against-russia-waged-since-2014/

 

CARTOON AT TOP — SEE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftbfOCOHKOM

A LOT OF POPPYCOCK FROM JOHN KENNEDY AND SECRETARY AUSTIN....

 

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armageddon....

 

 

BY Douglas Macgregor

 

Limited war is a form of warfare constrained by the exercise of deliberate restraint in the application of force and the pursuit of political-military goals that exclude annihilation. In Ukraine, all sides shared an interest in avoiding the use of nuclear weapons, and contrary to the Western narrative, Moscow’s goals were arguably confined to the destruction of hostile Ukrainian forces (“denazification”) and the establishment of a neutral Ukrainian state.

In the Middle East, the situation is very different. When Hamas fighters attacked Israel’s heavily fortified border at daybreak on October 7, the first wave of roughly 1,000 fighters advanced behind a curtain of rocket fire using motorcycles, pickup trucks, paragliders, and speed boats, Israeli forces were surprised. Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official, said in an interview on October 8, “We made them think that Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [in Gaza] and has abandoned the resistance altogether.

In the days that followed, 3,000 fighters, including an unknown numberfrom the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ), penetrated Israeli territory, killing at least 1,300 Israelis and wounding approximately 3,500. Subsequent cross-border raids into Gaza revealed that some of the Israelis who were kidnapped were executed after entering Gaza.

The speed, coordination, and effectiveness of the Hamas operation was unexpected, but the horrific damage the Hamas fighters inflicted on Israel’s population was not surprising. Hamas exists for one purpose: to terrorize and kill Jews with the goal of destroying the State of Israel.

In response, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war and mobilized 360,000 reservists to form an army of between 470,000 and 500,000. Netanyahu is obviously determined to impart a lasting object lesson, one that will crush Hamas in Gaza and probably eliminate any more talk inside the Palestinian population of a “two-state solution.” Having already pulverized Gaza from the air, the stage is now set for a battle of annihilation. The question is: whose annihilation?

Israeli rage is justified and widely shared by Americans. Like the Israelis, Americans are inclined to see terrorism through the lens of 19th-century piracy: “no quarter given, none expected.” In this total war setting, the Geneva Convention cannot apply to Hamas’s terrorist forces. But how long can the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) wage total war, depriving Gaza’s Arab population of food and water, without creating an enormous humanitarian disaster that will play for years in the news?

Can Hamas and its leadership be destroyed without killing large numbersof civilians who may hate the Israelis but have nothing to do with Hamas? Does it not serve Hamas’s purpose for the IDF to become bogged down in an open-ended, full-scale ground invasion of Gaza because the urban conflict will unavoidably entail loss of innocent life? Does it not seem ominous that Hamas is urging the population of Northern Gaza to remain in the ruins of the city?

Americans stand behind Israel, but many are unconvinced that killing more Arabs in Gaza will solve Israel’s security problem. Americans also have doubts about the Israeli government’s ultranationalist officials, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. These men are widely seen as emboldening Jewish extremists.

These questions and concerns may explain why Israel is rushing to carry the war into Gaza. If Russian forces arrive to help Egypt and Turkey establish a humanitarian corridor, there will be Russian and Turkish troops in Gaza to defend the distribution of humanitarian aid. Outpacing the arrival of Russians, Turks, and Egyptians makes sense.

These points notwithstanding, the Middle East today is very different from the Middle East in 1973. Technologies have altered the conduct of warfare, but more importantly, the societies and states of the Islamic world have also changed. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, and Turkey are different in character from what they were in the 1970s. None of the states bordering Israel will tolerate population shifts that introduce large numbers of Palestinian Arabs into their societies. Europeans want them even less.

Iran’s national leaders have already called on Islamic and Arab countries toform a united front against Israel, but Iran’s influence in these matters is more limited than most Americans realize. Iranian military power is largely restricted to Iran’s use of proxy militias like Hezbollah and their cooperation with the Pasdaran, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran is simply incapable of adding high-end conventional military forces to such a front. Tehran’s government also knows that the use of Iran’s formidable theater ballistic missile force against Israel risks almost certain Israeli nuclear retaliation.

The governments of Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Lebanon are very probably opposed to a general war against Israel, but their enraged populations could easily trap them into doing so. Scenes of celebration across the Middle East showing people waving Palestinian and Hamas flags, dancing, and singing in the streets are being shared on social media.

Turkey’s President Erdogan has offered to mediate between Hamas and Israel, but Erdoğan himself has warned that the war won’t just stop “in a week or two.” However, Turkey, a nation of more than 80 million, is the one actor in the region with the societal cohesion, martial culture, and military power to lead the Sunni Arab states in a confrontation with Israel.

In a regional war, Turkey can field large armies and air forces equipped with modern weapons, manned by disciplined and determined fighters. The advent of a regional Sunni Muslim alliance guided by Ankara and financed by Qatar resurrects the specter of advanced conventional warfare for the IDF, a form of warfare known to only a few of today’s IDF leaders.

Sadly, the region has not advanced much beyond the conditions described by Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s Prime Minister in 1924 and again from 1929 to 1931:

We encouraged an Arab revolt against Turkey by promising to create an Arab Kingdom from the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire including Palestine. At the same time, we were encouraging the Jews to help us, by promising them that Palestine would be placed at their disposal for settlement and government, and, also at the same time, we were secretly making with France the Sykes-Picot agreement partitioning the territory which we had instructed our Governor-General of Egypt to promise to the Arabs. The story is one of crude duplicity, and we cannot expect to escape the reprobation which is its proper sequel.

Both the Jews and the Muslims continue to live inside civilizational conflicts that have defined Jerusalem since World War I.

With American offshore naval power, Washington is certainly poised to stumble into the conflict if it widens, but the use of American naval power will not end it. Although it is distasteful to the ruling political class in Washington, the Biden administration should consider taking the lead in supporting a ceasefire, even if it means cooperating with the Turks, Egyptians, and Russians to secure the arrival of humanitarian aid.

In Ukraine, Washington underestimated Russian resolve and military power. Washington should not repeat this mistake by underestimating the potential for a regional Muslim alliance that could threaten Israel’s existence. The possibility that Israel could end up like Ukraine should not be discounted.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/avoiding-armageddon/

 

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signing off....

 THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS A BIT DISINGENUOUS — INCLUDING IN ITS TITLE AND SUBTITLE:  GOP Senators Very Upset That Biden Judicial Nominee Thinks People In Prison Are People

Republican senators do not appreciate a judicial nominee’s efforts to protect people in prison from dying of COVID-19.

 BY MADIBA K. DENNIE  NOVEMBER 2, 2023 

The Senate Judiciary Committee did something on Wednesday that, at least historically, it has done only rarely: it considered the nomination of a former public defender to a federal judgeship. The Committee’s resident conservative lawyers remained very true to form, though, as a couple blowhard senators spent the hearing outraged by the idea that recognizing the humanity of criminal defendants could have any role in the legal system. 

In October, President Joe Biden nominated Sarah French Russell, a law professor and former federal public defender, to a federal district court in Connecticut During her confirmation hearing, she incurred the made-for-TV wrath of Republican Senators John Kennedy of Louisiana and Ted Cruz of Texas because she signed onto an open letter in March 2020 urging Connecticut’s governor, Ned Lamont, to free people from the state’s prisons in order to protect them from the COVID-19 pandemic. The letter specifically called on the Governor to release people in pretrial detention, to prioritize the release of people who are elderly or immunocompromised, and to declare a moratorium on incarcerating anyone else. “In the absence of immediate and decisive action,” the letter warned, “incarceration will turn into a death sentence for many of our community members.” 

On Wednesday, the senators suggested that Russell’s choice to sign the letter showed that she is incapable of fulfilling the duties of a judge. Kennedy accused Russell of sounding “like a district attorney in San Francisco,” a reference to Chesa Boudin, whose recall last year was fueled by similarly cynical attacks from right-wing pundits. Kennedy also asked Russell how she was “ever going to send somebody to prison” if she believes prisons are, as the letter says, “detrimental to public health and human rights and disproportionately harm marginalized communities.” After Russell assured him that she “understands the role of the judge,” Kennedy replied, “That’s not what you say here.”

Cruz howled that the letter’s recommendation to release legally innocent people “means murderers, it means serial rapists, it means child molesters” running loose on the streets. Russell indicated and reindicated that she believes “releases need to be consistent with public safety.” Cruz, like Kennedy, replied “that’s not what this letter says.”

https://ballsandstrikes.org/nominations/sarah-french-russell-confirmation-hearing-ted-cruz-dummy/

 

HERE ONE HAS TO WATCH THE VIDEO TO UNDERSTAND THAT PROFESSOR Sarah French Russell TRIED TO FUDGE HER RESPONSIBILITY IN SIGNING A DOCUMENT SHE SHOULD NEVER HAVE SIGNED.... SHE SHOULD HAVE ADMITTING MAKING A MISTAKE RATHER THAT NOT RECALL THE DOCUMENT WHERE SPECIFIC ACTIONS WERE DESCRIBED IN REGARD TO PRISONERS.

 

SEE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01FrqRhdkqo

 

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