Predictably, America’s foreign policy establishment is claiming that the Boston Marathon bombing has presented a golden opportunity for the Obama administration and Congress to once again “reset” our relationship with Russia. Almost before the smoke had cleared, various and sundry “experts,” led principally by spokesmen for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), began sounding the theme that this latest terror attack is proof of the need for more cooperation and convergence between U.S. and Russian intelligence agencies.
James M. Lindsay, the CFR’s senior vice president and director of studies, and Anya Schmemann, director of the CFR’s Task Force Program, were among the earliest out of the starting blocks with an April 19 “Waters’ Edge” CFR blog that posited: “The reported identification of the Boston bombers as Chechens may spur increased U.S. support for Moscow’s approach to Islamic extremism. Russia has already offered its assistance in the ongoing investigation, and the Boston bombings will likely lead to increased counterterrorism cooperation between the two countries.”
The following day, April 20, many newspapers and websites carried a Reuters story by Timothy Heritage with the title “Boston bombings — a chance for U.S.-Russia cooperation.” The Reuters story begins:
Russian President Vladimir Putin may have been tempted to tell Barack Obama “I told you so” when U.S. officials blamed two ethnic Chechens for the Boston Marathon bombings. He has long said the United States underestimates the security threat posed by Islamist militants in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus, and has rejected criticism that Moscow’s use of force in the region has been heavy-handed.
The Reuters story quoted Robert Legvold, a CFR member and regular writer for the CFR journal Foreign Affairs, on the likely “positive” effect the bombing would have on U.S.-Russian relations. Reuters reported:
Robert Legvold, professor emeritus at Columbia University and a Russia expert, said the events in Boston would help increase U.S.-Russian cooperation because the sides would share intelligence and information about the suspects.
He underlined that Russia had been quick to rally behind Washington after the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and a similar deepening of security cooperation could take place now.
“I think in the end, the Russians under Putin want to keep the relationship as constructive as possible,” Legvold said. “This episode is likely to be more positive than negative (for U.S.-Russian relations).”
“The Boston bombings have led to increased cooperation between Washington and Moscow, a jarring shift coming amid weeks of rancor over American criticism of Russia’s human rights record,” wrote the New York Times team of Eric Schmitt (CFR), Michael S. Schmidt, and Ellen Barry on April 21. “Presidents Obama and Vladimir V. Putin spoke by telephone late Friday night, in a conversation initiated by the Russian side, the Kremlin announced.” The Kremlin’s statement said both leaders expressed “the building of close coordination between Russian and American intelligence services in the battle with global terrorism.”
“I hope the revelation of the bombers’ Chechen ties will, if anything, open a window of opportunity to repair U.S.-Russia security cooperation,” said Matthew Rojansky, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment, which has long been a sort of sister organization to the CFR — and always reliably pro-Kremlin. (CFR founder John Foster Dulles was chairman at Carnegie, readers may recall, when he brought in fellow CFR member — and Soviet agent — Alger Hiss to be president of the endowment.)
“Now that we ourselves have experienced terror that has a North Caucasus dimension, it certainly gives a chance to revive counterterrorism cooperation,” Angela Stent (CFR), director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University, told RIA Novosti, one of the venerable old Kremlin propaganda organs that continues to serve Putin’s FSB as it did the Soviet KGB.
“Putin has been making the point for 14 years that Chechnya affects all of us,” said Fiona Hill in an Associated Press story on April 23. Hill, formerly the White House’s national intelligence officer for Russia under Obama and President George W. Bush, is a CFR member. In 2005, Hill was the lead author of a Carnegie Endowment study entitled “A Spreading Danger: Time for a New Policy Toward Chechnya,” which claimed, “President Putin has provided an opening for a more positive Western role in the region by informing German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of his desire for active Western involvement in the economic development of the North Caucasus region.”
The proper U.S. response to this generous offer from Putin, said the Carnegie experts, “should involve both Western state aid organizations and international financial institutions, like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.” They envision a massive aid program for the region that would “include restoring transport and communications links, improving social infrastructure like housing and electricity, creating new educational institutions,” etc.
The above-mentioned Carnegie report also warned that “the next soft target of North Caucasian terrorism could be a Western one,” a seemingly prescient prediction of the Boston bombing. The call is not so prescient, however, when one takes into consideration that Carnegie has close ties to Putin’s FSB and may have been presetting the convergence response dial in concert with Kremlin strategists who already had terror provocations planned. The Carnegie Endowment is uniquely situated for this function, with a large presence in Russia at the Endowment’s Moscow Center run by Dmitri Trenin, a disciple of KGB deception strategist Georgiy Arbatov. Even the choice of the name “Moscow Center” for Carnegie’s facility in Moscow is significant; the Carnegie hands who established it would have known that “Moscow Center” has become a standard metonym in spycraft for the central headquarters of the KGB/FSB. It was popularized as the nickname for the KGB strategists in the spy novels of John le Carre. The name is especially apropos here, inasmuch as Carnegie’s Moscow Center is integrally tied into Putin’s ruling clique, as well as other KGB/FSB operations, such as the Gorbachev Foundation.
Glaring “Oversight”
None of the many commentaries we’ve read lately by these so-called experts have pointed out that many of the most notorious “Chechen” terror incidents in Russia over the past two decades have been convincingly exposed as false-flag operations orchestrated by Putin’s FSB.
The CFR’s website features a “backgrounder” on Chechnya entitled “Chechen Terrorism (Russia, Chechnya, Separatist)” that lists all the usual terror incidents in Russia referred to in our major media and attributed to Chechens: the Moscow apartment bombings, the Dubrovka Theater hostage crisis, the Beslan school massacre, etc. No mention at all that many of these events have been shown to be provocations orchestrated by Vladimir Putin and Russia’s intelligence agencies. This has been established beyond doubt particularly in the case of the Moscow apartment bombings, often referred to as “Russia’s equivalent of 9/11.”
The problem is that the CFR “experts” have stubbornly chosen to ignore the mountains of evidence that conflict with their convergence agenda. This is especially obvious considering that an exhaustive new examination and compilation of that evidence, The Moscow Bombings of September 1999, by Hoover Institution Scholar John Dunlop, was published last year. Amy Knight, a genuine Soviet-Russian expert, whom the New York Times has described as “the West’s foremost scholar” of the KGB, says of Dunlop’s book: “The evidence he provides makes an overwhelming case that Russian authorities were complicit in these horrific attacks.” (See our companion article on page 15.)
This writer agrees with Knight. And if the evidence is “overwhelming” that “Russian authorities,” i.e., Putin and Company, were indeed “complicit in these horrific attacks,” then why are these incidents being cited repeatedly as reasons why we must “unite,” “cooperate,” and “converge” with Putin and Company on security and terrorism concerns? Are we supposed to be so fearful of the Chechen provocations that we embrace the provocateurs? Apparently so.
As just one example of the global ripple effect of the CFR’s policy line, we can take a look at an April 19 article from the Independent in the U.K. entitled “From Boston to Chechnya to Moscow: the chain of terror that unites US and Russia.” The article’s subtitle tells us: “Fear of Islamic extremism is a rare bridging link between the US and Russia.” Somewhere around 50 percent of the article is composed of quotes from or references to the CFR backgrounder report we mentioned earlier, “Chechen Terrorism.”
The Independent cites a British terrorism expert, Professor Simon Bennett, who has reliably absorbed the CFR party line — and who also seems to share the CFR’s imperviousness to the overwhelming evidence that the “Chechen” terrorist events are actually Russian FSB instigations. The Independent piece tells readers:
The United States may have become a target for Chechen terrorists in the wake of the harrowing Beslan school hostage crisis nearly 10 years ago, an expert explained today.
The world watched in horror in 2004 as armed Islamic separatist militants, some Chechen, occupied a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, and killed more than 380 people.
Security expert Simon Bennett said the tragedy bridged a gap between the US and Russia by establishing a mutual threat — fundamental Islamic terrorism.
Dr Bennett, director of the Civil Safety and Security Unit at the University of Leicester, said: “One of the few things in the past five or 10 years that has brought the Russians and the US closer together is the perceived threat from Islamic terrorism.”
Terrormasters as Partners
That America’s preeminent think tanks and foreign policy “experts” can be proposing an alliance with the Kremlin to combat terrorism, with virtually nary a peep in opposition to this scheme, is incredible — and deplorable. It also speaks volumes about the subversive impact of the CFR’s dominance of policy debate over the past few decades. It is as if a chorus of experts proposed that the FBI and Justice Department enter into a partnership with all of the recognized heads of Mafia families for a joint operation against organized crime — and not a single objection was raised in opposition to the absurd proposition.
There is no question that the scourge of terrorism in the 20th century was the creation of the Soviet Union’s intelligence services, the KGB and GRU. Important defectors from the Soviet intelligence services and their bloc allies, such as Anatoliy Golitsyn, Alexander Litvinenko, Ion Pacepa, Petr Deriabin, and Jan Sejna, as well as documents from the Soviet secret archives and public admissions by former Soviet officials, have confirmed what responsible scholars of terrorism have always recognized, to wit, that international terrorism could scarcely have existed during its heyday of the 1960s through the 1980s absent the crucial aid and direction provided by the Soviet Union.
Among those in the West who did the most to expose this truth — through books, film documentaries, speeches, newsletters and/or official investigations and reports — were Claire Sterling, Pierre de Villemarest, Hilaire du Berrier, Count Alexandre de Marenches, and Congressmen Lawrence P. McDonald and John Ashbrook.
Even more important to the issue today is the fact that the Kremlin’s terror sponsorship did not cease with the name change from the Soviet Union (USSR) to Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Yuri Andropov, the longest-serving head of the KGB (1967-1982) was most directly responsible for launching the global wave of terror. He went on to become general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
Vladimir Putin and a large contingent of his retinue are all Andropov protégés who publicly venerate Andropov as their hero. They not only have continued Andropov’s Soviet terror strategy, but have dramatically expanded Andropov’s strategic deception of creating “Islamic” terror groups to carry out acts that not only will not be attributed to Russia, but which can be used to create the perception that Russia and the West face a mutual threat and must cooperate to defeat a common enemy. Hamas, Hezbollah, PLO, PFLP, PKK, al-Qaeda, Taliban, Abu Sayyaf, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Islamic Jihad, and numerous other “Islamic” terrorist organization have long Kremlin pedigrees stretching from Andropov’s KGB to Putin’s FSB. We have provided extensive details concerning this ongoing terror connection in a number of articles in The New American, many of which are available online. (See, for example: “Behind Islamic Terror,” “The Real Terror Paymasters,” and “Who’s Who in Terrorism,” all from September 3, 2007; “Putin, Poison, and Murder,” January 22, 2007; “Russian Red Jihad,” October 10, 2012; and “Hizb ut-Tahrir: KGB-FSB Connection?” July 24, 2009.)
Continuous Convergence Path
The proposal for U.S.-Russia cooperation and convergence in military and intelligence matters for the purpose of fighting terrorism is not new; in fact, it has been building in fits and starts for decades, always under the tutelage of the CFR, assisted by folks at Brookings, Carnegie, Rand, and other similarly minded globalist think tanks. As The New American reported in extensive stories in 1996 (“Russia’s Global Crime Cartel”) and 1997 (“Crackdown on ‘Extremism’”) by William Norman Grigg, the Clinton administration’s FBI Director Louis Freeh kicked off this effort in a big way, declaring, “All of the former Cold War adversaries should also consider reprogramming personnel and technologies to the fight against criminals and terrorists.”
We reported then that “under Freeh’s leadership, the FBI, which was once the dreaded enemy of the Soviet KGB, has embraced the KGB’s successor organizations as ‘partners’ in combating the global menace of terrorism and organized crime. On July 4, 1994, Freeh and Sergei Stepashin of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) signed an accord outlining joint training and enforcement efforts. But the groundwork for this development was laid several years earlier through the work of the ‘U.S.-Soviet Task Force to Prevent Terrorism,’ which brought together ‘retired’ KGB and CIA officials to encourage superpower collaboration against terrorism.”
That U.S.-Soviet task force, which got under way in the last days of the Reagan administration and was fully launched in the early days of the George H.W. Bush administration, produced a report entitled Common Ground on Terrorism: Soviet-American Cooperation Against the Politics of Terror. Naturally, the CFR’s journal, Foreign Affairs, gave it a glowing review, and CFR members in the Bush and Clinton administrations began implementing its recommendations.
Over the past several years, the CFR convergence artists and their Soviet counterparts have sought to spur the process on. On December 30, 2012, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (CFR) and former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov joined to co-write an op-ed for the New York Times (the CFR’s premier propaganda fount) entitled “A New Agenda for U.S.-Russia Cooperation.” The Albright-Ivanov production averred that “American and Russian interests converge on a number of significant and timely issues,” and called on Presidents Obama and Putin to “act together to strengthen global security in general and pave the way for a more stable and predictable world.”
Another of the many stunning examples of the convergence choir in operation is an op-ed for the Guardian by Nikolai Patrushev, Putin’s successor as FSB chief and now secretary of the Russian Security Council. Entitled “Russia and the US: a Fresh Start,” Patrushev’s April 4, 2010 piece was subtitled: “In this post-cold war era we can refocus our energies and co-operate in cutting nuclear weapons and confronting terrorism.” According to this Putin aide, “Once cold war foes, Russia and the west are today united in facing a very real terrorist threat that more than ever requires a joint, co-ordinated and determined effort to defeat it.” Bloomberg Businessweek (a CFR corporate member) picked up the story and spread it worldwide.
As if the loss of liberties, the increasing militarization of our law enforcement, and the dramatic buildup of the surveillance state since 9/11 are not already sufficiently alarming, imagine how much worse it might get if KGB/FSB-style “security” were fully implemented here. We are rapidly moving in that direction, and unless Congress receives a clear message from the American people and acts to halt this treachery, it is very likely that we could “converge” formally into that hellish system, with our new ally Putin, in the not-too-distant future.
— Photo of Russian President Vladimir Putin with U.S. President Barack Obama: AP Images
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