If the combined assessments, writ large, in these analyst's notes are even directionally true — if the Iran Deal (JCPOA), climate change negotiations, and transnational organized crime have been strategically weaponized by U.S. adversaries to corrupt/capture Western elites, to hijack critical portions of the global nuclear fuel cycle, and to reroute those uranium supply chains through a region where China is committing genocide — then who, specifically, has paid the greatest price for this series of leadership failures, aside from U.S. taxpayers?
The answer: the poor people trapped in China's concentration camps.
April 2017: Uyghur, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Tatar male detainees at a concentration camp in Lop County, Hotan Prefecture, Xinjiang, China (East Turkistan) are photographed, presumably during an indoctrination session. That photograph is later shared on the Xinjiang Bureau of Justice's WeChat Account and is subsequently obtained by Human Rights Watch.
7 July 2017: At the G20 in Hamburg, Germany, U.S. President Donald Trump holds a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling for improved relations. An undisclosed second meeting occurs later in the day.
Notes from the meeting subsequently become the subject of a Federal records lawsuit.
28 July 2017: “Kazakh KazMunaiGaz to Transfer Shares to CEFC China Energy.”
29 August 2017: The IAEA launches its Low-Enriched-Uranium Bank (LEU Bank) in Eastern Kazakhstan w/ investments from Warren Buffet, US, Norway, UAE, the EU, Kazakhstan, and Kuwait.
Shown here are IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano (left) and Russian-aligned Kazakh kleptocrat Nursultan Nazarbayev — former First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic — take part in a video link dedicated to the opening of the Low Enriched Uranium Bank in the Kazakh city of Oskemen, in Astana on August 29. It's unclear what they're doing in this photo.
• https://www.rferl.org/a/kazakhstan-iaea-opens-low-enriched-uranium-bank/28702928.html
30 August 2017: Less than two months after the Trump/Putin meetings at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, former Chechen Senator Umar Dzhabrailov is detained after allegedly firing a handgun in his Moscow Four Seasons hotel room, supposedly while under the influence, joking that it was due to his inexperience handling weapons (which the Moscow Times reported matter-of-factly).
Analyst's note: the Four Seasons Moscow is located in the historic Moskva Hotel building, which Donald Trump was in negotiations with Mayor Luzhkov to remodel and reopen as a Trump-branded hotel.
What're the odds?
After the shooting, Dhabrailov purchases “Patriot Shooting Gallery” (парк Патриот), signaling that the incident was likely theatrical. In an interview with Crime Russia, he says that “he was given tea and fed with buns” by the police.
Analyst's note: Patriot Shooting Gallery (unless there's more than one shooting gallery with that name) is actually an impressive park-sized complex that's autonomous from, but affiliated with, the Russian Ministry of Defense. Customers can book a machine gun online, and probably more powerful weapons offline… or, perhaps, a Kalashnikov of the type used to assassinate Paul Tatum.
Also, a story from the time of the shooting lists something interesting: “among Dzhabrailov's key assets [are] the Plaza holding group, which he created in 1997. It included the [French clothing boutique] Danako companies [one of the earliest of which was housed at the Radisson-Slavyanskaya], the Tikhaya Gavan advertising firm, the Smolensky Passage and Okhotny Ryad trade enterprises.”
The Okhotny Ryad is the shopping complex connected to the Moscow Metro which mayor Luzhkov had mentioned (see “1st Week of November, 1996”).
16 October 2017: Kazakh sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna looks to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of Communist China for (Chinese) investor interest.
11 September 2017: NGO Warns that the life of jailed Kazakhstani uranium czar Mukhtar Dzhakishev is in danger.
2 November 2017: Kazakhstan's former uranium czar, Mukhtar Dzakishev claims, rather plausibly, that he was imprisoned for opposing the sale of the Canadian company “Uranium One” to Russian interests (see 6 September 2005, etc.).
Analyst's note: Dzakishev, to this day, seems quite proud of having met Bill Clinton , completely unaware that his imprisonment was probably viewed favorably by American Clinton-aligned Democrats and by Russians eager to see the ink dry on the Uranium One deal.
22 November 2017: Former Chechen Senator Umar Dzhabrailov is fined 500K rubles for his previous alleged hooliganism.
19 December 2017: The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) reports that several House Democratic IT aides were running a car dealership (during D/CIA John Brennan's tenure leading the CIA) with all the markings of a money laundering operation. Their dealership's name? Implausibly: Cars International A (CIA). Those same aides were, at the time of DCNF's reporting, under (clearly fake) Capitol Police investigation for massive breaches of House rules, including improperly accessing and transferring terrabytes of Congressional correspondence to Pakistan. The alleged ringleader, Imran Awan, had been arrested in July of 2017 while trying to flee to Pakistan. From one of many DCNF stories on the saga:
❝ The used car dealership known as CIA never seemed like an ordinary car dealership, with inventory, staff and expenses.
On its Facebook page, CIA’s “staff” were fake personalities such as “James Falls O’Brien,” whose photo was taken from a hairstyle model catalog, and “Jade Julia,” whose image came from a web page called “Beautiful Girls Wallpaper.”
If a customer showed up looking to buy a car from Cars International A, often referred to as CIA, Abid Awan — who was managing partner of the dealership while also earning $160,000 handling IT for House Democrats — would frequently simply go across the street to another dealership called AAA Motors and get one.
“If AAA borrows a car to Cars International and they have a customer, it was simply take the car across the street and sell it, and then later on give the profit back or not,” Nasir Khattak, who ran the longstanding AAA dealership, testified in a lawsuit. “There was no documentation… If you go and try to dissect, you will not be able to make any sense out of them because there were many, dozens and dozens, of cars transferred between the two dealerships and between other people.” […]
Imran Awan and his family members were congressional IT aides who investigators said made unauthorized access to the House Democratic Caucus server thousands of times. At the same time as they worked for and could read all the emails of congressmen who sat on committees like Intelligence, Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs, they also ran a car dealership that took money from a Hezbollah-linked fugitive and whose financial books were indecipherable and business patterns bizarre, according to testimony in court records. […]
Abid Awan is married to a Ukranian named Nataliia Sova, who was herself on the House payroll as an IT aide in 2010 and 2011 for Reps. Emmanuel Cleaver, Ted Deutch, and Gabby Giffords. (Before Gabby Giffords was shot.) Abid incorporated Cars International in 2008, and Cars International A in 2009, taking out loans from the Congressional credit union while omitting the dealership from House financial disclosures. It was not clear how he could have been working at both the dealership and a high-paid congressional job.
In 2010, the CIA dealership took a $100,000 loan from Dr. Ali Al-Attar, who is of Iranian heritage and was a minister in the Iraqi government , according to court records. Al-Attar is a fugitive wanted by the U.S. government. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, wrote that Attar “was observed in Beirut, Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official” in 2012–shortly after the loan was made. ❞
Analyst's note: Philip Giraldi surely wasn't covering for Porter Goss and John Brennan, right?
“The Awan brothers,” as they'd come to be known, got their start in the office of one Robert Wexler, a (Jewish) Congressman from Florida (where former D/CIA Porter Goss was from) back in 2004. Imran and his conspirators (he recruited his relatives to join him) continued providing IT services to Democrats until 2017… for 13 long years.
Was Imran Awan a Pakistani ISI operative? (Yes.) Was Nataliia Sova a Ukranian SBU operative? (Yes.) Were they actually counterintelligence assets (yes) who were chosen specifically because of their foreign connections, i.e., so that if discovered, Pakistan and Ukraine could be blamed rather than John Brennan & Company? Look at John Brennan speaking to Congress. He's clearly someone who has nothing but contempt for democracy. He even spied on the U.S. Senate Intel Committee.
Did the Pakistanis and Ukrainians end up receiving access to Congressional correspondence as a perk for helping out with this arrangement? Might there have been specific members and committees they were interested in? Might that also explain a few other things regarding our relationships — including our apparent lack of diplomatic leverage on certain issues — with those two countries, as well?
Your humble analyst identified the offices served by the Awans and was surprised to find a statistically-unlikely pattern: all DNC superdelegates who were serviced by the Awans endorsed Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016. All of them… with only two exceptions: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who had to maintain the appearance of neutrality as DNC Chair, and Kyrsten Sinema, whose predecessor had just been shot in the head. Curiously, the Awans seemed to target both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Both broke early in favor of Hillary. Did Hillary perhaps know how to make the right pitch to those superdelegates? Perhaps a little inside info after a peek at their email?
The U.S. Capitol Police ran the clearly fake “investigation” into the Awans. It was a classic whitewash/coverup job. During that clearly-performative “investigation,” Imran Awan allegedly supplied Capitol Police with a fake image of former Rep. Xavier Becerra’s (D-CA) server. Becerra later became the attorney general of California after employing the Awans. Now he's Biden's (fully compromised) Secretary of Health and Human Services.
A nice reward for not asking too many questions, huh? (Not to imply that he'd know which questions to ask.)
Wexler was a top contender to be Joe Biden's Ambassador to Israel, but was passed over for Thomas Nides, managing director and vice-chairman of Morgan Stanley. The Awans, by the way, ended up receiving a hero's welcome in Pakistan, where it appears much of the data was transferred to. (And to Ukraine.)
It gets even more interesting when one starts looking for further Pakistani and Ukrainian penetration of Congress. For instance, why — after this very clear penetration of Congress by likely Pakistani ISI and Ukrainain SBU double-agents — was Nancy Pelosi permitted to hire a Ukrainian legislative aide named Ivanna Voronovych? (A tip of the hat to Yaacov Apelbaum for his work identifying her.)
This is neither here nor there (and not related to the Awans), but Xavier Becerra later ended up suing the Trump administration on behalf of California's colleges and universities in order to stop Trump's effort to ban international students from returning to the US during the pandemic (almost as if he was hoping the coronavirus pandemic would spread).
Former Pfizer board member-turned-Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne — a good friend of the Bankman-Fried family (major Democratic donors) — wrote to his campus at the time:
❝ “Asking international students to transfer or leave the country — not to mention navigate the travel restrictions in place in many countries around the world, and risk the possibility they may not be able to return — is misguided and harmful.”❞
I can think of a few other things that are misguided and harmful, Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Indeed, Marc (and his former Pfizer board member colleagues) are surely fortunate to have TWO former California AGs in the White House: Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, and, of course, VP Kamala Harris…whose own father works at Stanford, where Marc is now President. Small world!
• https://www.voanews.com/a/top-democrat-it-aid-arrested-while-trying-to-leave-us-for-pakistan/3959857.html
• https://dailycaller.com/2017/10/06/imran-awan-very-strongly-wants-to-block-review-of-hard-drive-was-using-alias/
• https://dailycaller.com/2017/11/29/hard-drive-tied-to-wasserman-schultz-is-central-to-imran-awan-case/
• https://dailycaller.com/2017/12/19/house-it-aides-ran-car-dealership-with-markings-of-a-nefarious-money-laundering-operation/
• https://dailycaller.com/2018/03/18/imran-awan-house-hacking-intimidation-tampering/
• https://dailycaller.com/2018/04/18/imran-awan-usb-drive-pakistan/
• https://dailycaller.com/2018/04/20/ig-pakistani-mystery-man-imran-awan/
• https://dailycaller.com/2018/04/22/trump-pakistani-mystery-man-documents-debbie-wasserman-schultz/
• https://dailycaller.com/2018/05/17/ryan-refuses-awan-question/
• https://dailycaller.com/2018/05/31/justice-department-imran-awan-tried-to-hide-his-money/
• https://dailycaller.com/2018/06/07/gunmen-targeted-awan-wife/
• https://dailycaller.com/2018/07/02/awan-memo-server-vanished/
• https://dailycaller.com/2018/07/09/awan-inspector-general-report/
• https://dailycaller.com/2018/08/21/imran-awan-no-jail-time-hospital/
• https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/13/doj-imran-awan-records/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/federal-probe-into-house-technology-worker-imran-awan-yields-intrigue-no-evidence-of-espionage/2017/09/16/100b4170-93f2-11e7-b9bc-b2f7903bab0d_story.html
• https://www.foxnews.com/politics/imran-awan-case-lawmaker-calls-massive-data-transfers-from-wasserman-schultz-aide-a-substantial-security-threat
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wexler
Former D/CIA Porter Goss co-chairing the first meeting of the Office of Congressional Ethics on 23 January 2009. From 1989 until 2004, he represented Florida's 13th and (later) 14th Districts in the House. From 2004 until 2006, he was D/CIA. From 2009 until 2015, the former spymaster co-chaired the “bipartisan” “Office of Congressional Ethics” (during Imran Awan and co-conspirators' time servicing the House Democratic Caucus).
15 January 2018: Freedom House takes note of President Trump's planned meeting the next day with Kazakhstan's dictator, President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
❝ U.S. president Donald Trump will welcome President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan to the White House on January 16. Although the reported agenda for the meeting includes discussion of topics ranging from regional security and economic cooperation to nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, one crucial topic seems to be missing: human rights. ❞
The piece continues:
❝ Kazakhstani authorities regularly restrict the most important tools of democracy by banning independent media and bringing criminal charges against peaceful protesters, bloggers, social media users, and civic activists. Torture is reportedly widespread in the country. In 2017, authorities liquidated the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions and secured criminal convictions against union leaders. As a result of these practices, there is little space for political pluralism, dissent, or public participation in Kazakhstan. ❞
• https://freedomhouse.org/article/will-trump-encourage-repression-kazakhstan
16 January 2018: Major media also reports on the human rights situation in Kazakhstan and Donald Trump's business ties, with Hunter Walker, Yahoo News’ White House Correspondent, filing a story appropriately headlined “Trump's meeting with Kazakhstan president raises questions about human rights and business ties.”
29 January 2018: Kazakh President Nazarbayev advocates for the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA).
• https://www.eurasiareview.com/29012018-kazakh-president-advocates-for-iran-nuclear-deal/
19 April 2018: Radio Free Asia reports that “authorities in Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian) prefecture, in northwest [East Turkistan, also known as] China’s Xinjiang region, are setting up ‘burial management centers’ as part of what the Uyghur exile community say is a bid to control all aspects of life for members of their ethnic group — even the act of dying.”
• https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/burials-04192018141100.html
26 June 2018: Radio Free Asia reports that China's neocolonialist authorities in Xinjiang are “rapidly building crematoria” to extinguish Uyghur funeral traditions:
❝ Between March 2017 and February 2018, the XUAR government listed 5-10 million yuan (U.S. $760,000 to $1.52 million) tenders for contractors to build nine “burial management centers” that include crematoria in mostly Uyghur-populated areas throughout the region, according to a report listed on the official website of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC). ❞
16 July 2018: President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in Helsinki, Finland. During the press conference, President Trump insists that Russia didn't interfere in the 2016 election. Even the BBC runs with the headline, “Trump sides with Russia against FBI at Helsinki summit.”
Analyst's note: President Trump's body language at Helsinki indicates that something was very off.
25 July 2018: Less than ten days after Presidents Trump and Putin meet in Helsinki, former Chechen Senator Umar Dzhabrailov is expelled from the political party United Russia — a party whose de facto leader is Vladimir Putin — over his previous act of alleged “hooliganism” (see 30 August 2017).
23 August 2018: Hunter Biden business associate Kenes Rakishev attempts to link former BTA Bank head Mukhtar Ablyazov to Trump in Newsweek via son-in-law/ex-Almaty Mayor Khrapunov’s purchase of units in Trump SoHo via Felix Sater. The Khraphunov case in London hinges on testimony of Ukrainian lawyer Olena Tyschenko, who claims she was detained by Russia in 2013 for laundering money, allegedly on behalf of Rakishev foe Ablyazov.
Analyst's note: some might speculate that Rakishev has essentially stolen Ablyazov’s company with the backing, perhaps, of certain Russian, Kazakh, UK, US, and/or Ukrainian authorities and legitimized said theft via claims of fraud, embezzlement, and corruption against his own predecessor. Like many things related to former Soviet bloc countries, the situation in Kazakhstan is extremely murky. Ablyazov was conveniently the only viable political opponent of Kazakhstan’s regime and was allegedly one of the masterminds behind a recent spate of anti-“Chinese Expansion” protests which had swept Kazakhstan, highlighting serious and legitimate human rights concerns with the Chinese regime's neo-colonialist and social-imperialist treatment of Central Asians (in their own countries) which most of the world has completely ignored, but his background is also chequered, to say the least; ergo, some might speculate that Rakishev is the good guy and Ablyazov is the con artist. Neither or both might be true. Again, like all things related to Kazakhstan, things are extremely murky.
5 December 2018: Hong Kong's former home secretary-turned-CEFC head, Patrick Ho, is convicted in the Southern District of New York of attempting to bribe Chadian and Ugandan authorities.
❝ Geoffrey S. Berman, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division announced that CHI PING PATRICK HO, a/k/a “Patrick C.P. Ho,” a/k/a “He Zhiping,” was found guilty today after a jury trial before U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska of participating in a multi-year, multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC China Energy Company Limited (“CEFC China”). HO was convicted of violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”), international money laundering, and conspiracy to commit both. […] ❞
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said: “Patrick Ho now stands convicted of scheming to pay millions in bribes to foreign leaders in Chad and Uganda, all as part of his efforts to corruptly secure unfair business advantages for a multibillion-dollar Chinese energy company. As the jury’s verdict makes clear, Ho’s repeated attempts to corrupt foreign leaders were not business as usual, but criminal efforts to undermine the fairness of international markets and erode the public’s faith in its leaders.” […]
HO was involved in two bribery schemes to pay top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC China, a Shanghai-based multibillion-dollar conglomerate that operates internationally in multiple sectors, including oil, gas, and banking. At the center of both schemes was HO, the head of a non-governmental organization based in Hong Kong and Arlington, Virginia, the China Energy Fund Committee (the “CEFC NGO”), which held “Special Consultative Status” with the United Nations (“UN”) Economic and Social Council. CEFC NGO was funded by CEFC China.
In the first scheme (the “Chad Scheme”), HO, on behalf of CEFC China, offered a $2 million cash bribe, hidden within gift boxes, to Idriss Déby, the President of Chad, in an effort to obtain valuable oil rights from the Chadian government. In the second scheme (the “Uganda Scheme”), HO caused a $500,000 bribe to be paid, via wires transmitted through New York, New York, to an account designated by Sam Kutesa, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uganda, who had recently completed his term as the President of the UN General Assembly. HO also schemed to pay a $500,000 cash bribe to Yoweri Museveni, the President of Uganda, and offered to provide both Kutesa and Museveni with additional corrupt benefits by “partnering” with them in future joint ventures in Uganda.❞
Analyst's note: Patrick Ho's first action upon leaving jail was to reach out to his lawyer, one Mr. Hunter Biden.
• https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/patrick-ho-former-head-organization-backed-chinese-energy-conglomerate-convicted
• https://bidenlaptopemails.com/biden-emails/email.php?id=20171118-184544_12068
12 December 2018: Two days after Patrick Ho's conviction, Joe Biden calls Hunter Biden saying that he wants to talk to him after reading a New York Times story about Hunter's dealings with Chinese oil giant CEFC. The 2018 New York Times story in question concerned CEFC's chairman Ye Jianming, who had been arrested in China, and his top lieutenant, Patrick Ho, the former Hong Kong Home Secretary who had been convicted in the U.S. for bribing African officials in order to help Iran evade oil sanctions.
1 January 2019: A new law enters effect requiring that all devices using local Kazakh mobile SIM cards be registered with the state (with a few exceptions, like M2M devices and foreign devices roaming in Kazakhstan). The IMEI number of a phone must be tied to either BIN (Business Identification Number) or an ИИН (IIN, Individual Identification Number, which is similar to an American Social Security Number). If a device isn't registered, then mobile operators are instructed by law to stop providing cell service to it.
27 January 2019: The South China Morning Post reports that “China is planning to apply the same technology used to detonate a nuclear bomb over Hiroshima during the second world war to access its massive shale gas reserves in Sichuan province.” While this “exploding wire” doesn't employ a nuclear blast, it does demonstrate that Chinese scientists are, at the very least, going right up to the edge of what would be considered “nuclear fracking,” and talking about it quite openly.
Analyst's note: a regime that's building concentration camps is not a regime that should be allowed to do “nuclear” anything, much less nuclear fracking.
31 January 2019: Reuters reports that Erik Prince plans to build a training center in Xinjiang, the region bordering Kazakhstan where China's built concentration camps. Reuters reports:
❝ Hong Kong-listed Frontier Services Group (FSG), co-founded by former U.S. military services contractor Erik Prince, has signed a deal to build a training base in China’s far western region of Xinjiang, the company said in a statement.
FSG, a security, logistics and insurance provider, signed a deal with the Kashgar Caohu industrial park in southern Xinjiang to build a training centre, FSG said in a Chinese-language statement on its website.
It did not provide details of the project but said a signing ceremony in Beijing on Jan. 11 was attended by officials from Xinjiang’s Tumxuk city and from CITIC Guoan Construction, owned by state-run conglomerate CITIC Group.
FSG will invest 40 million yuan ($6 million) in the centre, which will have the capacity to train 8,000 people a year, state media said in a report.
Prince, deputy chairman of FSG, is a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer and the brother of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. ❞
The deal never materializes, and the next day, to his (very small) credit, Reuters reports:
❝ Former U.S. military contractor Erik Prince had “no knowledge or involvement” in a preliminary memorandum signed by a Hong Kong-listed company to build a training base in China’s far western region of Xinjiang, his spokesman said on Friday. ❞
10 March 2019: Authorities in Almaty, Kazakhstan arrest human rights defender Serikzhan Bilash at around 2:30AM, falsely accusing him “inciting ethnic hatred.” Mr. Bilash had previously struggled to raise the plight of ethnic Kazakhs whom China had disappeared into its vast complex of concentration camps, prisons, and labor camps. Speaking in multiple languages, Bilash had rightly encouraged Muslims worldwide to engage in “information war” against China's genocide-committing regime, stressing that violence is never a solution.
• https://eurasianet.org/kazakhstan-activist-for-xinjiang-kazakhs-arrested-for-alleged-hate-crimes
25 March 2019: In the Southern District of New York, a USD $440M complaint: “CITY OF ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN and BTA BANK JSC, vs FELIX SATER, DANIEL RIDLOFF, BAYROCK GROUP INC., GLOBAL HABITAT SOLUTIONS, INC., RRMI-DR LLC, FERRARI HOLDINGS LLC, and MEM ENERGY PARTNERS LLC.”
While Bayrock is more commonly associated with Felix Sater, Wikepedia describes its founder, Tevfik Arif, thusly (in somewhat broken English which seems as if it may have been written by him or his associates):
❝ Tevfik Arif (Russian: Тофик Арифов; born May 1953), also known as Tofik Arifov, is a Russian/Turkish real estate developer and investor. He is the founder of the Bayrock Group, an international real estate development and investment company based in New York.
Tevfik Arif was born Tofik Arifov in an ethnic Turkish family in Dshambul [today called Jambyl or Zhambyl], [in the] Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. ❞
Donald Trump, Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater at the Trump SoHo launch party in September 2007 © Mark Holden/WireImage
Wikipedia continues:
❝ His family came to Kazakh[s]tan from Meskhetia, Georgia after the ethnic Turkish Meskhetian community were deported by Joseph Stalin in 1944. Arif received an international relations degree from [Moscow State University]. Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Arif worked for the USSR's Ministry of Commerce and Trade for 17 years. He served as the deputy director of its Department of Hotel Management. Arif resigned from the ministry in 1991 and founded Speciality Chemicals Trading Company, an export-import business trading in rare metals, chrome, and raw materials. He then worked as an "agent on the ground" in Kazakhstan for Trans World Group, a natural resources company run by David and Simon Reuben.
In 2001, Arif founded the Bayrock Group, an international real estate and development company. He began developing property in Brooklyn, first redeveloping Loehmann's Seaport Plaza, a waterfront shopping center in Sheepshead Bay. Arif was originally the sole employee of Bayrock, later hiring Felix Sater as managing director.
After moving the Bayrock Group to Trump Tower, Arif developed a relationship with businessman Donald Trump. Trump provided a licensing deal for the Trump SoHo hotel in a joint venture between the Bayrock Group and the Sapir Organisation. In 2007, Bayrock traded future profits from Trump SoHo and other projects in exchange for $50 million in financing from Icelandic company FL Group.
Trump and Bayrock later developed the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Fort Lauderdale. The group were also involved in projects in Europe.
Although the working relationship with Trump ended in 2008, following the housing market collapse, Bayrock came under close scrutiny in the United States due to its dealings with Trump between 2002 and 2011. Nothing out of the ordinary was uncovered, and no official action has been taken against the company. ❞
• PDF https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Sater.pdf
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tevfik_Arif
• https://www.ft.com/content/549ddfaa-5fa5-11e6-b38c-7b39cbb1138a
2 April 2019: Reuters reports the following:
❝ Ukraine’s state oil and gas firm Naftogaz has secured Chinese backing that will open the way to as much as $1 billion in loans and investments, the group said on Tuesday.
Naftogaz said insurance cover from China’s Sinosure would initially be used to allow it to borrow about $160 million for its gas production division to buy Chinese drilling equipment and services.
“At the second stage, another $800 million is planned for additional Naftogaz group projects that will be agreed upon with China in the near future,” Naftogaz said, noting the deal with Sinosure did not require a sovereign guarantee.
Naftogaz is Ukraine’s biggest gas producer and its output accounts for around 75 percent of the country’s total gas production. ❞
Analyst's note: Amos Hochstein (see 29 March 2007 for background) was on Naftogaz's supervisory board when this deal with the concentration camp-building Chinese regime was approved.
Why would Naftogaz need Chinese backing? Why couldn't a Ukranian bank, like PrivatBank, provide the backing?
Here's a likely clue: UkrNafta, an oil company in which US-sanctioned Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky exerts considerable influence, is one of NaftoGaz's affiliates (see 18 April 2019 below).
18 April 2019: Kyiv's District Administrative Court decides behind closed doors that the Ministry of Finance and the National Bank had insufficient legal grounds to declare PrivatBank insolvent… a declaration which led to the bank being taken over by the government in December 2016. PrivatBank was the equivalent of Ukraine's FDIC. “The PrivatBank Affair,” which is what it should be known as, revolves around the alleged laundering of some $470 BILLION dollars (including through Joe Biden's home state of Delaware) and has been described as “the biggest case of money laundering in history.” Multiple intelligence agencies are very clearly implicated and some might even suggest that it's one of several causal factors behind the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Wikipedia provides relevant some background on PrivatBank's founder:
❝ Ihor Valeriyovych Kolomoyskyi (Ukrainian: Ігор Валерійович Коломойський, romanized: Ihor Valereriyovych Kolomoyskyi; Hebrew: איגור קולומויסקי; born 13 February 1963) is an Israeli-Cypriot billionaire businessman, once considered a leading oligarch in his native Ukraine. In 2020, he was indicted in the United States, on charges related to large-scale bank fraud, and in 2022 was deprived of Ukrainian citizenship by President Zelenskyy. Many of Kolomoyski's [[alleged]] assets, particularly ones that were strategic to the Ukrainian state in light of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, including his ownership of Ukraine's largest gasoline companies, were nationalized by the Ukrainian government in November 2022. […]
Kolomoyskyi was born into a Jewish family in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union. Both parents had graduated in engineering. His mother worked at the university and father in a metallurgical plant. Already in his childhood he was considered to be very determined, diligent and serious, was enthusiastic about sports, and liked to play chess [[chess was/is a conduit for intelligence asset cultivation/recruitment]]. Professionally, he followed the example of his parents. After graduating from the Gymnasium 21 in Dnipro with the Komsomol badge “For outstanding school performance,” in 1980 [[thus making him a likely target for intelligence asset cultivation]] he took up graduate studies in engineering at the Leonid Brezhnev Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute (now the National Metallurgical Academy of Ukraine), graduating in 1985. […]
In 1990, with two other graduates from Dnipropetrovsk universities, Gennadiy Bogolyubov and Oleksiy Martynov, Kolomoyskyi created a joint enterprise marketing office equipment bought in Moscow. After the collapse of the USSR, the partners, joined by the son of a major Soviet entrepreneur, Leonid Miloslavsky, began to import foreign goods — from sneakers and sportswear to telephones. To pay for the imports, Kolomoyskyi arranged the export of steel products. Soon they realized the greater profits to be made in internationally trading the locally sourced ores and metal. Among other operations, their Privat group supplied fuel to the mining company Pokrovsky (Ordzhonikidzevsky) GOK, receiving in return manganese ore for export. [[Analyst: this sounds like the beginning of a securitization/forward-financing ponzi scheme… likely the first of many major crimes.]] […]
In March 1992, the four companies of the Privat Group established Privatbank CJSC. Unlike state-owned banks, Privat willingly served private entrepreneurs and in 1995 participated aggressively in the voucher scheme for the privatization of state assets. With the blessing of Prime Minister Leonid Kuchma (also from Dnipro, and whose successful presidential campaign in 1994 Kolomoyskyi and his partners later funded), PrivatBank was also the only Ukrainian lender to receive permission from the National Bank of Ukraine to open overseas branches. One branch in Latvia, established in 1992, was later implicated in the 2014 Moldovan bank fraud scandal. The operations of a second, opened in the late 1990s in Cyprus, helped precipitate the nationalization of PrivatBank in 2016. [[One should also note that Kolomoyskyi's fellow Lubavitcher, Victor Pinchuk, is Leonid Kuchma's son-in-law.]]❞
Swedish economist Anders Åsland (generally a good source), writing for the (state- and corporate-funded and therefore sometimes unreliable) Atlantic Council, explains a bit more how the situation has developed:
❝ On 21 May 2019, the nationalized Ukrainian PrivatBank filed a remarkable civil case against its prior owners Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov in the state court of Delaware. [[Deleware. Interesting.]] The three co-defendants are US citizens in Miami and nineteen anonymous companies.
The defendants are accused “for hundreds of millions of dollars of damages arising in connection with claims for… unjust enrichment, for fraudulent transfer under state laws (including Delaware and Ohio), for violations of Ohio’s [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations] statute, and for civil conspiracy” (p. 2).
The most striking statement is “From 2006 through December 2016, the total movement of funds (credits) into the [ultimate beneficiary owners’] laundering at PrivatBank Cyprus was $470 billion, which amounts to approximately double the Gross Domestic Product of Cyprus during the same period” (p. 77). If this is true, this is the biggest case of money laundering in history, and it has been perpetrated by one single group. ❞
Per Kreller Consulting:
❝ The complaint, which arose after the bank’s 2016 nationalization, in the wake of its fraud-induced near collapse, offers a unique window into the 4-step process by which a financial institution’s funds can be stolen by its principals, obscured through a labyrinthine laundering process, funneled into offshore commercial assets, and the whole process hidden through a system of loan recycling. […] In step three the laundered money originally acquired through “general corporate financing” loans, was channeled to a group of related Delaware LLCs and used to purchase commercial assets in the United States […] contravening the stated purpose of the loans.❞ (Analyst: Kreller's entire breakdown of the 4-step process should be read.)
Analyst's note: one doesn't simply launder billions of dollars through Delaware shell companies without paying “10% for the big guy.” Racketeering — serving as the point man for what's essentially a money-laundering protection racket being run by people who have abused their privileged positions in the intelligence community and in elected office — isn't possible if you let some people pay and let some people skate. Of course, compensation has to be far removed from the illicit activity. The way you do that is by arranging for a board seat or another perk for your patron or one of their family members.
Even though Ukrainian Zelensky has recently turned against Kolomoyskyi, depriving him in 2022 of Ukrainian citizenship (a small penalty), he's long been considered Kolomoyskyi's man. A Politico piece from 2019, explains the situation well:
❝ Ukrainians hope that Zelenskiy will fight for the common man instead. It’s a powerful narrative that has catapulted this political unknown within spitting distance of the presidency. There’s just one major problem with it: the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, whose television station 1+1 hosts Zelenskiy’s hit show. Kolomoisky’s media outlet also provides security and logistical backup for the comedian’s campaign, and it has recently emerged that Zelenskiy’s legal counsel, Andrii Bohdan, was the oligarch’s personal lawyer. Investigative journalists have also reported that Zelenskiy traveled 14 times in the past two years to Geneva and Tel Aviv, where Kolomoisky is based in exile. Neither man could be reached for comment. ❞
It gets more interesting. On 18 May 2019, (perhaps not realizing that he was referring to a person who might be described as “a load-bearing oligarch”) Rudy Giuliani sent out a tweet asking if Zelensky would have Ihor Kolomoisky arrested. Three days later, on 21 May 2019, Giuliani was photographed with Kolomoiskyi's rabbi, the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine (more on that later), Moshe Azman, in Paris while smoking cigars… the same day PrivatBank filed that aforementioned remarkable civil case against its prior owners, Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov, in the state court of Delaware.
Two days after that, on 23 May 2019, Kolomoisky threatened Rudy Giuliani with a big scandal. The exact events are unclear, but it would appear that Giuliani didn't understand that Azman's loyalty was to the man whom he just said Zelensky should have arrested. Azman confirmed that loyalty on 19 October 2019, when he decried an effigy of Kolomoyskyi as being anti-Semitic… even though many Jews in Ukraine don't like him — with his French champagne and Swiss chalets (no offense against Swiss chalets) — and would probably agree with the Catholic Giuliani and with the FBI that he's a criminal.
Analyst's note: in rare cases, Chabad-Lubavitchers such as Kolomoyskyi sometimes perpetrate their frauds by corrupting their religious authorities (buying them off) and by exploiting their own communities (as is probably sometimes the case with the application of Sharia law by Muslim jurists, etc.). In other words, Kolomoyskyi's donations to the Chabad-Lubavitcher community may not have been altruistic in nature (see the right-hand column), but rather may have been a means to bribe religious authorities.
A full explanation is beyond the scope of this document, but a Jewish “beth din” is sometimes used within the Orthodox Jewish community to resolve civil disputes. The Shulkhan Arukh (Code of Jewish Law) calls for civil cases to be resolved by religious, instead of secular, courts (arka'oth). This is why its rare (but not unheard of) for matters of inheritance and divorce for these particular communities to make their way into secular, civil courts, and why so much (dis-)organized crime gravitates towards post-Soviet states. One could, of course, make a strong and compelling case that secular jurists in many countries, including in America, are far more compromised than religious ones (don't get me started), but *if* the use of private religious arbitration is a factor in the Kolomoiskyi case, as it appears to be (given the Giuliani meeting with Rabbi Azman), then it would be important to determine which *other* rabbi(s) might have an interest in cases concerning him and Ukraine's nationalization of PrivatBank.
Writing for Forward in 2017, Nathan Guttman explains the background of the rabbinical dispute in the Russia/Ukraine war:
❝ In the hyper-sensitive international atmosphere surrounding Russia’s 2014 forceful annexation of Crimea, even a name tag can create a crisis. (Analyst: name tags can indeed be sensitive issues.)
This lesson was learned by Chabad-Lubavitch, the Brooklyn-based Haredi group which convened its annual emissaries conference in New Jersey on November 19. Among the 5,600 emissaries, or shluchim, from across the world attending the convention was Rabbi Binyamin Wolf, the Chabad representative in Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city. His name tag, however, identified him as being from Sevastopol, Russia.
This was not lost on the Russian press, which viewed Rabbi Wolf’s name tag as recognition, on behalf of the largest Jewish organization active in Russia and the former Soviet Union, of the legitimacy of Russia’s occupation of Crimea. ❞
Is Crimea part of Russia or Ukraine? If PrivatBank was essentially functioning like Ukraine's FDIC — while engaged in a massive money laundering operation sprawling through Delaware — then one can see how PrivatBank's assets in Crimea (or at least Kolomoisky's own personal assets in Crimea) might become an issue for religious authorities.
If Kolomoiskyi “owns” Zelensky (through kompromot or otherwise) and if he's mediating his fraud though Rabbi Azman, then the issue of who, exactly, the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine is — and who the Chief Rabbi of Crimea therefore is — might actually be quite consequential for Ukraine.
Analyst's note: phrased another way: does Zelensky run Ukraine? Or does his rabbi, Moshe Azman? Or is it his rabbi's benefactor, Kolomoyskyi? Or is it his rabbi's benefactor's creditors, perhaps in Russia (or even in China)?
Kolomoyskyi has been a prominent figure in both Ukraine's organized crime scene and in its organized Jewish community for decades. Explaining the intricacies of Jewish Hasidim and Chabad-Lubavitcher oligarchs is (far) beyond the scope of this timeline, however Wikipedia provides this good summary of the narrow bit relating to Kolomoyskyi:
❝ In 2008, he was elected the President of “the United Jewish community of Ukraine” in Kyiv. He became a major funder in Ukraine of the Chabad movement, which has Ukrainian roots.
In 2012, with Gennady Bogolubov and Victor Pinchuk (a friend of the Clintons and Adam Schiff), he financed construction of what purports to be the largest multifunctional Jewish Community Center in Europe, the Menorah Centre, in downtown Dnipro. Comprising seven marble towers (of which the highest is 20 stories) arranged in the shape of a menorah, it houses a synagogue, two hotels, kosher restaurant and grocery store and Jewish Memory and Holocaust Museum.
In 2010 in Berlin, after promising the outgoing president he would donate $14 million, Kolomoyskyi was appointed as the president of the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC). Some western European ECJC board members described his elevation as a “putsch” and a “Soviet-style takeover.” After several resigned in protest, Kolomoyskyi quit the ECJC and, together with fellow Ukrainian oligarch Vadim Rabinovich, founded the European Jewish Union in April 2011.
Launched by Kolomoyskyi and Rabinovich at Disneyland Paris (because of course), the EJU subsequently styled itself the European Jewish Parliament. Modelled on the Israeli Knesset with 120 members, its declared aim is to represent the concerns of the Jewish community to the European Union. The Brussels-based initiative, with which Kolymoyski no longer appears to be associated, has been opposed by much of the established Jewish community leadership.❞
The American: Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich
Per Wikipedia: ❝ [Rabbi] Yaakov Dov Bleich (born October 19, 1964) is an American-born [Brooklyn native] [Orthodox] rabbi, and [proclaims himself to have been the] Chief Rabbi [of] Kyiv and Ukraine since 1989 [[a title also claimed by Rabbi Azman]]. Rabbi Bleich was vice-president of the World Jewish Congress from 2009-2017. Rabbi Bleich chose not to run for re-election as a member of the WJC Executive Committee at the WJC’s May 2021 plenary assembly. ❞
A member of the Karlin-Stoliner Hassidic community, he attended Telshe Yeshiva in Chicago, appears to be an opponent of corruption (judging by his Wikipedia entry), and supposedly has good relations with the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches. He was, most recently, also the Treasurer of the European Jewish Congress (an affiliate of the World Jewish Congress).
Analyst's note: without getting too deep into the history of the World Jewish Congress, being its vice-president (and later, its treasurer) is a credential which is fairly significant, but Bleich was never elected to the position of being Chief Rabbi of Ukraine. It's a title, as far as the analyst can tell, based on his high profile, self-proclamation, and community consensus.
In 2022, Rabbi Bleich was accused of sexual misconduct by the Board of Deputies of British Jews (yes, British Jews) but not prosecuted for said conduct by civil authorities… which is why he didn't run again in 2021. (It may also be the case, one might speculate, that he was a very bad treasurer for the World Jewish Congress, headed by Ronald Lauder since 2007.) He still proclaims himself Chief Rabbi of Ukraine, though.
These dueling claims to being the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine likely play a far more significant role in the current crisis in Ukraine than is realized by non-Jews.
Settling inter-rabbinical disputes is far beyond the scope of this document, but suffice it to say that one of the areas of dispute likely involves who should properly be called the “real” Chief Rabbi of Crimea… is it Rabbi Bleich, is it Rabbi Azman, or is it Rabbi Lazar? Trick question: it doesn't actually matter since Jesus Christ is the Chief Rabbi of everywhere, but I digress.
The Soviet: Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman
Per Wikipedia: ❝ Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman (born in Leningrad/Saint Petersburg in 13 March 1966) is an Orthodox Rabbi [who proclaims himself to be] the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine [[a title also claimed by Rabbi Bleich]]. Rabbi Moshe Azman is an influential figure in Ukraine, an outspoken opponent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 Rabbi Azman [[a Kolomoiskyi ally]] was born in 1966 in Leningrad [[Saint Petersburg]]. Rabbi Azman's mother's family was Chabad and his father's family was Litvish. He is married to the daughter of Zusya Hirsh Lyubarsky, a shochet from Kharkiv. Rabbi Azman was active in the refusenik movement since his youth and received ordination as a shochet (ritual slaughterer) when he was 18. In 1982, the central communist newspaper Pravda, reporting on Jewish refusenik activities in Leningrad, referred to him as “An enemy of Soviet Power” [[which actually means he was likely an informant for the KGB]] . In 1987, he received permission from the Soviet government to leave the USSR [[which is exactly the *opposite* of what the KGB would allow if he had been an actual “enemy of Soviet Power,” rather than an agent of Soviet Power sent to Israel]]. He immigrated to Israel where he studied in a Chabad yeshiva. He worked as a secretary in “Beit Chabad for Russian Jews” in Israel during the Russian aliyah of 1991, helping Russian-Jewish immigrants adjust to Israel life in Israel and reconnect to Judaism [[we can assume Beit Chabad for Russian Jews is probably an organization that he to used place KGB assets in Israel]]. Rabbi Azman also helped with bringing Ukrainian-Jewish children of Chernobyl to Israel so that they could receive medical and psychological rehabilitation. ❞
Analyst's note: while Azman is today publicly considered Ukraine's Chief Rabbi as far as non-Jewish sources go, in 2005, the Jerusalem Post noted that he was only technically elected by two Jewish communities led by (Kolomoiskyi ally) Vadim Rabinovich — the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress and the United Jewish Community of Ukraine — and that most rabbis rejected him in favor of Bleich (who had never been elected).
In 2019, Azman urged Ukraininan authorities to quickly find and punish men who supposedly threw Nazi salutes before leaving a red-paint splattered effigy of Igor Kolomoiskyi on the steps of Kiev's main synagogue. Presumably they weren't hired by Kolomoyskyi himself, or Rabbi Azman would've told us that, right?
Right?!
The Russian: Rabbi Yechezkel Lazar
Rabbi Yechezkel Lazar (right) is the son of Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar (left), who serves as the Chief Rabbi of Russia — excluding the federal prison service and the Russian Armed Forces — and chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia and Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS. In September 2005 Lazar became a member of the Public Chamber of Russia. Because of his connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin he is sometimes called “Putin's rabbi.”
On 8 October 2017 (18 Tishrei 5778) the MiceTimes reported that “the Jewish community of Simferopol celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year and Yom Kippur, the Day of absolution, together with a new spiritual leader.”
JewishPress.com picked up the story, and reported that “the Chief Rabbi’s son and his wife have visited Crimea several times since the 2014 invasion, and each time were bombarded with requests from local Jews to establish a Chabad House there.”
Rabbi Yechezkiya Chaim Chizkiya Medini (1813-1905) was the Chief Rabbi of Tsarist Crimea for 33 years before he was allegedly expelled, moving to Jerusalem.
On 18 November 2021 (14 Kislev 5782), Anash.org reported that workers in Lugorsk had discovered Jewish symbols inside a building from the mid 19th century. They go on to report that the building was probably a synagogue in which famed Rabbi Chaim Chizkiyahu Medini used to daven. Most shuls in the Crimean peninsula had been ruined at the start of World War II, when the Red Army bombed the area in order to stop the Nazis from advancing.
Upon discovery of the Jewish elements, “the authorities turned to the Rabbi of Crimea, Rabbi Yechezkel Lazar, who, in consultation with his father, the Chief Rabbi of Russia, Rabbi Berel Lazar, reached an agreement with the local administration to renovate the place while respecting and preserving all Jewish symbols.”
Analyst's note: having studied Chabadniks for some time, one would guess that the alleged connection to Rabbi Chaim Chizkiyahu Medini might be fabricated by Russian intelligence. Nevertheless, this “discovery” and his handling of it sets Yechezkel Lazar up nicely for reviving the title of “Chief Rabbi of Crimea” at some later point.
The Retiree: Rabbi Azriel Chaikin
Lest you think that the confusion is settled: there's one other (still living) Chief Rabbi of Ukraine (although he publicly abandoned the “Chief Rabbi of Ukraine” title in 2008 when he moved to Brooklyn, can we be sure he abandoned it privately?)… the Soviet-born (now possibly Brussels-based) Rabbi Azriel Chaikin (now somewhere around 92 years old), who was proclaimed chief rabbi by dozens of Chabad rabbis working for the Federation of Jewish Communities in Ukraine — the Ukrainian Chabad group aligned with Russia's Berel Lazar — back in 2003. Chaikin was born in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1931, where his father, Meri Chaim Chaikin, had served as an envoy of the sixth Chabad-Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, who was known as the “Frierdiker” or “previous” rebbe (shown on right wearing an expression that can't be described in English, but that's best approximated as “what on Earth am I going to do with you people?”).
Chaiken could likely clarify many things, especially as they relate to Kolomoyskyi — and the Schneersohn Library, which is an entirely separate-but-related (and honestly rather ridiculous) issue — but this analyst would caution anyone seeking to understand the full depth of Kolomoyskyi's corruption of the Hasidim to be careful, as four rabbis will yield, at a minimum, six different perspectives… which, again — as far as מָשִׁיחַ is concerned — will all be wrong.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrivatBank
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihor_Kolomoyskyi
• https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/how-kolomoisky-does-business-in-the-united-states/
• https://www.politico.eu/article/volodomyr-zelenskiy-ihor-kolomoisky-the-comedian-and-the-oligarch-ukraine-presidential-election/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaakov_Bleich
• https://khpg.org/en/1608810144
• https://www.timesofisrael.com/leading-ukraine-rabbi-denies-sexual-misconduct-allegations/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moshe_Reuven_Azman
• https://jpost.com/jewish-world/jewish-news/election-of-third-chief-rabbi-in-ukraine-splits-jewish-community
• https://www.timesofisrael.com/ukraines-chief-rabbi-sounds-alarm-over-jewish-tycoons-effigy/
• https://forward.com/news/388476/how-a-name-tag-dragged-chabad-into-the-russia-ukraine-debate/
• https://micetimes.asia/rabbi-lazar-moved-to-the-crimea/
• https://www.jewishpress.com/news/global/russia/son-of-chabad-chief-rabbi-of-russia-moves-to-annexed-crimea/2017/10/08/
• https://www.jewishhistory.org/the-chief-rabbi-of-crimea/
• https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-699052
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azriel_Chaikin
• https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-720658
8 May 2019: U.S. President Donald Trump orders new sanctions on Iran, this time targeting its industrial metals sector, hours after Tehran says it will no longer fully comply with a landmark nuclear deal already ditched by Washington.
France24 reports:
❝ “The announcement was made on the anniversary of the Trump administration's unilateral withdrawal from the 2015 agreement between Tehran and world powers, under which the Islamic Republic agreed to curb its nuclear program in exchange for easing some sanctions. It came just hours after Tehran said it would no longer fully comply with the accord if its remaining signatories — Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia — did not make good on promises to shield its oil and banking sectors from [U.S.] sanctions.” ❞
• https://www.france24.com/en/20190508-trump-nuclear-iran-sanctions-france-escalation
16 May 2019: China formally arrests two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, on national security grounds, having taking them into custody on 10 December 2018, falsely accusing them of gathering and stealing “sensitive information and other intelligence” since 2017.
Author's note: China's formal arrest of the two Canadians (16 May 2019) is 8 days after Trump's new sanctions on Iran (8 May 2019), while their initial informal detention, 10 December 2018, was five days after Patrick Ho was convicted (see 5 December 2018) and two days before Joe Biden called Hunter Biden about the NYT's Patrick Ho/CEFC story (see 12 December 2018). In other words, these cases, which are often tied linearly to the Meng Wanzhou/Huawei case by legacy media reporters, are much more likely tied to Iran (it isn't a coincidence that Kovrig's boss was Obama's JCPOA negotiator) and the Patrick Ho/CEFC case implicating Hunter than the Meng Wanzhou case in isolation (which itself was also linked to the Iran deal).
3 June 2019: The "Nuclear Society of Kazakhstan" trade association issues a press release stating that Kazatomprom and China National Nuclear Corporation Discuss Cooperation. From the press release:
❝ JSC National Atomic Company “Kazatomprom” (“Kazatomprom” or “the Company”) announces today that Chief Executive Officer Galymzhan Pirmatov met with the Chairman of the Board of Directors of China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), Yu Jianfeng. The meeting was held during the Chinese delegation’s working visit to Kazakhstan, with a wide range of topics discussed in relation to activites involving the peaceful use of atomic energy. ❞
9 June 2019: Following the resignation of Nursultan Nazarbayev, acting President Kassym-Jomart Kemeluly Tokayev wins Kazakhstan’s June 9 presidential election, receiving 70.96% of the vote (6,539,715 votes), according to Kazakhstan's Central Election Commission (CEC) member Lyazzat Suleimen at a June 10 CEC briefing on the election's results. Three days later, on 12 June, he's sworn in.
Originally scheduled for April 2020, when President Nursultan Nazarbayev's fifth term was set to expire, the snap elections were announced on 9 April 2019 as taking place on 9 June 2019, shortly after president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev assumed office as Acting President, following Nazarbayev's resignation amidst anti-government protests.
Wikipedia describes Tokayev's relevant background as follows:
❝ From 1970, Tokayev attended the Moscow State Institute of International Relations where he studied Mandarin. In his fifth year, Tokayev was sent to training courses at the Soviet embassy in China for six months.
Upon graduation from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1975, Tokayev joined the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs where he was posted to the Soviet Embassy in Singapore.
In 1979, Tokayev returned to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1983, he went to China for training courses at the Beijing Language Institute. In 1984–1985, he served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was then posted to the Soviet embassy in Beijing where he served until 1991 as Second Secretary, First Secretary, and Counsellor. In 1991, he enrolled at the Soviet Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow for a training course towards senior diplomats. ❞
Analyst's note: it's safe to assume that President Tokayev is someone intimately familiar with both Russian and Chinese intelligence. Or rather, someone with whom both countries' intelligence services are intimately familiar.
14 June 2019: Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping meets Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The Chinese readout mentions the following:
❝ Xi Jinping stressed that China and Iran should strengthen strategic communication and support each other on issues concerning each other's core interests. We need to strengthen coordination and integration and carry out practical cooperation in a steady manner. […] Hassan Rouhani said that Iran-china relations are of long-term strategic importance. The Iranian side attaches great importance and is committed to developing relations with China in an all-round way, and is willing to actively participate in jointly building the Belt and Road Initiative and tap into the potential of bilateral cooperation in a wide range of areas. The Iranian side firmly opposes the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the JCPOA, speaks highly of China's positive role in international affairs and is ready to strengthen communication and coordination with the Chinese side. ❞
24 June 2019: Authorities in Kazakhstan are forced to evacuate tens of thousands of people from a town next to a military ammunition depot. Satellite imagery of the town of Arys, in the southern Turkestan region, shows smoke from the blast spreading across a vast area, spanning 90 kilometers by 45 kilometers.
“One civilian and one serviceman” were killed and 165 patients sought treatment, Kazakh Prime Minister Askar Mamin later announces.
24 June 2019: After 7 years, Canadian media again reports on the case of exiled/fugitive former Kazatomprom VP Rustem Tursunbayev. From the article:
❝ A Kazakh multimillionaire wanted for embezzlement in his homeland has been awarded $203,000 in costs after the Federal Court found Canadian officials guilty of abusing the legal process in fighting the man’s request to stop the deportation proceeding against him.
The compensation to Rustem Tursunbayev is believed to be the largest monetary award for costs ordered in an [sic] single immigration case by the court, said Lorne Waldman, one of the man’s three lawyers.
Tursunbayev was apprehended in the Greater Toronto Area in 2012 after Interpol sought his arrest based on accusations of fraud, counterfeiting and organized crime by Kazakh authorities. He was released from Toronto West Detention Centre and placed under strict house arrest for years. He is no longer under house arrest and does not have guards watching him. ❞
Analyst's note: a reassuring detail, since the previous piece on his apprehension made very clear that he had guards watching him around the clock (see 26 June 2012).
28 June 2019: According to former National Security Advisor John Bolton, at the 2019 G20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, President Donald Trump reportedly expresses approval of concentration camps for Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, China (East Turkistan) during a private meeting with Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes the meeting this way:
❝ Donald Trump said that it was a great pleasure to meet with President Xi Jinping again. My visit to China in 2017, which was the most enjoyable one I ever had, still remains fresh in my memory. I saw with my own eyes the very remarkable Chinese civilization and the very great achievements China had made. I harbor no hostility towards China and hope bilateral relations will be even better. I value the good relations with President Xi Jinping and would like to strengthen cooperation with China. Donald Trump said that the US side and the Chinese side will work hard in accordance with the principles and direction set by the two heads of state to jointly promote the US-China relations based on coordination, cooperation and stability, and believed the meeting between the two heads of state will give a strong boost to the development of US-China relations. […]
On issues concerning China's sovereignty (read: “East Turkistan, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan” or, if you're a Communist, “Xinjiang, Xizang, Xianggang, and Zhongguo Taipei”) and dignity, China must safeguard its core interests. As the world's two largest economies, China and the US will eventually have to find a mutually acceptable solution to their differences through dialogue and consultation. ❞
Analyst's note: with such a positive view of the CCP's definition of “Chinese civilization,” should anybody wonder why Donald Trump signed a trade agreement with the Chinese Communist Party-state, or why he never mentioned the Uyghurs in any meaningful way (hewing closely to respecting China's “red lines”), or why he waited until the very last moment of his Presidency to allow Secretary Pompeo's State Department to label China's actions as constituting genocide? There's a real misconception that Donald Trump was tough on China. Many people in his administration were very tough on China, but he was not.
Forbes reports that “the Chinese government granted a total of 41 trademarks to companies linked to Ivanka Trump by April of 2019 — and the trademarks she applied for after her father became president got approved about 40% faster than those she requested before Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, according to a new book by Forbes’ senior editor Dan Alexander.” Should anyone be surprised that Ivanka tagged along to Osaka a few months later?
7 August 2019: Kazakhstan temporarily halts the implementation of an internet surveillance system criticized by lawyers and human rights defenders as illegal, with the government describing its initial rollout as “a test.” (Key word: “temporarily.”)
21 August 2019: Mozilla and Google issue a joint announcement saying that “the companies deployed technical solutions within Firefox and Chrome to block the Kazakhstan government's ability to intercept Internet traffic within the country.” Each company says they're deploying “a technical solution unique to its browser.” Apple tells Ars Technica that they, too, are blocking the Kazakh government's ability to incept traffic using an automatically-installed malicious root certificate.
Analyst's note: the interception technology being used is unlikely to have been developed by the Kazakh government or even by a Kazakh company. Fearing the ramifications for human rights if that data fell into the hands of Russia or China (the two nations most likely to have supplied this tech to the Kazakhs), this author has endeavored to determine which company was the supplier.
23 August 2019: “Unsealed Filings Detail Felix Sater’s Work as an Intelligence Asset, with Significant Gaps.”
18 September 2019: “Court Suspends NY Lawyer Who Filed Sealed Info on Felix Sater.”
September 2019: Leaked video shows the forced transfer of hundreds of blindfolded detainees, with heads shaved (just as was done in Nazi extermination camps) onto “Holocaust trains” in Xinjiang, China (East Turkistan) — the region bordering Kazakhstan — many of whom are likely ethnic Kazakhs. President Donald Trump and candidate Joe Biden say nothing in response.
18 October 2019: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) takes delivery of the first shipment of low-enriched uranium (LEU) at a purpose-built storage facility at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant in eastern Kazakhstan. The delivery marks the official start of operation of the IAEA LEU Bank, aimed at providing assurance to countries about the availability of nuclear fuel. World Nuclear News reports:
❝ Last November the IAEA announced that, following an open tender, it had signed contracts to purchase LEU from Kazakhstan's NAC Kazatomprom and France's Orano Cycle. The IAEA noted the procurement was its largest since the Agency was founded in 1957. ❞
World Nuclear News continues:
❝ The first LEU shipment, from France's Orano Cycle, was transported by truck to a French port, then shipped to Russia and subsequently transported to Kazakhstan by train. The entire journey took four weeks to complete. The shipment comprised 32 cylinders of LEU — sufficient for one reload of fuel for a typical light water reactor.
“With the arrival of the first shipment, the IAEA LEU Bank is now established and operational," declared IAEA Acting Director General Cornel Feruta. "It is the first time the Agency has undertaken a project of this legal, operational and logistical complexity.” […]
Other assurance of supply mechanisms established with IAEA approval include a guaranteed physical reserve of LEU maintained by Russia at the International Uranium Enrichment Centre in Angarsk, Russia, and an assurance of supply guarantee for supplies of LEU enrichment services in the UK. The USA also operates its own LEU reserve. ❞
Analyst's note: although this first shipment is from France's Orano, there's some slight-of-hand here, as the IAEA is “taking delivery” for much of this LEU from Kazatomprom, which is basically… well, right next door. Kazatomprom hosts the bank and also supplies it, after all. In other words, France could've sent it to Kazatomprom (after sending it on a boat to Russia, which, again, is a very ill-conceived supply chain, with the generous benefit of hindsight, presuming the French lack all semblance of foresight) — but they understandably wouldn't do that, as that would commingle French LEU with Kazakh LEU — which for all we know, might itself be commingled with Iranian LEU… LEU destined, one presumes, for China (and from there, who knows? America?). It's all a rather strange arrangement, with Orano LEU, Kazatomprom LEU, and the IAEA all under one roof — une ménage à trois nucléaire — but the allure, if one ignores the placement of the bank, does perhaps make sense in warm and fuzzy diplomatic terms, although not in cold and calculated geostrategic energy security terms, which is how the United States and our Allies need to begin approaching these issues.
• https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/IAEA-fuel-bank-receives-first-delivery-of-uranium
24 October 2019: “Hunter Biden’s 2016 legal work in Romania raises new questions about his overseas dealings” (see KazMunaiGaz/CEFC).
• https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/24/hunter-bidens-legal-work-in-romania-raises-new-questions.html
5 December 2019: Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Laura Drager hits Felix Sater with USD $14K/mo in alimony payments to his ex-wife, Viktoria Sater.
• https://nypost.com/2019/12/05/former-trump-associate-felix-sater-must-pay-14k-a-month-to-ex-judge/
5 January 2020: Two days after the assassination of Iranian General Qasim Soleimani, Iran's Mehr News Agency reports that "the Islamic Republic of Iran, in the fifth step in reducing its commitments, discards the last key component of its operational limitations in the JCPOA, which is the ‘limit on the number of centrifuges.’ […] As such, the Islamic Republic of Iran's nuclear program no longer faces any operational restrictions, including enrichment capacity, percentage of enrichment, amount of enriched material, and research and development. From here on, Iran's nuclear program will be developed solely based on its technical needs.”
15 January 2020: The BBC World Service's Heart and Soul program profiles Kazakhs who spent time in Chinese concentration camps.
21 February 2020: “Court Vacates Suspension of Lawyer Who Filed Sealed Info on Felix Sater.”
19 March 2020: Authorities in Kazakhstan release former uranium czar and head of Kazatomprom, Mukhtar Dzakishev, from prison.
• https://www.rferl.org/a/former-uranium-tycoon-dzhakishev-released-from-kazakh-prison/30496808.html
30 March 2020: President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have a lengthy conversation about oil markets and trade during a call initiated by the U.S. Per Reuters, “the presidents agreed for Russian and U.S. energy ministers to hold consultations on global oil markets. They also agreed to continue their dialogue at a personal level, the Kremlin said in a readout of the call.”
2 April 2020: Days after the Trump/Putin call, wealthy Chechen businessman Umar Dzhabrailov is hospitalized at the Sklifosofsky Institute after allegedly suddenly attempting suicide. Reports from the time indicate that he had “hand injuries” and allegedly tried to bandage the wounds before calling authorities.
Analyst's note: it sounds like somebody may have wanted their blackmailer dead (and somebody else was too kind and decent to do that). Of course, Dzhabrailov wasn't the blackmailer; Putin was. (The proper way to have handled this would've been to build overriding leverage on the Russians and any interlocutors, which wouldn't have been hard.) PS: Putin supported Biden in the 2020 election. Stick that in your assessment and smoke it.
May 2020: The U.S. State Department releases a factsheet explaining China's Military-Civil Fusion strategy, stating:
❝ “Military-Civil Fusion,” or MCF, is an aggressive, national strategy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Its goal is to enable the PRC to develop the most technologically advanced military in the world. As the name suggests, a key part of MCF is the elimination of barriers between China's civilian research and commercial sectors, and its military and defense industrial sectors. The CCP is implementing this strategy, not just through its own research and development efforts, but also by acquiring and diverting the world’s cutting-edge technologies – including through theft – in order to achieve military dominance. […]
Key technologies being targeted under MCF include quantum computing, big data, semiconductors, 5G, advanced nuclear technology, aerospace technology, and AI. The PRC specifically seeks to exploit the inherent ‘dual-use’ nature of many of these technologies, which have both military and civilian applications. ❞
Analyst's note: this is particularly important as it relates to Kazakhstan's Kazatomprom, Russia's Rosatom, and China's state-owned nuclear enterprises, especially China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), and one of its subsidiaries, Nuctech (more on Nuctech later), which it partially owns (alongside Tsinghua Tongfan) (see 27 August 2022).
• PDF https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/What-is-MCF-One-Pager.pdf
16 June 2020: Twitter hires Jim Baker, who had previously served as general counsel at the Federal Bureau of Investigation for four years (until January 2018) as its deputy general counsel. The Reuters wire story notes: “Baker, who has also held various roles at the Department of Justice including as counsel for intelligence policy, joins Twitter, which was recently in the spotlight when President Donald Trump signed an executive order on social media companies after he had attacked the company for tagging some of his tweets with a warning that prompted users to fact-check the posts.”
Analyst's note: a sensible policy, if used sparingly; an insane policy, if used liberally.
2 July 2020: Iran confirms an incident at the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant, which it describes later as an act of sabotage causing “significant damage.” Experts estimate that the blast sets Iran's nuclear program back by year.
20 July 2020: The United States imposes sanctions on Russian GRU asset Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov, his wife, and his two daughters. Kadyrov is a (surprisingly diminutive) Russian and Chechen politician currently serving as the Head of the Chechen Republic. He was formerly a member of the Chechen independence movement and is a lieutenant general in the Russian military.
As Chechnya’s blood-soaked leader, Kadyrov has overseen (and denied the existence of) anti-gay purges in Chechnya. These purges have included enforced disappearances — secret abductions, imprisonment, torture — and extrajudicial killings by authorities targeting persons based on their perceived sexual orientation, with the primary targets being gay men. At least 2 people have reportedly died after being held in what human rights groups and eyewitnesses have called concentration camps.
Analyst's note: interestingly, Ramzan Kadyrov is close friends with Kenes Rakishev, pictured in the introduction with Joe and Hunter Biden (see 3 May 2022).
30 July 2020: Details of a 25-year strategic partnership agreement between Iran and China leak on Persian social media; the agreement calls for China to invest USD $400 billion in Iran's energy, telecommunications, infrastructure, ports, railways and other sectors in exchange for Tehran's supplying Beijing with a heavily discounted supply of oil over the following 25 years.
Analyst's note: some rumors about the agreement include the possiblity that Iran might transfer control of Kish Island, in whole or in part, to the Chinese regime. Kish is a crown jewel of the Persian Gulf.
7 August 2020: Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden says he opposes uranium mining around the Grand Canyon, citing importance to tribes.
Analyst's note: while naÏve commentators might observe that such a policy is a boon to the environment, those reading this timeline are less blind to reality. Biden's policy helps other uranium-producing and/or -processing nations, especially ones which don't have as good a record on human rights as nations like the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, and France… nations like Russia, China, and Kazakhstan. Who could've been responsible for it? Who could've advised Biden to strangle America's uranium capacity production? And why?
(This was one of Biden's signals to the Russians and Chinese to corner the uranium markets and to support him in every inconspicuous way possible; another was in pledging to re-enter into the Paris Agreement “on day one,” clearly telegraphing to them how they should place their long-dated bets — against America's energy industrial base — in energy markets. Trump had been pushing to open the Grand Canyon to resource development, which would've benefited all Americans, including Native Americans, immensely… but I digress.)
18 August 2020: The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence releases the selectively-redacted Part 5 of their report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Part 5 details the part of the Counterintelligence report; “Kazakhstan” is mentioned 13 times in the unredacted report, while “Deripaska” is mentioned 340 times, “Sater” is mentioned 479 times.
• PDF https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf
16 September 2020: Journalist John Solomon reveals that the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) turned over Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to Senate investigators which flagged several foreign transactions to Hunter Biden-connected businesses as “suspicious.”
Analyst's note: the lawful release of these Biden-related Suspicious Activity Reports to Senate investigators may have prompted the FinCEN Files, which were released on 15 October 2020 and designed to paint Trump in a negative light. Nobody's been held responsible for that leak, which suggests members of the Senior Executive Service (SES) may have been involved.
23 September 2020: Senators Ron Johnson (R-OH) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) release a report on their conflicts-of-interest investigation into Hunter Biden, alleging millions of dollars in questionable financial transactions between Hunter Biden and his associates and foreign individuals, including the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and individuals with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Included in their press release are the following specific allegations:
In early 2015 former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, George Kent raised concerns to officials in Vice President Joe Biden’s office about the perception of a conflict of interest with respect to Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board. Kent’s concerns went unaddressed and in September 2016, he emphasized in an email to his colleagues, “Furthermore, the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.”
In October 2015, senior State Department official Amos Hochstein raised concerns with Vice President Biden, as well as with Hunter Biden, that Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board enabled Russian disinformation efforts and risked undermining U.S. policy in Ukraine.
Hunter Biden was serving on Burisma’s board (supposedly consulting on corporate governance and transparency) when Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky allegedly paid a [USD] $7 million bribe to officials serving under Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Vitaly Yarema, to “shut the case against Zlochevsky.” George Kent testified that this bribe occurred in December 2014 (seven months after Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board), and, after learning about it, he and the resident legal adviser reported this allegation to the FBI.
In addition to the over four million dollars paid by Burisma to Hunter Biden and his business partner, Devon Archer, for membership on the board, Hunter, his family, and Archer received millions of dollars from foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds.
Devon Archer received [USD] $142,300 from Kenges Rakishev of Kazakhstan, purportedly for a car, the same day Vice President Joe Biden appeared with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arsemy Yasenyuk and addressed Ukrainian legislators in Kyiv regarding Russia’s actions in Crimea.
Hunter Biden received a [USD] $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina. Ms. Baturina is the wife (widow) of the former mayor of Moscow.
Author's note: this is rather interesting, because [Y]Elena Baturina's husband was Yury Mikhailovich Luzhkov (who served as the mayor of Moscow from 1992 to 2010) negotiated with Donald J. Trump (see 1996), and he was mayor when Oklahoman Paul Tatum was assassinated in a Moscow metro station (see 3 November 1996).
Interestingly, Baturina later entered the hotel business herself. That's not all, though. It seems her ex-husband, Mayor Luzhkov, was rather tied up in Solntsevskaya Bratva, the main branch of the Russian mafia, often called “the Brotherhood.” If this is true, it raises serious questions about Elena Baturina. Did she (and her brother) take over her former husband's role in the Russian underworld? If so, why was she paying Hunter Biden?
Per Wikipedia:
❝ According to secret cables published by WikiLeaks, the US ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle, reported allegations that [Elena] Baturina had links to major criminal groups, particularly Solntsevskaya Bratva. The full text of the cable makes clear that Mr. Beyrle is simply repeating gossip and allegations conveyed to him by journalist Sergei Kanev. Beyrle writes, ‘Kanev told us that Luzhkov's wife, Yelena Baturina, definitely has links to the criminal world, and particularly to the Solntsevo criminal group.’ Beyrle stated that her husband Yury Luzhkov sat on top of a “pyramid of corruption.” “Luzhkov oversees a system in which it appears that almost everyone at every level is involved in some form of corruption or criminal behaviour,” wrote Beyrle. “Analysts identify a three-tiered structure in Moscow's criminal world. Luzhkov is at the top. The FSB, MVD and militia are at the second level. Finally ordinary criminals and corrupt inspectors are at the lowest level.” Beyrle also suggested that much of Luzhkov's business empire had been acquired using municipal finances to invest in “less than transparent” projects with former Soviet republics. The couple denied the accusations as “total rubbish.” ❞
Hunter Biden had business associations with Ye Jianming, Gongwen Dong, and other Chinese nationals linked to the Communist government and People’s Liberation Army. Those associations resulted in millions of dollars in questionable transactions.
Hunter Biden opened a bank account with Gongwen Dong that financed a [USD] $100,000 global spending spree with James Biden and Sara Biden.
Hunter Biden also moved millions of dollars from his law firm to James Biden’s and Sara Biden’s firm. Upon being questioned about the transaction, Sara Biden refused to provide supporting documentation and information to more clearly explain the activity. The bank subsequently closed the account.
Hunter Biden paid nonresident women who were nationals of Russia or other Eastern European countries and who appear to be linked to an “Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring.”
• PDF https://www.finance.senate.gov/download/hsgac_-finance-joint-report
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelena_Baturina
• https://wikileaks[.]org/plusd/cables/10MOSCOW317_a.html
• https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cables-moscow-mayor-corruption
• Elena Baturina: LJ Capital Investments Limited (BVA) https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/240040115
1 October 2020: Kazakhstan's State Technical Service is reorganized into a joint-stock company with independent directors joining the board.
14 October 2020: According to the press service of Kazakhstan's Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry (MDDIA), unscheduled work is carried out on the Internet in four of Kazakhstan's largest cities:
“On October 14, 2020, from 00.00 to 09.00 Nur-Sultan time, unscheduled work will be carried out on the equipment of the State Technical Service RSE in the cities of Almaty, Aktobe, Atyrau and Nur-Sultan.”
Authorities assure the public that the outages shouldn't last longer than 20 minutes.
Analyst's note: the author believes that four fiberoptic duplexers may have been deployed at key collection sites in Almaty, Aktobe, Atyray, and Astana (“Nur-Sultan”) during these 20-minute outages. The author surmises that the systems deployed may be similar to systems deployed by the Russian intelligence contractor PETER-SERVICE. This system would allow for the theoretical bulk collection, indefinite retention, and subsequent decryption (using a government-mandated root certificate) of all data passing through those four collection sites. Since New Year's Day of 2019, all SIM cards in Kazakhstan have required registration with authorities, meaning all wired and wireless communications in Kazakhstan are most likely susceptible to state surveillance (see 1 January 2019).
• https://tengrinews.kz/kazakhstan_news/kazahstantsyi-pojalovalis-na-sboi-v-seti-416951/
• https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/63189/intelligence/wikileaks-russia-peter-service.html
14 October 2020: Facebook and Twitter both limit sharing of articles about Hunter Biden's business dealings. Even the typically left-leaning NPR raises its eyebrows at the unprecedented corporate censorship in its second paragraph:
❝ Both social media companies said the moves were aimed at slowing the spread of potentially false information. But they gave few details about how they reached their decisions, sparking criticism about the lack of clarity and consistency with which they apply their rules. ❞
14 October 2020: The NY Post reports that “smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.”
The email in question is from Vadym Pozharskyi, who was an advisor to Burisma's board of directors.
A later story by the NY Post makes another connection… from Vadym Pozharskyi to China. As it turns out, Hunter's signature appears on a Burisma board resolution to export grain from Ukraine to China, along with the signature of Cofer Black, another Burisma board member.
❝ In addition to Hunter, seven other members of Burisma’s board of directors authorized their adviser, Vadym Pozharskyi, to “represent with all Chinese Potential Shareholders for development, negotiation, and contracting issues as well as operation management of the project ‘Sino Ukraine Silk Road Grain Port’.”
Former CIA officer Joseph Cofer Black, a fellow Burisma board member, was also among those who signed off on the project, the document shows.
There is no further mention of the project on Hunter’s laptop — and it wasn’t immediately clear if the grain was ever shipped. ❞
Analyst's note: Cofer Black (fifth photo). Interesting. Per Wikipedia, Cofer Black “served as director of the Counterterrorism Center in the years surrounding the September 11th attacks, and was later appointed Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department by President George W. Bush, serving until his resignation in 2004.
Prior to his roles combatting terrorism, Black served across the globe in a variety of roles with the Directorate of Operations at the CIA.” An interesting gentleman to be sitting on the board of Burisma with Hunter Biden, no?
A less obvious CIA connection: Alan Apter, who remains Chairman of Burisma to this day. What's his Agency connection? He used to be a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, the firm founded by Alan Dulles himself. He also worked at the Moscow-based Renaissance Capital from 1995-1998. Today Renaissance is owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, but when Alan worked there, it was clearly a condominium (one roof under which multiple, friendly intelligence agencies operate).
All of this begs the question: was Hunter Biden being run as “an asset” for the CIA's National Resources Division (NR)? Per Wikipedia — this isn't classified — NR's “main function is to conduct voluntary debriefings of U.S. citizens who travel overseas for work or to visit relatives, and to recruit foreign students, diplomats and business people to become CIA assets when they return to their countries.”
Is that why disgraced former D/CIA John Brennan — an old friend of Cofer Black — and others rushed to dismiss the laptop as being the product of “Russian disinformation?” What color passport did Hunter Biden travel with during the foreign trips he took (after he waived his Secret Service detail)? If Hunter Biden — someone with addictive tendencies — was being run as an Agency NR asset by John Brennan, et al., that would actually make him a much more sympathetic victim.
If Hunter Biden's addiction was, tragically, being enabled by virtue of his — hypothetical and, as of right now, unproven — status as Agency NR asset, should the CIA's Directorate of Operations answer for that?
Should John Brennan answer for that?
Should that be a subject of future intelligence reform efforts? Should the families of senior government officials be off limits for intelligence/counterintelligence use? Should there be better oversight?
If Hunter Biden, someone clearly struggling with addiction, was being run as an Agency NR asset — really for no good reason other than nepotism — happily advancing foreign elite capture schemes that were targeting his father, all while thinking (erroneously) that he was actually helping America, then might that explain why he was able to engage in so much illicit activity without facing repercussions? Could it be the case that all the illicit activity found on his laptop was “authorized?” How might that have worked?
If Hunter Biden were a domestic FBI informant (“a snitch”) rather than a domestic CIA NR asset collecting (in theory) foreign intelligence, then the activity depicted on his laptop would've constituted “otherwise illegal activity.” The FBI's Confidential Informant Guidelines permit the FBI to authorize confidential informants to engage in activities that would otherwise constitute crimes under state or federal law if they were engaged in by someone without such authorization. Such conduct is termed "otherwise illegal activity" or "OIA" and requires, in theory, that the Special Agent handling the informant provide them with the assurance of an “OIA waiver” (which goes in their physical FBI file).
Think about how bad Hunter Biden's illicit (otherwise illegal) activity made the United States look to the rest of the world's intelligence agencies. Think about how bad it still, to this day, makes the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the media look (both to the wider world and to normal American people) that all of this evidence was given to them and nothing was done about it.
How is the CIA allowed to make the FBI look this bad, and why?
Darren Tromblay, the author of "Spying: Assessing U.S. Domestic Intelligence Since 9/11" and "Political Influence Operations: How Foreign Actors Seek to Shape U.S. Policy Making," pulls back the curtain on how this specific aspect of FBI/CIA “coordination” works in Lawfare (the short version is that it's mediated through ODNI):
❝ CIA-FBI coordination on foreign intelligence collection continued to evolve after the development of the 1966 guidelines. According to a 1982 CIA document titled “Guidance for CIA Activities Within the United States,” and attached appendices, CIA foreign intelligence collection activities conducted within the U.S. are supposed to be coordinated with the FBI in accordance with Executive Order 12333. A 2005 CIA-FBI memorandum of understanding (MOU) provided updated guidance. One objective was to ensure that the two agencies were not working at cross purposes and had knowledge of whether their counterpart had already debriefed or recruited a source. In developing the MOU, the FBI initially insisted on controlling all of the CIA’s domestic activities, including the agency’s U.S.-based assets. Ultimately, the MOU reaffirmed the need for the CIA to coordinate its operations with the FBI and ensured that the CIA’s National Resources Division provided the FBI with more information about operations and debriefings.
The DNI issued the intelligence community’s Directive (ICD) 402, “Director of National Intelligence Representatives,” in 2009. The Domestic Director of National Intelligence Representative (DDNIR) program is an opportunity for the FBI to further coordinate the systematic collection of foreign intelligence domestically. DNI representatives play a significant role in integrating the IC components within their respective areas of responsibility. Specifically, they are tasked with leading the IC effort to integrate intelligence support by acquiring, maintaining, and appropriately sharing knowledge of relevant IC activities, including intelligence or intelligence-related agreements, arrangements, or exchanges; ensuring active collaboration among IC elements; assisting IC elements’ representatives in implementing their responsibilities; and evaluating the quality of IC support, including recommending to the DNI or his or her designee modifications to IC mission posture including resources, priorities, or allocation of IC personnel as appropriate.
Around the same time, the DNI launched a pilot program that would appoint the heads of four FBI field offices as DNI representatives. In its initial iteration, the program was scheduled to operate for 18 months. The DNI and the director of the FBI (D/FBI) signed a memorandum of agreement in late 2011. In February 2012, the DNI officially designated 12 FBI executives — the heads of FBI offices in Atlanta; Boston; Chicago; Denver; Houston; Los Angeles; Miami; New York; Pittsburgh; San Francisco; Seattle; and Washington, D.C. — as DDNIRs responsible for 12 geographic regions. Later that year, the DNI amended ICD 402, rescinding the 18-month pilot program and placing the selection of DDNIRs within the formal DNI representatives framework. As described by the update to ICD 402, “[t]he DNI’s representatives for locations inside the U.S. are accountable to the DNI and D/FBI, or their respective designees.”❞
The CIA's been re-organized since the publication of this org chart, but this is where NR used to reside.
Interesting.
In other words, if Hunter Biden was being run as an NR asset in D/CIA John Brennan's CIA… then John Brennan, DNI James Clapper and D/FBI Jim Comey all, in theory, would've known!
Are you mad? You should be mad. The CIA was never intended to be an extension of the Democratic Party through which foreign interests could purchase our politicians. It was intended to be the tip of the spear of American intelligence; it was intended to advance America's strategic interests.
If your humble, unpaid analyst sounds irritable, there's good reason: if the CIA were competent and still relatively uncorrupted, spending hundreds of hours assembling this timeline in order to diagnose what ails our beloved country (and many other countries, in fact) — and then sharing it here for those with enough curiosity or patriotism or humanity to care — wouldn't even be necessary.
• https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/
• https://nypost.com/2022/08/03/hunter-biden-linked-to-2018-deal-sending-grain-from-ukraine-to-china/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Resources_Division
• https://www.newsweek.com/2013/11/15/biggest-little-cia-shop-youve-never-heard-243964.html
• https://unredacted.com/2015/10/27/first-complete-look-at-the-cias-national-clandestine-service-org-chart/
• https://www.lawfareblog.com/federal-bureau-investigation-and-foreign-intelligence-collection
• ARCHIVED https://web.archive.org/web/20171107043544/https:/burisma-group.com/eng/
15 October 2020: The “FinCEN Files” reveal [USD] $100M in “suspicious transactions” by former Trump associate Felix Sater, as well as transactions by Sater’s and his wife’s company. Furthermore, transactions related to BTA Bank founder Ablyazov’s family are revealed. Transactions related to the Biden family (if any) aren’t revealed.
19 October 2020: Nick Shapiro, a former top aide under CIA director John Brennan, provides POLITICO with a letter signed by at total of 51 former US intelligence officials, including Jim Clapper, Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, and others, incorrectly claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was “Russian disinformation” in a blatant attempt to lie to the American people.
Analyst's note: the self-identification of individuals signing this letter was no doubt spectacularly useful for American adversaries and competitors.
The 51 former intelligence officials who signed the letter are listed below. (The credentials that they listed on the letter provided to Politico are in white.)
Author's note: this list shouldn't be confused with the somewhat-related list of former officials who call themselves “The Steady State.” (All of whom should be blacklisted as subversives.)
Jim Clapper (Bio)
• CNN “national security analyst” since 2017
• Former Director of National Intelligence
• Former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence
• Former Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
• Former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
• Member, “The Steady State”
• Signed 2018 letter protesting Trump's revocation of John Brennan's security clearance.
• Former Senior Member of the Downing Assessment Taskforce, which was the investigation into the Khobar Towers bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia… a terrorist bombing that killed 19 American airmen and injured more than 400 U.S. and international military members and civilians.
• The attack was blamed on (Shia) “Saudi Hezbollah” and Iran but was, in this analyst's assessment, likely (at least in part) the work of (Sunni) al-Qaeda or its affiliates. This analyst hypothesizes that exposure of Saudi Sunni/Wahhabist involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing could've complicated America's relationship with the KSA and could've perhaps exposed a (theoretical) covert program to recruit and resettle former anti-Soviet Afghan Mujahadeen in the United States (primarily to be used for their language skills against the nascent threat of al-Qaeda).
• This is not a fringe theory. In 2007, William Perry (considered to be a Democrat), who was SECDEF at the time of the Khobar Towers bombing — someone on whom the deaths of those 19 airmen likely weighed heavily — stated that he believed al-Qaeda was responsible for the Khobar Towers bombing.
• The then-FBI director, Louis Freeh (considered to be a Republican), claimed that Iran had ordered the attack.
• Though the Saudis had primary investigative authority into the attack, the FBI is charged with investigating the deaths of Americans overseas… however these Americans were U.S. airmen. The ensuing turf war resulted in the Downing Assessment Taskforce and its report, which can be found here.
• The 9/11 Commission's Report, perhaps reflecting its bipartisan nature, later assigned blame to all of the above, stating that “the operation was carried out principally, perhaps exclusively, by Saudi Hezbollah, an organization that had received support from the government of Iran. While the evidence of Iranian involvement is strong, there are also signs that al-Qaida played some role, as yet unknown.” The 9/11 Commissions report cited two specific reports which have yet to be made public (as far as this analyst can tell) which may provide clues on al-Qaeda's involvement (see footnote).
• In this analyst's opinion, this investigative failure was likely later used by the adversarial Iranian regime as a point of institutional blackmail leverage against the United States during the JCPOA negotiations, albeit one of diminishing value since most of the persons involved have retired.
• This type of institutional leverage doesn't need to waved in the face of the party being leveraged… it can be alluded to subtly or even be left unspoken. The effect would be the same. Such leverage would explain how our negotiators negotiated themselves into some of the more egregious aspects of the JCPOA… particularly the alleged “pallets of $400M in cash.”
• Former US Diplomat J. Michael Springmann detailed some relevant intelligence failures in his book, but he seems to have aligned himself with the hostile Iranian regime since leaving government service… to the point of sympathizing with them and being promoted as a commentator by Iranian state media (indeed, this author believes that Iranian intelligence likely gained significant information from Springmann, and he, like disgraced former D/CIA Brennan, et al., has been a significant and stalwart supporter of the JCPOA).
• The “Khobar cohort” (or “Khobar polycule”) — Jim Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey (who, as Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, handled the Khobar Towers prosecution) and their close associates — should be distanced from the U.S. intelligence community.
• There's a very, very low statistical probability that the same three men whose early careers were defined by their handling the botched 1996 investigation into the Khobar Towers bombing would, 20 years later, magically find themselves heading the ODNI, CIA, and FBI, respectively.
• This fact alone is enough to conclude that whatever the actual truth of the Khobar Towers bombing was/is, these three men likely shared a point of common, mutual compromise. Perhaps indicators and warnings were missed. Perhaps that fact was covered up. Perhaps al-Qaeda was responsible, but maybe the Saudis (in 1996, pre-9/11) objected to blaming Sunnis. After all, Saudi Binladen Group, aka Bin Laden Construction, was/is a rather large conglomerate (it comprises an estimated 537 companies, at least on paper), and Osama bin Laden was indeed part of the family that controlled it.
• In assessing this group of individuals, the actual truth — from an intelligence and counterintelligence perspective — is less important than the mere fact that some of the truth (whatever it might be) has clearly been obscured. We don't actually need to know the truth to confidently infer that this group shares a point of common compromise.
• The “Khobar cohort” should likely be assessed and treated by counterintelligence historians as an example of U.S. intelligence failures being exploited by hostile foreign powers (Iran and likely Russia) for the purposes of political leverage.
• Serious efforts should be made to declassify more information about the Khobar Towers bombing and al-Qaeda (or other Sunni terrorist) involvement. The former officials involved in the Khobar cohort should be questioned about what information they hid from the public and why… for the sake of our 19 fallen airmen, their families, and the more than 400 other victims of the attack.
• Individuals who share a common point of compromise can effectively be exploited at an institutional level and will act to protect each other (thereby also protecting and maintaining the leverage that adversarial powers might have built on them) through an omerta-like code of silence… unless that area of common compromise is obviated (i.e., by the free press, by open source researchers, by academia, etc.).
• This was evident with the Iran-Contra scandal (the “Contra cohort” developed a strong and lasting in-group affinity) and is also evident with the “Khobar cohort.” Ergo, experts in political Islam and terrorism should take a fresh look at the Khobar Towers bombing and the Downing Assessment Taskforce report.
• One might argue that Obama-era intelligence failures related to Russia and China have effectively created a new “Russiagate cohort,” (with which the Khobar cohort partially overlaps), although “the Russiagate cohort” as a name for this group of mutually-compromised individuals misses the larger, more salient point (which is worth stating explicitly):
➤ China (a 1.4 billion person, $17.73 trillion GDP economy) — not Russia (a 143.4 million person, $1.779 trillion GDP economy) — is the nation that systematically compromised the CIA during this cohort's period leading the U.S. intelligence community. This cohort's disproportionate tunnel-vision focus on Russia obscures this reality… as well as the even larger reality of tripartite threat convergence from China, Russia, and Iran.
Mike Hayden
• CNN “national security analyst” since 2017
• Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Director, National Security Agency
• Former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
• Signed 2018 letter protesting Trump's revocation of John Brennan's security clearance.
Leon Panetta
• Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Secretary of Defense
• Headline speaker at California Rep. Eric Swalwell's 2013 campaign kickoff (Swalwell was later targeted by Chinese intelligence operative “Fang Fang”).
• Chairman of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, which runs a “Panetta Institute for Public Policy Congressional Internship Program” (a program which is now in its 25th year).
• 17 July 1994 - 20 January 1997: Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton (The clandestine relationship between Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky lasted from 1995-1997… she was first assigned to Leon Panetta's office in 1995).
• Signed 2018 letter protesting Trump's revocation of John Brennan's security clearance.
John Brennan (Bio)
• NBC/MSNBC “senior national security and intelligence analyst” since 2018
• 8 March 2013 - 20 January 2017: Director, Central Intelligence Agency
• Sworn in a week before Edward Snowden leaves his job at Dell, where he was an NSA contractor.
• Tenure as D/CIA coincided with the largest compromise of agency sources and methods by hostile foreign powers — particularly, China — in its history, with nearly all of the agency's network in the PRC being captured/killed. Presided over other massive failures, as well… perhaps he was too busy not noticing that to *also* not notice that Hunter Biden was being used in a blatant influence-peddling scheme? Or could it be that the latter caused him to willingly turn a blind eye to the former?
• Tenure as D/CIA saw massive expansion of non-intelligence work, including illegal spying on Congress… one could even frame that as being a kind of “insurrection.”
• Tenure as D/CIA saw massive expansion of CIA's extrajudicial drone assassination program (a clear violation of EO 12333 §2.11 which, if it had been legal, was overt military action that was far outside the remit of the CIA's limited foreign intelligence and covert action missions and belonged under the sole purview of DoD), thereby pushing Pakistan — a major nuclear proliferation risk — into the loving embrace of China… yet somehow he didn't notice Pakistan's increasing closeness with China during his (at least) two undisclosed visits there as D/CIA (which the public doesn't know about).
• Oddly, a member of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps… yet he somehow missed indicators and warnings that EcoHealth Alliance was funding researchers affiliated with China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences to conduct dual-use research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
• 2009-2013: Former White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor
• 2005-2013: President and CEO of the Analysis Corporation
• Period as CEO of the Analysis Corporation coincided with the murder of an FBI cooperating witness, Lieutenant Quarles Harris, Jr. (see 19 April 2008) after Barack Obama's, Hillary Clinton's, and John McCain's passport files were illegally accessed.
See also CNBC (in 2013): “In Brennan's Private Sector Stint, a Chinese Connection ”
• 2003-2005: Former Director, Terrorism Threat Integration Center (later renamed to the Counterterrorism Center)
• March 2001 - March 2003: Deputy Executive Director, CIA… yet somehow missed indicators and warnings of the 9/11 attacks, leading the U.S. into a prolonged, costly Global War on Terror, which killed untold numbers of innocent people and which has damaged U.S. standing in the world, to the very clear benefit of our traditional Cold War adversaries, Russia and China.
• 1999-2001: Chief of Staff to D/CIA Tenet
• 1996-1999: CIA Chief of Station, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia… yet somehow missed indicators and warnings of the 1996 Khobar Towers Bombing.
• 1995-1996: Executive Assistant to DD/CIA Tenet
• 1994-1995: CIA briefer (President's Daily Brief) to Bill Clinton… yet somehow didn't notice the illicit sexual relationship between Bill Clinton and his young, vulnerable staffer, Monica Lewinsky (after she was first assigned to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta's office in 1995, presumably while Brennan was briefer).
• 1990-1992: Terrorism Analyst, Counterterrorist Center
• 1984-1989: Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis
• 1982-1984: Political Officer, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
• 1979-1980: Joins Central Intelligence Agency
• 1980: MA in Government, University of Texas at Austin
• 1977: BA in Political Science, Fordham University
• September 1975 - January 1976: Student, American University in Cairo… just after Vadim Kirpichenko's promotion to head the KGB's S Directorate (see 12 August 2022). One wonders which professors at the American University in Cairo Mr. Brennan was close with, and which ones may have been recruited by the the KGB's Egyptian Mukhabarat المخابرات collaborators or, more directly, by Soviet intelligence itself.
• Former member, Communist Party USA … who would a Soviet illegal — and in particular, one who had clawed his way to the top of the CIA while dodging multiple mole hunts — choose to help after the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (CCCP)?
Perhaps the CCP?
Michael Morell
• Former Acting Director, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Deputy Director, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Director of Analysis, Central Intelligence Agency
• Signed 2018 letter protesting Trump's revocation of John Brennan's security clearance.
John McLaughlin
• Former Acting Director, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Deputy Director, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Director of Analysis, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Director, Slavic and Eurasian Analysis, Central Intelligence Agency
• Signed 2018 letter protesting Trump's revocation of John Brennan's security clearance.
Thomas Finger
• Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis
• Former Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research, Department of State
• Former Chair, National Intelligence Council
Rick Ledgett
• Former Deputy Director, National Security Agency
Mike Vickers
• Former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence
• Former Operations Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
Doug Wise
• Former Deputy Director, Defense Intelligence Agency
• Former Senior CIA Operations Officer
• Steering Committee, “The Steady State”
Nick Rasmussen
• Former Director, National Counterterrorism Center
Russ Travers
• Former Acting Director, National Counterterrorism Center
• Former Deputy Director, National Counterterrorism Center
• Former Analyst of the Soviet Union and Russia, Defense Intelligence Agency
Andy Liepman
• Former Deputy Director, National Counterterrorism Center
• Former Senior Intelligence Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Senior Intelligence Service (SIS)
• Member, “The Steady State”
John Moseman
• Former Chief of Staff, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Director of Congressional Affairs, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Minority Staff Director, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Larry Pfeiffer
• Former Chief of Staff, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Director, White House Situation Room
• Former Senior Executive Service (SES), Senior Intelligence Service (SIS)
• Member, “The Steady State”
Jeremy Bash
• Husband, CNN anchor Dana Bash
• Former Chief of Staff, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Chief of Staff, Department of Defense
• Former Chief Counsel, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Rodney Snyder
• Former Chief of Staff, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Director of Intelligence Programs, National Security Council
• Chief of Station, Central Intelligence Agency
Glenn Gerstell
• Former General Counsel, National Security Agency
David B. Buckley
• Former Inspector General, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Democratic Staff Director, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
• Former Counterespionage Case Officer, United States Air Force
Nada Bakos
• Former Analyst and Targeting Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
• Member, “The Steady State”
Patty Brandmaier
• Former Senior Intelligence Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Deputy Associate Director for Military Affairs, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Deputy Director of Congressional Affairs, Central Intelligence Agency
James B. Bruce
• Former Senior Intelligence Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Senior Intelligence Officer, National Intelligence Council
• Considerable work related to Russia
Jonna Hiestand Mendez
• Technical Operations Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
Emile Nakhleh
• Former Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Senior Intelligence Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency
Gerald A. O’Shea
• Co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment
• Former Senior Operations Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
• Served four tours as Chief of Station, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Senior Intelligence Service (SIS)
• Member, “The Steady State”
David Priess
• Former Analyst and Manager, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former PDB Briefer, Central Intelligence Agency
Pam Purcilly
• Former Deputy Director of Analysis, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Director of the Office of Russian and European Analysis, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former PDB Briefer to President George W. Bush, Central Intelligence Agency
Marc Polymeropoulos
• Advisor, Spycraft Entertainment
• Former Senior Operations Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Acting Chief of Operations for Europe and Eurasia, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Senior Intelligence Service (SIS)
• Member, “The Steady State”
Chris Savos
• Former Senior Intelligence Officer, Central Intelligence Officer
Nick Shapiro
• Former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Director, Central Intelligence Agency
John Sipher
• Co-founder, Spycraft Entertainment
• Senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council (respectfully, that's not a real job)
• Former Senior Operations Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Deputy Chief of Russian Operations, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Senior Intelligence Service (SIS)
• Member, “The Steady State”
• Massive failure as Moscow Chief of Station
Stephen Slick
• Former Senior Director for Intelligence Programs, National Security Council
• Former Senior Operations Office, Central Intelligence Agency
Cynthia Strand
• Former Deputy Assistant Director for Global Issues, Central Intelligence Agency
Greg Tarbell
• Former Deputy Executive Director, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Analyst of the Soviet Union and Russia, Central Intelligence Agency
David Terry
• Former Chairman of the National Intelligence Collection Board
• Former Chief of the PDB, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former PDB Briefer to Vice President Dick Cheney, Central Intelligence Agency
Greg Treverton
• Former Chair, National Intelligence Council
John Tullius
• Former Senior Intelligence Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
David A. Vanell
• Former Senior Operations Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
Winston Wiley
• Former Director of Analysis, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former Chief, Counterterrorism Center, Central Intelligence Agency
Kristin Wood
• Advisor, Spycraft Entertainment
• Former Senior Intelligence Officer, Central Intelligence Agency
• Former PDB Briefer, Central Intelligence Agency
In addition, nine others who refused to be named publicly also co-signed onto the letter.
Analyst's note: The Steady State was founded by ex-CIA Assistant General Counsel Steven Cash (bio1, bio2, LinkedIn). Going by his résumé, he's the perfect guy to put his (very dirty) fingers on the scales of justice in Manhattan and in Washington, D.C. (should that be necessary). Cash was also part of the CIA's Directorate of Operations from 1995-2001, alongside Brennan. He was also Co-Vice Chair of the ODNI's Biological Sciences Experts Group under Jim Clapper. He's now conspicuously gone from the Steady State's website. He also deleted his Twitter account sometime pre-August 2022 (but not before I got screenshots). This is why he's lowered his profile:
• https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-russian-disinfo-430276
• PDF https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9b330000
• See Abdel Bari Atwan, The Secret History of al Qaeda (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 50–1, 168. The 9/11 Commission staff expanded on the reasons Bin Ladin left Sudan: “His departure resulted from a combination of pressures from the United States, other western governments, and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Libya, all three of which faced indigenous terrorist groups supported by Bin Ladin. “Staff Statement No. 15,” 6. Atwan asserted that al Qaeda bombed the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 to retaliate for having to leave Sudan. Secret History, 169. Although Hezbollah is usually credited with the bombings, 9/11 Commission Report indicated Atwan’s assertion may have some credibility because “there are also signs that al Qaeda played some role, as yet unknown.” 60, citing (n. 48) CIA analytic report, “Khobar Bombing: Saudi Shia, Iran, and Usama Bin Ladin All Suspects,” CTC 96-30015, July 5, 1996; DIA analytic report, Defense Intelligence Threat Review 97-007, July 1996; Intelligence report made available to the Commission; Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam's War Against America (New York: Random House, 2002), 224–5, 300–2.
• Previous footnote from STRATAGEM IN ASYMMETRY: NONSTATE ARMED GROUPS’ USE OF DECEPTION, by D. D. Jessee PDF https://dl.tufts.edu/downloads/bz60d781m?filename=w3763k116.pdf
• https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3138630/why-do-so-many-us-intelligence-chiefs-become-media-pundits
21 October 2020: Rudy Giuliani gets caught in a compromising position in Amazon Prime's new “Borat” film. NBC News is given a pre-release copy of the film, and reports the following:
❝ In the film, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, Giuliani and a young woman posing as a reporter, who was part of Cohen's sting, can be seen going into a hotel bedroom for drinks — at the woman's invitation — after completing what Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, apparently believed to be a real interview about the coronavirus pandemic and Trump's response to it. ❞
22 October 2020: President Donald Trump and candidate Joe Biden clash in the final televised debate over Hunter Biden's laptop.
In an effort to refute the damning material against him, Joe Biden cites the letter signed by 51 officials (see 19 October 2020) to falsely claim that Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation.
• https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/trump-and-joe-biden-debate-hunter-corruption-claims-at-final-debate/
13 November 2020: Radio Free Asia reports that “two internment camps recently identified by satellite imagery in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) appear to be separated by a cemetery and crematorium, raising fears that authorities are working to cover up deaths in the facilities.” A Norway-based Uyghur leader pleads with the world to listen, telling RFA:
❝ These photos are irrefutable proof that that the centers for so-called ‘voluntary re-education’ and ‘vocational education’ in the Uyghur Region are not merely camps that are managed in the style of prisons but also that China’s camp policies have been combined with forced labor from 2018 onward. ❞
17 November 2020: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admits that censoring Hunter Biden-related news was “a mistake that we made both in terms of the intention of the policy and also the enforcement action of not allowing people to share it publicly or privately.”
The full exchange follows:
❝ CORNYN: “Mr. Dorsey, when Twitter decided to take down the story, the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop, did you do that under your terms of service or did you do it under some other claim of authority?”
DORSEY: “We did it under our terms of service which, as you know, everyone agrees to when they sign up for Twitter, and this is a policy around distribution of hacked materials. We did not want Twitter to be a distribution point for hacked materials.”
CORNYN: “Well, you do realize that by taking down that story you probably gave it more prominence and more visibility than it ever would have gotten had you left it alone.”
DORSEY: “We realize that and we recognize it as a mistake that we made both in terms of the intention of the policy and also the enforcement action of not allowing people to share it publicly or privately.” ❞
• https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/twitter-censoring-ny-posts-hunter-biden-story-a-mistake/
18 November 2020: Senators Ron Johnson (R-OH) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) release a supplement to their report on potential conflicts of interest stemming from the Biden family's foreign business arrangements.
23 November 2020: Brice Lalonde — 1981 Presidential candidate for the Political Ecology movement, French Green Party leader, and noted French nuclear industry activist — tweets out his excitement that John Kerry has been appointed by Joe Biden to be his “special climate envoy.”
Lalonde, a fan of the Castro- and Putin-loving filmmaker Oliver Stone, is John Kerry's cousin. He also, evidently, subscribes to a misanthropic, anti-capitalist ideology.
Interestingly — at least for those who find such things interesting — he mentions in another tweet that he saw President Mikhaïl Gorbachev at the 6th World Water Forum in Marseille, in 2012 (along with Jacques Cousteau, whom, one would presume, he already knew).
The Green Movement has long been a target of Communist intelligence services as well as their successors in Post-Soviet states.
In 2014, NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen, said that Russian intelligence was working directly with European environmental groups to fund anti-fracking campaigns.
According to a 2016 report, 15 to 20 members of the German Green Party in the 1980s cooperated closely with the secret police, or Stasi, in Communist East Germany.
More recently, in 2022, it was revealed that a pro-Putin NGO pushed the Green New Deal and protested the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Analyst's note: if the Stasi was working with German Green Party members in 1981, then who was the French 1981 Green candidate in France, Brice Lalonde, being backed by? That was a very close election. Perhaps a clue can be found in the biography of the Political Ecology Movement's 1974 French Presidential candidate, Rene Dumont (see footer).
Also, surely John Kerry isn't in active contact with his eccentric French nuclear industry lobbyist cousin, right? That'd be a very strange and possibly illegal source of influence, given how dependent the French nuclear industry is on both Kazakhstan's Kazatomprom and Russia's Rosatom (nevermind how much they're trying to capitalize on China's nuclear breakout, which is likely a major reason why Macron is so hostile to NATO, despite needing American taxpayers to subsidize Europe's defense so badly).
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brice_Lalonde
• https://twitter.com/bricelalonde/status/1567790441872953344
• https://twitter.com/bricelalonde/status/1330931567296962562
• https://twitter.com/bricelalonde/status/1255134342055030790
• https://twitter.com/bricelalonde/status/179692848902451200
• https://twitter.com/bricelalonde/status/161207388509192195
• https://twitter.com/bricelalonde/status/159398465548451840
• https://www.dw.com/en/study-confirms-that-stasi-infiltrated-greens/a-36024911
• https://weber.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1208
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/07/03/the-kgbs-successors-and-the-greening-of-europe/?sh=2baa2590314f
• https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Dumont#Pacifisme
7 December 2020: Following a failed attempt to force Western companies to install a root certificate (see 7 August 2019 and 21 August 2019), Kazakhstan's Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry (MDDIA, Сандық даму, инновация және аэроғарыш өнеркәсібі министрлігі) and its National Security Committee (now chaired by former Kazakh Community Party Chairman-turned-President Nursultan Nazarbayev) announce an effort (ostensibly) to combat cyber attacks within the country, creatively titled “Cyber Security Nur Sultan-2020.” A key piece of this effort centers on forcing users to manually install the same type of root certification that Western companies refused to automatically install. The installation of this root certificate most likely allows the Kazakh government to decrypt https-encrypted browser sessions, such as those used for checking email, especially in the context of a “bulk collection” program (see 14 October 2020).
Analyst's note: again, it is unclear which country supplied the technical know-how for this Kazakh Internet surveillance system, however this author believes it was likely Russia. Kazakhstan's technical reliance on Russia would make it exceedingly unlikely that the Kazakh government might ever turn against the Russian state. See Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2021 report for more topical information on Kazakhstan's Internet.
• https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/kazakhstan-online-security-initiative/
10 December 2020: China's first ship for the transport of used nuclear fuel — the Xin An Ji Xiang (IMO #9928530, MMSI #413250640) — is delivered to China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC). The independently-produced, double-hulled vessel meets the INF-3 (Irradiated Nuclear Fuel class 3) standards set by the International Maritime Organization.
• https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/China-commissions-first-used-fuel-transport-ship
12 December 2020: Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping claims that China will achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, in large part by dramatically expanding China's nuclear program.
Analyst's note: this pledge is worse than aspirational. It's manipulative. Chinese leadership understands that by simply making a false pledge, by simply lying, they can influence market assumptions far into the future. For a regime that politically-manages its economic risks — its structurally insolvent banks, its debt-laden state-owned enterprises, its supply chain forward-financing arrangements which are unsustainable and which presume perpetual growth — particularly in the context of foreign partners (like BRI host nations) and foreign investors (like sovereign wealth funds), this type of market manipulation is critically important… most especially when there are ulterior motives at play. Indeed, some might argue that Chinese energy market manipulation is an example of high-level military deception (MILDEC) in the domain of economic warfare.
3 January 2021: The Pentagon announces that it's ordered the aircraft carrier Nimitz to remain in the Middle East because of Iranian threats against President Trump and other American officials, just three days after sending the warship home as a signal to de-escalate rising tensions with Tehran.
Per the New York Times, “acting secretary of the defense, Christopher C. Miller, abruptly reversed his previous order to redeploy the Nimitz, which he had done over the objections of his top military advisers. The military had for weeks been engaged in a muscle-flexing strategy aimed at deterring Iran from attacking American personnel in the Persian Gulf.”
• https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/world/middleeast/trump-iran-carrier-nimitz.html
4 January 2021: According to a CBS news report two days later, (in an incident that allegedly took place on 2 January), multiple air traffic controllers at JFK Airport in New York heard a chilling threat: “We are flying a plane into the Capitol on Wednesday. Soleimani will be avenged.”
4 January 2021: Iran announces that it's begun enriching uranium to 20%, levels unseen since the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal with world powers.
20% enrichment leaves Iran just one technical leap away from weapons-grade uranium (depending on the centrifuges and separative process).
The next step is 60% enrichment; weapons-grade is then 90% and above.
Concurrent with the announcement, Iran also seizes a South Korean-flagged tanker near the crucial Strait of Hormuz in a double-barreled challenge to the Free World that further raises Mideast tensions.
5 January 2021: World Nuclear News reports that “China General Nuclear (CGN) is expected to acquire a 49% stake in Ortalyk LLP, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kazakh uranium producer Kazatomprom, by mid-2021. The transfer of the stake was part of cooperation agreements signed between CGN [also called CGNPC] and Kazatomprom in 2014, 2015 and 2016.”
• https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/CGN-set-to-take-stake-in-Kazakh-uranium-mining-com
11 January 2021: In the waning hours of the Trump administration, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC), on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Ballistic Missile Analysis Committee (DIBMAC), releases an unclassified report detailing foreign missile systems. The report describes missile threats from all adversarial nations, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. The 40-page report, which should be read in full, describes the threat posed by China as follows:
❝ China continues to have the most active and diverse ballistic missile development program in the world. It is developing and testing offensive missiles, forming additional missile units, upgrading missile systems, and developing methods to counter ballistic missile defenses. China’s deployed ballistic missile force, operated by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy and PLA Rocket Force (formerly known as Second Artillery), is expanding in both number and diversity of system. China continues to field conventionally-armed SRBMs such as the CSS-6 (DF-15) and the CSS-7 (DF-11) opposite Taiwan, and has developed a number of mobile, conventionally-armed MRBMs and IRBMs. Missiles such as the CSS-11 (DF-16), CSS-22 (DF-17), CSS-5 Mod 4 (DF-21C) and Mod 5 (DF-21D), and CSS-18 (DF-26) are key components of the Chinese military modernization program, specifically designed to prevent adversary military forces’ access to regional conflicts. The CSS-5 Mod 5 and a variant of the CSS-18 have anti-ship missions. China is also developing a shipborne anti–ship ballistic missile (ASBM) for export. China has ground and air-launched LACMs.
China’s nuclear-armed missile force is also expanding with the number of Chinese ICBM nuclear warheads capable of reaching the United States potentially expanding to well over 200 within the next 5 years. China is adding the CSS-10 Mod 2 (DF-31A) and CSS-4 Mod 3 (DF-5B) to the ICBM force; the DF5B is China’s first ICBM with multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). The CSS-N-14 SLBM gives China its first long-range, sea-based nuclear capability. China is also developing the CSS-20 (DF-41), a new MIRV-capable, road-mobile ICBM and the DF-31AG road-mobile ICBM. China attributed both nuclear and conventional missions to the CSS-18 displayed for the first time during the Victory Day Parade in September 2015. ❞
Analyst's note: the report, which isn't focused on proliferative risks, doesn't state that China is also the world's #1 proliferator of missile technology, including nuclear missile technology… which they are.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies releases the following graphic, depicting the threat.
25 January 2021: Linda Thomas-Greenfield, under questioning by Senator Rubio during her confirmation hearing to be Biden's UN Ambassador, reveals that the Biden administration is inexplicably reviewing the Trump administration's determination that China is committing genocide.
Thomas-Greenfield: What they’re doing there has been referred to as genocide, and I know that the State Department is reviewing that as we speak. What they’re doing is horrific, and I look forward to seeing the results of the review that’s being done.
Rubio: The State Department issued a designation, I believe, on the president’s last day. So is your understanding that it’s now being reviewed by the State Department to see if that’s appropriate?
Thomas-Greenfield: I think the State Department is reviewing that now because all of the procedures were not followed and I think that they’re looking at that to make sure that they are followed to ensure that that designation is held.
Analyst's note: had it not been for immense public pressure, it's very likely that Blinken would've caved and reversed the genocide determination in order to start with a “clean slate.”
In the same session, Rubio asked Linda Thomas-Greenfield about her paid speech to a Confucious Institute, after a 35-year career in the US foreign service. He's a sitting member of Congress and so he would never be so bold as to ask the real question: Confucius Institutes are known Chinese intelligence fronts. To prevent refusual, Chinese intelligence rarely offers monetary inducements with a “white glove” 白手套 without also holding blackmail leverage with a “black hand” 黑手.
The correct question would've been somthing along the lines of this: “They offered you money, Ambassador Greenfield. They rarely offer a carrot without holding a stick. So what blackmail leverage, precisely, do the Chinese have on, you, Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield? Do you even know? Have you been approached? Shouldn't this immediately disqualify you from holding any position in government service?”
2 February 2021: Based on detailed accounts from survivors, the BBC reports that “women in China's ‘re-education’ camps for Uighurs have been systematically raped, sexually abused, and tortured.”
❝ The men always wore masks, Tursunay Ziawudun said, even though there was no pandemic then.
They wore suits, she said, not police uniforms.
Sometime after midnight, they came to the cells to select the women they wanted and took them down the corridor to a “black room,” where there were no surveillance cameras.
Several nights, Ziawudun said, they took her.
“Perhaps this is the most unforgettable scar on me forever,” she said.
“I don't even want these words to spill from my mouth.” […]
The BBC also interviewed a Kazakh woman from Xinjiang who was detained for 18 months in the camp system, who said she was forced to strip Uighur women naked and handcuff them, before leaving them alone with Chinese men. Afterwards, she cleaned the rooms, she said.
“My job was to remove their clothes above the waist and handcuff them so they cannot move,” said Gulzira Auelkhan, crossing her wrists behind her head to demonstrate. “Then I would leave the women in the room and a man would enter - some Chinese man from outside or policeman. I sat silently next to the door, and when the man left the room I took the woman for a shower.”
The Chinese men “would pay money to have their pick of the prettiest young inmates,” she said.
Some former detainees of the camps have described being forced to assist guards or face punishment. Auelkhan said she was powerless to resist or intervene.
Asked if there was a system of organised rape, she said: “Yes, rape.” ❞
3 Februrary 2021: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol reports the following:
❝ Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents arrested a group of 11 Iranian citizens who illegally crossed the border into the United States Monday evening.
At approximately 6 p.m., BP agents encountered the group near San Luis, Arizona, on a bridge near County 21st Street and the Salinity Canal. Agents determined the group had illegally crossed the international border into the U.S. The group was arrested and taken to Yuma Station for processing. The five females and six males [were] all from Iran, a Special Interest Country.
Yuma Sector agents regularly encounter people from all over the world, including Special Interest Countries. Agents adjudicate each arrest in accordance with law and policy in order to secure our nation’s borders.
For the last two fiscal years, Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents have led the nation in apprehending illegal crossers from Iran. Yuma Sector agents apprehended eight Iranian nationals in FY2020, compared to just 14 from all other border patrol sectors combined. So far in FY2021, Yuma Sector agents have apprehend 14 nationals from Iran.
The primary mission of the Border Patrol is to prevent nefarious people and devices from entering the United States. Iran is a designated Special Interest Country and the agents of Yuma Sector work diligently to protect our borders for the safety of our nation. Border security is national security. ❞
• https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/yuma-sector-bp-agents-arrest-group-iranians
10 February 2021: China's Foreign Ministry releases an unusually-short press release. The headline: “Ma Zhaoxu Speaks with U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley on Iranian Nuclear Issue on the Phone.”
The content:
❝ On February 10, 2021, Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu had a phone conversation with U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley at the latter's request, and the two sides had an in-depth exchange of views on the Iranian nuclear issue. ❞
To their credit, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the most hardline, far-right portion of the Israel lobby (with AIPAC being solidly on the right, and JStreet being moderate-left) correctly points out the rather unusual nature of the call (especially so early in the Biden administration).
❝ Typically, the White House or State Department provides “read outs” confirming calls with foreign officials and summarizing the content of the discussion. However, the State Department issued no read-out regarding Malley’s conversations with Minister Ma Zhaoxu. Moreover, at the State Department’s February 17, 2021 press briefing, when the U.S. State Department was specifically questioned about China’s announcement of the Malley-Ma Zhaoxu meeting, and about the State Department’s failure to provide confirmation of the meeting and a readout, the State Department spokesman merely said that there were “ongoing consultations,” including with Minister Ma Zhaoxu, and provided no substantive information about what was discussed. […]
The U.S. State Department’s refusal to disclose the substantive content of Malley’s calls raises growing concerns among Iran watchers (including ZOA) that these calls may signal a Biden administration attempt to use China to circumvent existing sanctions on Iran, and to provide Iran with unwarranted de facto sanctions relief. […]
Malley’s meetings with China appear to violate the official Biden administration position that it will not conduct talks with Iran until Iran returns to the JCPOA’s limits on Iran’s nuclear development. […]
ZOA is also concerned because Malley’s overture to the Chinese, in contradiction to “official” administration statements, is eerily and dangerously reminiscent of the Obama-Biden administration’s secret appeasement offers to Iran prior to entering into the JCPOA. At the same time that the Obama-Biden administration was assuring the public (and its P5+1 partners) that the U.S. would appropriately not permit Iran to enrich uranium, the administration secretly sent envoys Jake Sullivan and Bill Burns, who now have top jobs in the Biden administration, to meet with the Iranians in Oman in 2013, to offer Iran the opposite: that Obama-Biden would allow Iran to continue to enrich uranium. ❞
Analyst's note: it appears that the Chinese built leverage on Malley by virtue of Michael Kovrig's arbitrary detention and that's perhaps why he was in such a rush to call them (see 16 May 2019 and 11 August 2022).
• https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjb_663304/zygy_663314/gyhd_663338/202102/t20210211_9906447.html
19 February 2021: “The United States Officially Rejoins the Paris Agreement.” From the press release:
❝ On January 20, on his first day in office, President Biden signed the instrument to bring the United States back into the Paris Agreement. Per the terms of the Agreement, the United States officially becomes a Party again today.
The Paris Agreement is an unprecedented framework for global action. We know because we helped design it and make it a reality. Its purpose is both simple and expansive: to help us all avoid catastrophic planetary warming and to build resilience around the world to the impacts from climate change we already see.
Now, as momentous as our joining the Agreement was in 2016 — and as momentous as our rejoining is today — what we do in the coming weeks, months, and years is even more important. ❞
• https://www.state.gov/the-united-states-officially-rejoins-the-paris-agreement/
7 April 2021: “Iran has produced 55 kg of 20% enriched uranium since January: official”
21 April 2021: STRATCOM Admiral Charles Richard warns Congress that China’s military is engaged in a “very rapid” expansion of nuclear forces, which threatens U.S. security and is complicating efforts to deter both Russia as well as China.
• https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/21/adm-charles-richard-warns-over-china-nuclear-expan/
23 April 2021: China's CGNPC (CGN Mining UK Limited) signs an agreement to pay [USD] $435 million for a 49% stake in a Kazatomprom uranium mining operation called Ortalyk following through on the agreements signed in 2015.
• Company #09142456: CGN Global Uranium, Ltd. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/09142456
• Company #09657831: CGNM UK Ltd. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/09657831
4 May 2021: Writing in the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen calls for an investigation of francophile John Kerry for potentially sharing classified information with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.
❝ News that former secretary of state John F. Kerry may have shared classified intelligence with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif about Israeli strikes on Iranian targets in Syria has elicited yawns from the media and among congressional Democrats. The revelation (which Kerry denies) was buried 22 paragraphs deep in a New York Times article about a leaked audio recording of Zarif. According to the Times, Zarif said that “Kerry informed him that Israel had attacked Iranian interests in Syria at least 200 times, to his astonishment.” ❞
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/04/john-kerry-must-be-investigated-zarif-tape/
9 June 2021: Energy Intelligence Group reports that CNNC subsidiary China National Uranium Co. (CNUC) is planning a uranium trading hub in Alashankou, near the Kazakh border in the far western Chinese province of Xinjiang, to rival established uranium trading hubs in Canada, France, and the United States.
• Paywalled https://www.energyintel.com/0000017b-a7dd-de4c-a17b-e7df73e40000
• Company #FC032478: China National Nuclear Corp. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/FC032478
• Company #BR017553: CNNC London Office https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/BR017553
17 August 2021: Ukrainian security researcher Volodymyr “Bob” Diachenko announces that he discovered an unprotected terrorist watchlist database containing 1.9 million records online. “Unprotected” means that no password or any other authentication was required to access it. According to Bob:
❝ The watchlist came from the Terrorist Screening Center, a multi-agency group administered by the FBI. The TSC maintains the country's no-fly list, which is a subset of the larger watchlist. A typical record in the list contains a full name, citizenship, gender, date of birth, passport number, no-fly indicator, and more.
I immediately reported it to Department of Homeland Security officials, who acknowledged the incident and thanked me for my work. The DHS did not provide any further official comment, though. ❞
26 August 2021: A series of at least six huge blasts at a munition depot in southern Kazakhstan on August 26 kill at least 12 people, wounding over 90, precipitating the evacuation of some 1,200 residents from multiple nearby settlements. Kazakh defense officials say that the string of six explosions occurred at the facility in the Jambyl/Zhambyl region, not far from the regional capital of Taraz, shortly after 7 p.m. It's unclear if the cause of the blasts in Jambyl/Zhambyl mirror the cause of the massive explosions that occurred at another Kazakh munitions depot, in Arys, two years before (see 24 June 2019).
Analyst's note: this explosion received almost no attention, because on the same day, in Kabul, Afghanistan, 13 American heroes were killed in a different explosion… a terrorist bombing during the final phases of withdraw. Two large explosions on the same day seems as if it'd be a rather rare occurrence.
8 September 2021: Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) and China Zhongyuan Engineering Cooperation sign a “Framework Agreement on Deepening Nuclear Energy Cooperation.” The agreement envisages the transfer of nuclear technology, uranium mining and processing, nuclear fuel supply, and the construction of nuclear research reactors, which will likely be used to help Pakistan increase its nuclear weapons stockpile.
On June 20th 2022, China Zhongyuan Engineering Corporation (CZEC) changed its named into China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) Overseas Ltd.
• https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-dangerous-new-nuclear-pact/
23 September 2021: President Biden nominates Kazakh-American Saule Omarova to be Comptroller of the Currency. Professor Omarova is respected attorney, academic, and policy advisor who just so happens to have been born in the West Kazakhstan Region of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.
RFE/RL describes her nomination thusly:
❝ Omarova is a controversial pick. Born in the Kazakh S.S.R. in 1966, she attended school in the provincial town of Oral (known in Russian as Uralsk). After excelling in school, she studied philosophy at Moscow State University, winning a V.I. Lenin Scholarship for academic excellence. Her career trajectory took a dramatic turn in December 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed while Omarova was on a university exchange in the United States. […]
In Oral’s School No. 21, principal Laura Sharkubenova told RFE/RL that Omarova was the first student to graduate from the school with a ‘gold medal,’ an academic distinction only awarded to a tiny fraction of students in the Soviet Union. ❞
A copy of the register from Oral's School No. 21 says that Saule Omarova was a member of the Komsomol, or 'Young Communists,' in the USSR. That's a pretty staggering fact for someone nominated to be head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Did anyone bother to check and see what happened to the Russian ruble once the Communists had finished with it?
Analyst's note: nobody is even remotely suggesting, i.e., that Professor Omarova attended the KGB's 101st Intelligence School in Moscow concurrently with her enrollment at Moscow State University before subsequently being sent to study and build a life in the United States.
Nor is anybody outlandishly suggesting that Professor Omarova is a KGB/SVR operative whose nomination nearly afforded her the opportunity to destroy the U.S. dollar/petrodollar system.
That being said, had President Biden asked experts in Soviet/Russian intelligence about Professor Omarova's nomination, presumably they might have pointed out — quite reasonably — that her exemplary academic career would've, at the very least, made her a potential asset for Soviet intelligence-connected professors at Moscow State University.
7-9 November 2021: USNI News reports that China has built at least two mock U.S. Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
❝ The Chinese military has built targets in the shape of an American aircraft carrier and other U.S. warships in the Taklamakan desert as part of a new target range complex, according to photos provided to USNI News by satellite imagery company Maxar. […]
The area has been traditionally used for ballistic missile testing, according to a summary of the Maxar images by geospatial intelligence company AllSource Analysis that identified the site from satellite imagery.
“The mockups of several probable U.S. warships, along with other warships (mounted on rails and mobile), could simulate targets related to seeking/target acquisition testing,” according to the AllSource Analysis summary, which said there are no indications of weapon impact areas in the immediate vicinity of the mockups. “This, and the extensive detail of the mockups, including the placement of multiple sensors on and around the vessel targets, it is probable that this area is intended for multiple uses over time.” ❞
Analyst's note: the Taklamakan desert is the world's 2nd largest shifting sand desert and is the region where China is pursuing massive energy projects and where it historically tested nuclear weapons. Moreover, it's in Xinjiang, which is the region where China's regime is committing genocide.
11 November 2021: Chinese-party-state media Xinhua reports that “a nuclear fuel assemblies plant built by a Chinese-Kazakh joint venture was put into operation on Wednesday in the city of Ust-Kamenogorsk in the East Kazakhstan Region […] with an operation period of 20 years, the project is jointly funded by CGNPC Uranium Resources and Kazakhstan's national atomic company Kazatomprom […] the project officially started in December 2016. It is designed to produce 200 tons of uranium nuclear fuel components annually, which are used for generating thermal power inside a nuclear reactor.”
• 🔓 http://www.news.cn/english/asiapacific/2021-11/12/c_1310305544.htm
12 Novemeber 2021: Kazatomprom proudly issues a press release touting two new contracts with the human rights-violating, organ-harvesting, concentration camp-building regime in Beijing.
From the press release:
❝ JSC National Atomic Company “Kazatomprom” (“Kazatomprom” or “the Company”) announces that the Company, represented by its Chief Commercial Officer, Askar Batyrbayev, participated virtually in the China International Import Expo 2021, held in Shanghai, China from 05–12 November 2021. During the Expo, Kazatomprom concluded two term contracts for the supply of Kazakhstani natural uranium concentrates: one with China National Uranium Company Limited [CNUC], and a second with State Nuclear Uranium Resources Development Company [SNURDC] Limited. The quantities and specific contract terms cannot be disclosed due to confidentiality and commercial sensitivity. ❞
23 November 2021: The Washington Free Beacon reports that Vice President Kamala Harris, while on a trip to France the previous week, purchased cookware from E. Dehillerin, a pricey shop outside the Louvre museum. According to the Free Beacon:
❝ The big-ticket items in the haul were a $375 serving dish and $160 frying pan, the Parisian specialty store told the Free Beacon. The vice president rounded out her purchase with various smaller accessories, such as a porcelain cocotte and egg dish, a copper cleaner, and various wooden spoons. […] All together Harris spent 516 euros, which amounts to roughly 600 dollars at the current exchange rate. ❞
Analyst's note: this is noteworthy simply for the signal it sends. Kamala Harris speaks French, BTW.
• https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/exclusive-kamala-harris-bought-375-pot-on-paris-trip/
7 December 2021: Professor Omarova withdraws her nomination for Comptroller of the Currency. President Biden cites “inappropriate personal attacks” on Omarova “that were far beyond the pale.” It's unclear if he understands the extremely serious counterintelligence concerns regarding her nomination.
From left-right: Leah Pisar; Samuel Pisar and wife Judith Pisar, chair of Arts France; Antony Blinken; Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan (also a Biden administration member).
Boris Yeltsin shaking hands with Samuel Pisar upon his arrival at the 'Crillon', in Paris, France on 16 April 1991.
26 July 1991 Epstein flight log (zoomed view below).
Members of the immediate family of the late Robert Maxwell, including Ghislaine (4L), stand behind the body laying on a stretcher during the funeral service in Jerusalem's main convention hall on 10 November 1991.
Then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken shakes hands with Gen. Fang Fenghui of the Chinese People's Liberation Army at a meeting in Beijing in Oct. 8, 2015.
Only slightly off-topic: Bill Browder (alleged codename: Solomon) was, until the Obama administration, the largest foreign investor in Russia. Browder is the grandson of Communist Party USA founder Earl Browder (see also 19 October 2020 re: John Brennan) and the son of Princeton mathematician Felix Browder.
Bill Browder has styled himself as a corruption fighter and anti-Communist. But is he really?
Bill Browder was a former employee of Robert Maxwell (before Maxwell's 5 November 1991 death, which was ruled a drowning). (Maxwell's real name was Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch Browder and he was posthumously dubbed “Israel's super-spy.”)
Bill Browder was the former business partner of Republic Bank of New York founder Edmond Safra (before Safra's 3 December 1999 death, which was ruled arson).
And Bill Browder was the employer (via a proxy) of Sergei Magnitsky, an “accountant” who was employed by a tax law firm, Firestone Duncan, that he had retained (before Magnitsky's 16 November 2009 death, which indisputably occurred at the hands of his Russian jailers).
Aside: Browder frequently misrepresents Magnitsky's occupation by stating that Magnitsky was a lawyer, prompting corrections from the New York County Prosecutor's Office in Manhattan, Swiss prosecutors (including a special prosecutor appointed specifically for this case), Russian authorities, and more.
For additional background: Edmond Safra (sometimes called “Mossad's banker,” though I'm sure Mossad would object to that as an exaggeration), whose Monaco apartment was called “the Hermitage” — which is the same Hermitage from whence Bill Browder's Hermitage Capital derives its name — was from a Brazilian-Lebanese Jewish banking dynasty. Indeed, Browder, Safra, and diamond magnate Beny Steinmetz founded Hermitage together. At the time of his death, Safra had just agreed to allow HSBC (the London-based Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corp.) to purchase his (probably insolvent) Republic Bank of New York banking empire for $10bn.
Mere days after New York banking regulators approved the acquisition, Safra died in a fire set by his male home health aide (a former US Army Ranger). Ah, but how could someone that rich have no security, you might ask? Well, his security was called off that night. And who was his head of security at the time? An Israeli named Yakir Shaashoua, who went on to found a company called VRMG Security Services.
The $10bn in proceeds from the sale of Maxwell's banking empire were placed in an HSBC-controlled trust in Guernsey. In other words, the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation paid Safra, then he died, and then his assets went right back on HSBC's ledger into a trust account (presumably to restructure Maxwell's network of companies, agents, and assets back to profitability and then to “liquidate” those deemed non-profitable).
Why steal from a bank when you can instead simply steal the entire bank? For her part, his widow, Lily Safra (whose previous husband committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the chest) inherited (on paper) $4bn (again, much of it in debt and distressed assets). She died in 2022, leaving behind a (supposedly) $600M estate in the South of France (probably much less than that, actually).
Lily Safra's shown here with Tony Blinken's stepsister, Leah Pisar, and French actor Alain Delon at the Scopus Award dinner given by the Jewish University of Jerusalem at Le Palais Brongniart November 18, 2007 in Paris, France. Clearly the families know each other.
27 December 2021: David Russell Lee of InnerCityPress.com, while covering the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, notes that one of the partially-redacted exhibits, from Epstein pilot Dave Rodgers' flight logs, lists a flight from New Castle Airport in Wilmington, Deleware (ILG) to Teterboro, New Jersey (TEB) which reported carrying both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell… on 26 July 1991 (before Robert Maxwell died, when he allegedly fell off his yacht in November of 1991). The inbound flight was the previous day, from Long Island MacArthur Airport (ISP).
The unredacted copy of the flight logs isn't much help. The notes are barely readable, they were obviously hastily written, and, absent chain-of-custody records, it isn't clear how we can even be sure they haven't been altered.
Analyst's aside: Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s stepfather, who raised him, was the Polish-American lawyer Samuel Pisar. Pisar was once a member of John F. Kennedy's economic and foreign policy task force (before JKF was assassinated). Later, he was a longtime consigliere and confidant of Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine Maxwell's father) before he, too, mysteriously died. Pisar was (reportedly) the last person to speak to Robert Maxwell before his death.
In a hagiography of Pisar, Politico (in a piece which neglects mentioning Maxwell and which reads like a partisan attempt to chart a very stupid path for Blinken's secretaryship building on Pisar's own chequered legacy) explains the (likely superficial) rationale for Pisar's flawed foreign policy views, which have shaped Tony's own thinking towards an even larger challenge: China. While it's easy to jump to the conclusion that French-speaking Pole Samuel Pisar was a dyed-in-the-wool Soviet, some human understanding and humane sensitivity to the fact that Pisar was a survivor of Aushwitz — a camp that was liberated by Soviets — is necessary in understanding his (at best) naÏve pro-Soviet views under JFK. (Blinken exclusively credited the US army with saving Pisar. His stepfather, Samuel Pisar, told a different story: “Russia was a savior. I consider my saviors to be the Russian and American armies.”) Politico explains:
It seemed “absurd” and “dangerous” to Pisar for the United States to try to exclude Russia, Eastern Europe and China from the increasingly globalized economy. Rather, Pisar proposed drawing “the East into a web of agreements that would create an irreversible commitment to peace; and to accept the bet that human freedom would progressively benefit from this process.” Pisar expounded on his ideas in a widely read 1961 U.S. government report titled “A New Look at Trade Policy Toward the Communist Bloc—The Elements of a Common Strategy for the West.” In such policy writings, always cautiously worded, he suggested that Washington limit the list of goods it refused to sell to the Soviets and allow in some Soviet goods, such as Kamchatka crabmeat, that had earlier been barred on grounds such as suspicion that slave labor was involved. The goal, in part, was to encourage post-Stalinist reforms, Pisar wrote in his autobiography.
The problem with drawing the East into a web of agreements is that, eventually, you'll end up being the one ensnared by such a web. Indeed, by the 1970s, the Soviets were clearly drawing Pisar into that web. From the New York Times (16 October 1972):
Trade with the Soviet Union has become an emotional and divisive concern for many American Jewish businessmen since Moscow's imposition of an emigration tax.
“There is a terrible anguish about this issue,” declared Samuel Pisar, an international lawyer and expert on EastWest trade who has been virtually commuting to Moscow recently on behalf of major banks and corporations that are his clients.
But Sidney H. Scheuer, a textile broker, maintained, “I don't regard this consideration as being in any conflict with my business.” Since 1957, he has done $150‐million worth of trade with the Russians. […]
The emigration tax, which took effect in August, requires educated Russians seeking to migrate to repay the cost of their educations. The tax, ranging from $5,000 to $30,000, has affected mostly Jews. […]
On Oct. 4, almost three‐fourths of the Senate joined Senator Henry M. Jackson, Democrat of Washington, in introducing legislation to withhold credits, credit guarantees or most‐favored nation tariff treatment from the Soviet Union in a trade agreement with the United States now under negotiation unless the Russians rescinded the exit tax.
The Soviet Union maintains that the tax is part repayment for free education and is intended to prevent a “brain drain.” […]
On Oct. 5, the East‐West Trade Council, a new group founded to promote broadened exchange, held a symposium in Washington attended by 250 business and political leaders, among them Cyrus S. Eaton, W. Averell Harriman and Senator Javits, as well as Senators Fred R. Harris, Democrat of Oklahoma, and Walter F. Mondale, Democrat of Minnesota.
Emotions were aired. Senator Harris [of Oklahoma] introduced Mr. Pisar, the international lawyer, as “someone with a lifelong commitment to East‐West trade and to the cause of the Jewish people.” A 43‐year‐old former inmate of Auschwitz, and an American citizen by special act of Congress, Mr. Pisar is the author of “Commerce and Coexistence,” a handbook on East‐West trade.
He is also known in informed circles for the impromptu, impassioned remarks he made at a conference of American public‐opinion makers and Russians in Kiev in July, 1971.
On that occasion, in the presence of David Rockefeller, Gen. James M. Gavin, Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, and others, Mr. Pisar strayed from economics into the issue of Soviet Jews. The digression had been prompted by the proximity of Babi Yar; afterward, at the urging of some of the Americans, people at the conference were taken by the Russians to look at the site of the World War II massacre of Ukrainian Jews by the Nazis.
At the symposium in Washington, Mr. Pisar dwelt briefly on what he described as his special “moral” credentials before espousing the use of trade channels for economic, political and humane objectives.
Ah, yes. There we have it. The special “moral credentials” of the man who would become a confidante of both Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.
To summarize events: the result of Pisar's lobbying was the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the U.S.-Soviet Trade Bill, which became law in 1974. It played a major role in Soviet-American relations until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment had its origins in 1972 (when the NYT story was written). In response to the sharp increase in the number of Soviet Jews seeking to leave the Soviet Union, supposedly because of rising Soviet anti-Semitism, the Brezhnev regime imposed a prohibitively expensive exit tax on educated Jews who wanted to leave. In response, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of the State of Washington introduced an amendment to the Soviet-American Trade Bill, linking the trade benefits that Moscow wanted (most favored nation treatment for Soviet exports and U.S. credits) to the exodus of Soviet Jews.
Another interesting (only slightly off-topic) fact: Bill Browder, the grandson of the founder of the Communist Party USA, Earl Browder, was an employee of Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, at the time of his death (see left-hand column). It's conceivable that Bill Browder, not Samuel Pisar, was the last person to see Maxwell alive and speak to him. Browder renounced his US citizenship to evade taxes. (Taxes ruin financial scams and intelligence plays.)
Recall Pisar's opposition to the Soviet Union's immigration tax. Was the problem *really* anti-Semitism? Or was the problem that the Soviet Union — which rescued Jews from Hitler's Third Reich — the Soviet Union, whose intelligence services were founded by Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, himself a Jew — wasn't at all anti-Semitic, but was rather lured into bankruptcy by overspending (i.e., goaded by Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative) and endemic graft and political corruption (not unlike the Democratic Party today) and actually simply genuinely needed money and to avoid capital flight?
Was the Perestroika Deception simply the means by which Soviet intelligensia ejected itself from the dried husk of the USSR and grafted itself onto the Free World and Western intelligence services? Were these new “Russian democrats” actually still the same wolves they'd always been? Who could lead such a pack of wolves?
At a high-level, might a repeat of the USSR's collapse be what Browder hopes to see happen to the United States? To see it collapse into bankruptcy, to see its defense capabilities wither, and then to see it looted by foreign investors? Is that why he aligned himself with HSBC, a bank over which the Chinese Communist Party holds so much sway? Wouldn't that mean Bill Browder is actually a Communist wolf — just like his grandfather, CPUSA founder Earl Browder — dressed like a capitalist sheep? A key player in the Perestroika Deception?
(Aside: The fact that the world's greatest human rights enforcement mechanism is called the Magnitsky Act, and is thus marred by Browder's self-serving activism is truly unfortunate. It should be renamed the Liu Xiaobo Act, in honor of the famed Chinese poet Nobel Laureate, or the Ilham Tohti Act, in honor of the famed Uyghur economist and Sakharov Prize Laureate.)
Back to Epstein: it's unclear who Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell might've been visiting in Wilmington, Delaware on their overnight trip on 26 July 1991, or who they might've taken with them. The trip is unliklely to have invovled Pisar, as he split his time mainly between New York and Paris, but might Robert Maxwell have been involved, perhaps accompanying Ghislaine? The Epstein flight logs revealed that Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (among others) were all passengers at one point or another. This particular log entry, however, is inscrutably-difficult to read.
Analyst's note: for what it's worth, Prince Andrew is a friend of Kenes Rakishev and sold his home to Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev (who is, himself, also a friend of Hunter Biden's Kazakh business partner, Mr. Rakishev). Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell is now on the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group (see 12 August 2022). Those incestuous connections may partly explain some other things in the timeline, but none of the major names that have surfaced in connection with Epstein were residents of Wilmington, Delaware in 1991… at least as far as the author is aware.
Who could Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell have been visiting in Wilmington, Delaware?
Think hard.
Secretary of State Blinken's stepfather, Samuel Pisar, is listed on page 87 of Jeffrey Epstein's Little Black Book. Epstein recorded 7 phone numbers and no addresses under this name.
• https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1475673270779318278
• https://lawandcrime.com/live-trials/ghislaine-maxwell/jeffrey-epstein-flight-logs-showing-detailed-passenger-lists-entered-into-evidence-at-ghislaine-maxwell-trial/
• https://ia803407.us.archive.org/33/items/epstein-flight-logs-unredacted/EPSTEIN%20FLIGHT%20LOGS%20UNREDACTED.pdf
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pisar
• https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/19/samuel-pisar-tony-blinken-secretary-of-state-460155
• https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/16/archives/many-us-jews-are-torn-over-trading-with-soviet-soviet-exit-tax.html
• https://www.eurotrib.com/comments/2020/7/5/94410/06518
• https://dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7361931/Misery-Maxwells-Bankruptcy-sudden-death-huge-fortunes-lost.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Ryan
• https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/5267-uk-mps-call-for-probe-of-prince-andrew-s-deals-in-kazakhstan
• https://theamericanreport.org/tag/insider-trading/
7 January 2022: “In Kazakhstan, Russia follows a playbook it developed in Ukraine” […] “What began as protests over rising fuel prices on Jan. 2, 2021, quickly escalated into violent clashes on the streets of Kazakhstan. On Jan. 5, Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, a firm ally of Putin’s, requested support from the Collective Security Treaty Organization, of which Putin’s Russian Federation is the leading member. Russia has responded decisively by sending paratroopers, special operations troops and equipment as part of a nearly 3,000-strong force to Kazakhstan.”
• https://theconversation.com/in-kazakhstan-russia-follows-a-playbook-it-developed-in-ukraine-174505
7 January 2022: State media reports that Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping praises ‘strong measures’ against protesters in Kazakhstan. Xi reportedly tells Tokayev the following in his message:
❝ You decisively took strong measures at critical moments and quickly calmed down the situation, showing your position of responsibility and sense of duty as a politician, and of being highly responsible for your country and your people. ❞
8 January 2022: Kazakhstan's ex-intelligence chief, Karim Masimov — who was Prime Minister of Kazakhstan from 10 January 2007 to 24 September 2012 and again from 2 April 2014 until 8 September 2016 (and who was previously pictured with Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Kenes Rakishev) — is arrested for treason.
19 January 2022: The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project publishes an exposé called “The Nazarbayev Billions: How Kazakhstan’s ‘Leader of the Nation’ Controls Vast Assets Through Charitable Foundations.” The exposé mentions four foundations:
❝ Born into a peasant family, Nazarbayev joined the Soviet Communist Party in his early 20s and rose steadily through its ranks. By the middle of his career, he was at the top of the party structure in Soviet Kazakhstan, holding positions including prime minister and first secretary of the local Party branch. When the post of president was established in 1990, he was selected to fill it. Nazarbayev was overwhelmingly reelected after the country gained its independence the following year, setting the stage for decades of one-man rule. […]
He was granted full immunity from scrutiny or prosecution, which extends to any entities founded by him. And in 2010, Nazarbayev also gained a new title — “Leader of the Nation.”
It was around this time that he began to establish the foundations that would eventually come to hold billions in assets. ❞
The exposé continues:
❝ One of these, the Foundation of the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan - Elbasy , had been established years earlier as a public foundation, but in 2011 it was reclassified as “private,” and Nazarbayev was listed as its founder. (It was dissolved in 2021.)
Nazarbayev founded two more private foundations, the Nazarbayev Foundation and the Nursultan Nazarbayev Foundation, in 2009 and 2010. He founded another two, Demeu (“Support”) and Elbasy (“Leader of the Nation”), in 2013 and 2021. ❞
Credit: James O’Brien/OCCRP
16 February 2022: At a high-level meeting of China's State Council, chaired by Premier Li Keqiang, its announced that China will disregard its Paris climate pledges and instead run its coal-fired power plants at full capacity in order to support economic growth.
Analyst's note: this was a tremendously pivotal moment. If Macron were as sincere as he pretends to be about ecology — your humble analyst is speaking as a Teddy Roosevelt conservationist and as a recycler — then they'd have gone full-blown Générale de Gaulle over this, but they didn't. This lack of outrage was extremely telling from an analytical POV. What France should've done was publicly announce extremely aggressive actions in the South China Sea along with a transit of the Strait of Taiwan. America — a nation that France claims is its ally — would've been happy to join them. But they didn't; they blinked. Why?
Answer: there are multiple ways in which France is compromised by China. It isn't simply their assistance to China's MCF (military-civil fusion) nuclear program in Guangzhou or to China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) biological weapons program (the Wuhan Institute of Virology appears to be only a small portion of that). It isn't simply the fact that France is upside-down and offsides when it comes to Iran and Pakistan. It isn't simply geopolitics: it's also about libertine hedonism and violating human rights in the pursuit of the finer things in life… les belles choses de la vie. French luxury brands, like Bernard Jean Étienne Arnault's LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (but also others), rely on China's nouveau riche to keep their prices (and profits) inflated. French makeup and pharmaceutical companies rely not only on China's consumers, but also on China's human test subjects (there's a global shortage of simian macaques, so China is pretty clearly using Uyghurs, but you won't see that reported anywhere, or the world might have to actually do something about it). (These companies use third-party Chinese contractors to run white label Chinese clinical/safety trails for them.)
Perhaps most salient to France at the time of this announcement, however, was the Olympics. The Beijing Olympics took place from 4 February until 20 February 2022 and France, which is hosting the 2024 Olympics, decided to tuck tail and not join the Western world in staging a boycott, with Macron calling the boycott “insignificant.” In short, Macron's concern for écologie — and his general orientation towards America, whom he professes to be his strongest, oldest ally — is feigned. He and his intelligence services (but really only during his tenure, as this analyst has nothing against the French in general, only Macron in particular), have behaved dishonorably towards their allies. He's made himself a hypocrite on the issue of ecology/conservation and China, and, ultimately, he's shown himself to be unworthy of remaining le grand maître de l’ordre national de la Légion d’honneur.
As an actual conservationist, as an actual (in theory) proponent of a circular economy, as a human rights defender, and perhaps most of all, as an (American) Gaullist, your humble author would dishonor himself by not pointing all of this out.
2 March 2022: Attorney General Merrick B. Garland announces the launch of “Task Force KleptoCapture,” ostensibly to target the Russian and Russian-linked transnational organized criminal networks behind this type of activity.
The annoucement says that the mission of the Task Force will include:
Investigating and prosecuting violations of new and future sanctions imposed in response to the Ukraine invasion, as well as sanctions imposed for prior instances of Russian aggression and corruption;
Combating unlawful efforts to undermine restrictions taken against Russian financial institutions, including the prosecution of those who try to evade know-your-customer and anti-money laundering measures;
Targeting efforts to use cryptocurrency to evade U.S. sanctions, launder proceeds of foreign corruption, or evade U.S. responses to Russian military aggression; and
Using civil and criminal asset forfeiture authorities to seize assets belonging to sanctioned individuals or assets identified as the proceeds of unlawful conduct.
Analyst's note (2/12/23): Merrick Garland may end up hoisted on his own petard. Did you know, dear reader, that NOT ONLY did Merrick Garland cancel the DoJ/FBI “China Initiative,” but Merrick Garland's second cousin is Terry Branstad, Trump's former Ambassador to China (and a lifelong friend to Xi Jinping)? And did you know that his son, Eric Branstad, was very likely compromised by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (the MSS, China's CIA)? On top of that, did you know that Eric Branstad was tapped to head Trump's “Save America” fund in 2021? Indeed, every indication is that Merrick Garland's appointment of a Special Prosecutor related to the (likely partially fictitious) Trump classified documents case is actually an attempt at tortious interference in the 2024 election. The objective clearly seems to be to wound Trump and to use him as controlled opposition to Biden, perhaps by having him run as a Ross Perot-type third party candidate (i.e., the “Conservative Party”) against someone like Mitt “Pierre Delecto” Romney, to steal a win for pro-China Democrats or for the pro-China wing of the GOP (Monsieur Romney talks like a China hawk, but he's fully committed to preventing American energy dominance vis-à-vis the Paris Agreement).
• https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/attorney-general-merrick-b-garland-announces-launch-task-force-kleptocapture
• https://theintercept.com/2020/10/15/eric-branstad-trump-china-ambassador/
• https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/jonathan-zimmerman-garland-race-american-identity-article-1.2568382
• https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-12/trump-hires-iowa-political-veterans-signaling-interest-in-2024
25 March 2022: Kazakh-born, Soviet-educated Saule Omarova, who was briefly tapped to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and who is a fellow at the Berggruen Institute (and the inaugural Beth and Marc Goldberg Professor of Law at Cornell Law School), releases a 100-plus-page proposal to create a new Fannie Mae-like federal agency to address climate change, which she calls “the National Investment Authority.” MarketWatch describes it as “a trillion dollar” question.
Strangely, the massive “climate change” proposal focuses on grid improvements and battery tech, only mentions the word “nuclear” once, and makes no effort to propose ways for America's nuclear industry to better compete against the likes of Kazatomprom, Rosatom, and China's state-owned nuclear players, CGNPC, CNNC, SPIC, SNPTC, and CHNG. Super weird, huh?
Analyst's note: Pierre Omidyar was previously a member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council (see 15 March 2013 re: Snowden). (He was also commissioner for President Barack Obama’s Commission on White House Fellowships.)
(Oh, and Marc Goldberg? He was no mensch. He was a tabaccoo executive. And what about the OCC, which Omarova was nominated to head? It charters, regulates, and supervises ALL national banks and federal savings associations (and federal branches and agencies of foreign banks), so whatever un-American foreign agent schmendrick advised Biden to nominate her probably dodged a metaphorical bullet when she withdrew her nomination… and would likewise probably do well to not make that type un-American mistake again, lest less forgiving analysts take note.)
25 March 2022: The Daily Mail runs a story with the following heading: “Hunter Biden DID help secure millions in funding for US contractor in Ukraine specializing in deadly pathogen research, laptop emails reveal, raising more questions about the disgraced son of then vice president.”
Author's note: Hunter Biden's Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners was reported to have a 13.4% stake in Metabiota in 2014… what was the value of Rosemont Seneca's stake after the COVID-19 pandemic?
Maybe someone should ask Metabiota's founder, Nathan Wolfe, Ph.D., the founder of Global Viral, the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Human Biology at Stanford University (Stanford has such interesting people), the founder of Metabiota, and someone, curiously, who proposed pandemic insurance before the COVID-19 outbreak. In fact, in 2016, presumably while Rosemont Seneca owned a stake, Metabiota entered into a “pandemic insurance” partnership with Munich Re.
❝ Tobias Farny, Chief Executive Asia-Pacific for Greater China, Korea and Southeast Asia at Munich Re: “When it comes to finding solutions, it all starts with data analytics that help us better understand the direct and indirect costs of infectious diseases for various industries. We are working with Metabiota to capture these insights and improve our understanding and quantification of epidemic risk. Eventually, we will be in a position to model the potential financial impact an epidemic may have on a region and its economy and offer the right insurance solutions.”
Munich Re has already made use of Metabiota’s data and real-time monitoring capabilities to structure innovative solutions to transfer epidemic risk to investors in a private placement and has also worked with Metabiota on data analysis for a cover for the infectious disease MERS in Korea. ❞
That means First Son and CIA National Resources Division asset Hunter Biden stood to materially benefit from a MERS-like pandemic, doesn't it? What happened to Rosemont Seneca's stake in Metabiota? Joe and Hunter were/are clearly two guys who've been bought and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP didn't contain the nascent pandemic during trade negotiations with the United States, but instead out-vented it to the entire world (presumably increasing the theoretical value of Rosemont's stake in Metabiota's even more, assuming they retained it). That “cui bono?” factor is super suspicious.
Nathan Wolfe is the star of a play called The Catastrophist which was written by his wife, playright Lauren Gunderson (so clearly it's honest/unbiased).
The blurb from The Catastrophist's Publisher reads like so:
❝ A time-jumping tale based on the life and work of Nathan Wolfe (who also happens to be the playwright’s husband). Though not a play about COVID19, it is a true story of a pandemic expert. A deep dive into the profundities of scientific exploration and modern Judaism, the lengths one goes for love and family, the bracing truths of fatherhood and discovery, and the harrowing realities of facing your own mortality, The Catastrophist is also a story of a main character battling the story he’s in… and who is writing it. ❞
• https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/ecohealth-alliance-wanted-to-block-disclosure-of-covid-19-relevant-virus-data-from-china/
• https://www.munichre.com/en/company/media-relations/media-information-and-corporate-news/corporate-news/2016/2016-02-01-cooperation-between-munich-re-and-metabiota-will-push-risk-transfer-solutions-for-epidemic-risks.html
• https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Catastrophist/cBJTEAAAQBAJ
4 April 2022: The New York Post reports that a Hunter Biden grand jury witness was asked “who is the ‘big guy?’” that was mentioned in Hunter Biden's email regarding the Chinese CEFC deal.
Analyst's note: if “the big guy” is indeed President Joe Biden, then yet another sitting President would likely be implicated in what appears to be RICO-predicate criminal activity.
5 April 2022: The New York Post Editorial Board issues an op-ed headlined “Need for a special counsel in Hunter Biden’s case has grown urgent.”
• https://nypost.com/2022/04/05/need-for-special-counsel-in-hunter-biden-case-has-grown-urgent/
3 May 2022: Oligarchs.eu reports that “Kenes Rakishev’s close friendship with Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s blood-soaked leader, is under scrutiny following threats from the United States to impose further sanctions on oligarchs who support the Russian regime.”
The story continues:
❝ Rakishev is a close friend and financial backer of Ramzan Kadyrov, ruler of the Russian republic of Chechnya.
The two men have posed happily for photographs and subscribe to the same radical interpretation of Islam. Kadyrov has described the Kazakh businessman as his “dear brother.”
But this friendship and the financial support given to Kadyrov could now expose Kenes Rakishev to U.S. sanctions as the White House has warned that it will step up efforts to punish oligarchs who back the Russian regime.
And Vladimir Putin has few more loyal enforcers than Kadyrov, who rules Chechnya with an iron fist.
Kadyrov’s vicious militia has been accused of a string of abuses including murder, the abduction of opponents, torture and the persecution of homosexuals. International NGOs have described Kadyrov’s actions as “crimes against humanity”.
Kadyrov’s loyalty to President Putin appears to be limitless. Just two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kadyrov announced his forces had been deployed to the battlefield.
In a video reportedly shot at Hostomel, an airfield near Kyiv, Kadyrov is seen dressed in military fatigues poring over invasion plans with other soldiers.
Images have also emerged showing a square in the Chechen capital, Grozny, filled with soldiers on their way to Ukraine to fight Putin’s war. (Photo #6)
Such is Kadyrov’s notoriety that most businessmen avoid any association with him. But Kenes Rakishev has, instead, embraced the Chechen tyrant.
Rakishev allegedly offered to bankroll construction of Kadyrov’s luxurious palace in Grozny and even organised for Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme to fly to Chechnya.
So how did Rakishev come to befriend Kadyrov? Photos from the early 2000s chronicle the burgeoning relationship. In one, Rakishev can be seen tenderly embracing Kadyrov. On another occasion, the pair were pictured sat cross-legged having reportedly just prayed together.
And in one of the most shocking cases, Rakishev was pictured dressed head-to-toe in black Chechen military uniform arm-in-arm with Kadyrov.
In an Instagram post published in 2015, Kadyrov wished his “dear brother” Rakishev a happy birthday. He added: “We have been true friends and brothers for many years.”
Kadyrov deleted that Instagram post in 2020 after the U.S. Government imposed new sanctions on the Chechen warlord and his key associates.
The Americans put sanctions on six companies and five individuals linked to Kadyrov, including his cherished football club Akhmat Grozny.
Rakishev managed to escape sanctions on that occasion. But the invasion of Ukraine and recent revelations about his business links to Kadyrov pose a new threat.
According to an investigation, Rakishev was intimately involved in the construction of Kadyrov’s opulent palace in Chechnya.
The palace is on the banks of the river Sunzha and has 13,000m2 of carpets, 4,000m2 of tapestries and is surrounded by a garden that features 16,000 roses.
Leaked emails have revealed that Rakishev was in contact with a luxury Italian furniture company in 2011 when the palace was under construction.
Rakishev was sent a quote of €2.4 million for work including marble flooring, luxury furniture, display cabinets for weapons and an enormous wooden Chechen coat of arms. ❞
The article continues:
❝ In one email sent by Rakishev, he said: “Tell the boss that I will pay for the project myself.”
While it is unclear whether Rakishev paid the final bill, the oligarch’s offer of help did not end there.
He also organised for Belgian actor Jean-Claude van Damme to fly to Grozny in November 2011 to celebrate the capital city’s anniversary.
Kenes Rakishev has devoted years to cultivating his image as a successful entrepreneur in the West. But Rakishev’s friendship with this Chechen warlord has revealed his true colours.
The question now remains: will Rakishev now join the list of sanctioned oligarchs as a result of this close association? ❞
9 May 2022: Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) writes to David Weiss, U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware, pointedly asking, “Have you discussed the need for a special counsel or independent counsel to properly investigate the Hunter Biden criminal matter?”
6 June 2022: President Biden announces that the United States will allow solar cells and modules imported from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam to enter the United States free from antidumping (ADD) and countervailing duties (CVD) for a 24-month period, despite ongoing circumvention inquiries initiated by the US Department of Commerce (DOC) on 1 April 2022. President Biden invokes a rarely-used emergency authority under the Tariff Act of 1930 to waive the potential duties, declaring that “threats to the availability of sufficient electricity generation capacity” in the United States constitute an emergency. Biden Administration officials, Members of Congress, and US solar installers had previously expressed concern that the threat of new tariffs on solar imports covered by the circumvention inquiries would seriously undermine the deployment of solar technology in the United States.
DOC had initiated its circumvention inquiries on 1 April 2022 in response to a petition filed by a US domestic producer, Auxin Solar, Inc., on 8 February 2022. The petition alleged that solar cells and modules completed in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, or Vietnam used parts and components manufactured in China are circumventing the ADD and CVD orders on solar cells and modules from China, which have been in place since 2012.
Analyst's note: the Uyghur Forced Labor Policy Act (UFLPA) implements a rebuttable presumption on the sourcing of goods which might be produced with slave labor, however this action, along with slow implementation of UFLPA enforcement as it relates to solar panels, could conceivably allow tax-payer subsidized solar panel suppliers to disguise the origin of the solar panel's polysilicon wafers by exporting it from Xinjiang for assembly in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Researchers, no doubt, are already investigating supply chains and pop-up Chinese companies in the aforementioned four Southeast Asian nations (see, also, Solyndra: 22 September 2011).
• https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/president-biden-invokes-emergency-authority-waive-antidumping-and-countervailing
• https://www.shu.ac.uk/helena-kennedy-centre-international-justice/research-and-projects/all-projects/in-broad-daylight
16 June 2022: The New York Times reports that Israeli and American intelligence officials have been watching each day as Iran digs a vast tunnel network just south of the Natanz nuclear production site, in what they believe is Tehran’s biggest effort yet to construct new nuclear facilities “so deep in the mountains that they can withstand [conventional] bunker-busting bombs and cyberattacks.”
he mining is visible from commercial satellite imagery. The new tunnel complex is shown on the bottom left.
Analyst's note: Iran's regime is significantly narrowing the window on its own survival and increasing the likelihood that it might be targeted with a decapitation strike. One would strongly advise the Iranians to accede to immediate, unconditional, verifiable denuclearization and pledge a freeze on weapons transfers and missile construction as a demonstration of good faith.
19 June 2022: In a possible attempt to overshadow Kazakhstan's new outreach to Iran and again paint itself as a responsible player — just as it did during the JCPOA's original P5+1 process — Kazakhstan's Foreign Minister, Mukhtar Tleuberdi, calls for the elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2045 (presumably since China plans to either subsume or invade Taiwan by 2049).
“The current military conflict on the territory of Ukraine, talk about the return of nuclear weapons and mutual threats to use nuclear weapons make us, more than ever before, think about the collective vulnerability of humanity and the urgent need to ban and eliminate these deadly weapons,” the minister says, with a completely straight face.
Analyst's note: His Holiness Pope Francis and UN Secretary General António Guterres subsequently join Mukhtar Tleuberdi in calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. What Kazakhstan's Foreign Minister, Mukhtar Tleuberdi, fails to mention in his absurd grandstanding is that Kazatomprom appears to be supplying China with the majority of the uranium being used for General Secretary Xi's massive civil-military nuclear program.
20 June 2022: The Tehran Times reports that Kazakhstan is preparing to give visa-free travel to Iranian nationals. Obviously, the article makes no mention of the massive (and likely intentional) proliferative risk that this entails.
23 June 2022: RFE/RL's Kazakh Service reports that “the former chief of Kazakhstan's Border Guard Service, Lieutenant General Darkhan Dilmanov, and several of his former subordinates have been detained on corruption charges.”
The report continues:
❝ The Committee of National Security (KNB) said on June 22 that the moves were made as part of an investigation into possible abuse of office while supervising the flow of goods at outposts along the Kazakh-Chinese border. Dilmanov, who was also the KNB's deputy chief, was sacked from his post in April, days before the Prosecutor-General's Office said a transportation company co-founded by the sister of former President Nursultan Nazarbaev was suspected of committing "numerous crimes" with regard to the transportation of goods via the Kazakh-Chinese border. The Anti-Corruption Agency said at the time that it also fired Erbol Nazarbaev, one of the former president's nephews. ❞
• https://www.rferl.org/a/kazakhstan-border-guard-head-detained-corruption-charges/31911538.html
7 July 2022: Kazakhstan officially announces visa-free travel for citizens of Iran, China, and India for 14 consecutive days for tourism, business, or private matters (like trafficking in illicit Iranian uranium?). These travelers would be permitted a total visa-free stay in Kazakhstan of up to 42 days (or three 14-day trips) in any given 180 day period.
Analyst's note: would “private matters” include trafficking in illicit Iranian uranium?
• https://www.onlinevisa.com/news/kazakhstan-visa-waiver-to-china-india-iran/
7 July 2022: The Observer Research Foundation (ORF) releases an Issue Brief on “China’s Nuclear Ambitions, the Implications for India, and the Future of Global Disarmament,” noting the following:
❝ For India, a point of concern arises from China’s stance on its membership to the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG). Although China consented to the 2008 NSG waiver that allowed India to participate in peaceful trade of nuclear energy technologies, Beijing has reiterated that India’s admission to the group is impermissible. ❞
Analyst's note: as the second-largest carbon emitter and builder of new coal power plants, India should be considered in every aspect of the global energy crisis and in the context of China's dual-use civilian-military nuclear program. One area where all permanent members of the U.N. Security Council should be able to agree is on the need for both Pakistan and India to join the NPT. To this author's best knowledge, there is presently no evidence that India has sought to proliferate nuclear or dual-use technologies, and India — if we are to have any hope of solving the climate and energy crises — should be allowed to become a full member of the NSG, just as China (a greater emitter) presently is.
• https://www.orfonline.org/research/chinas-nuclear-ambitions/
11 July 2022: New York City releases a PSA for residents in the event of a nuclear attack. From the PSA:
“So there’s been a nuclear attack. Don’t ask me how or why,” says a woman who’s walking a deserted city street. “Just know that the big one has hit, OK? So what do we do?”
An emergency management spokesperson tells The Post one of the pillars of the department is to educate residents on natural and manmade hazards. Per The Post:
❝ “The likelihood of a nuclear weapon incident occurring in/near New York City is very low. However, it’s important New Yorkers know the steps to stay safe,” the spokesperson said. “The new PSA encourages New Yorkers to take key, simple steps in the event of such an incident.”
NYC Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol said in a statement, “As the threat landscape continues to evolve, it is important that New Yorkers know we are preparing for any imminent threats and are providing them with the resources they need to stay safe and informed.” ❞
Author's note: this advice is now slightly out of date. In a study published in Physics of Fluids on 17 January 2023, scientists simulated a nuclear explosion to determine the best and worst places to be in a concrete-reinforced building during such an event.
The safest place: the corners of a room, author Ioannis Kokkinakis of Cyprus’ University of Nicosia says in a statement.
19 July 2022: In a clear break from its Tokyo, Paris, and Copenhagen commitments, Bloomberg reports that China is deepening its dependence on coal by speeding up approvals for the construction of new coal plants.
Analyst's note: by this point in the timeline, geopolitical strategists reading this might speculate that China's regime is engaged in a “double sprint” towards a century of stragetic global energy dominance. One sprint is for Beijing and its partners in Moscow, Tehran, and Astana to obtain strategic dominance over large swaths of the global nuclear fuel cycle, so that China can use that leverage in a massive nuclear weapons buildup, while the second sprint is to build all other sources of energy, including coal, as cheaply and as quickly as possible — while also deceiving the world about the CCP's true climate intentions — in order to free up greater portions of China's nuclear capacity for military use.
This concept of a “double sprint” would fit well with China's prior strategic efforts. Indeed, somewhat similar to America's Manhattan Project, China had its own “Two Bombs, One Satellite” (两弹一星; Liǎngdàn Yīxīng) nuclear and space “double sprint” project. “Two Bombs” refers to the development of China's first atomic bomb (and later the hydrogen bomb) and China's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), while “One Satellite” refers to the launching of China's first artificial satellite. China tested its first atomic bomb and first hydrogen bomb in 1964 and 1967 respectively, combined the atomic bomb with a surface-to-surface missile in 1966, and successfully launched its first satellite (Dong Fang Hong I) in 1970.
A broad overview of China's nuclear fuel cycle can be found here. In this context, one could compare China's massive foreign data collection and AI effort — which encompasses its smart cities efforts, its surveillance efforts, its massive dual-use computational genomics efforts, etc. — as being analogous to the “One Satellite” portion of their national strategy.
23 July 2022: Signaling growing global impatience with Iranian negotiators, French President Emmanuel Macron expresses his disappointment to his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, at the lack of progress over talks on the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement, urging Raisi to make a “clear choice” to reach a deal and go back to the implementation of Iran's commitments under the 2015 nuclear agreement.
26 July 2022: The National Review reports allegations by Senator Grassley (R-IA) that several “highly credible whistleblowers” told him about an FBI “scheme” to label and discredit negative news about Hunter Biden as “disinformation” before the 2020 election. “The information provided to my office involves concerns about the FBI’s receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI’s false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation. The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter,” Grassley writes in a July 25 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland. “According to allegations, all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants. In addition, ASAC Thibault allegedly ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required by FBI guidelines,” the letter said.
27 July 2022: Axios' Barak Ravid reports that ”White House Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk told a group of think tank experts last week it's ‘highly unlikely’ that the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran will be revived in the near future, according to three U.S. sources who were on the call.“
• https://www.axios.com/2022/07/27/iran-nuclear-deal-return-biden-mcgurk-unlikely
28 July 2022: STRATCOM Admiral Charles Richard, in response to a question from The Washington Times on the shifting balance of nuclear forces, says the new three-way standoff between the United States, China and Russia highlights the need to develop a new integrated deterrence policy. “No one knows with certainty where this is going, and this is why I’m calling for a more frequent examination of our capability, capacity and posture, so that we can execute our strategy as the threat evolves.” Admiral Richard also warns that Chinese strategy is shifting from retaliatory strikes to “launch-on-warning” and that the readiness of Chinese nuclear forces also has been increased, and that shorter-range nuclear missiles also have been deployed. Those shorter-range missiles wouldn't be needed “in a true minimum-deterrent, no-first-use policy.”
• https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jul/28/chinas-nuclear-arms-push-rising-challenge-stratcom/
28 July 2022: CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping and President Biden hold a 137-minute bilateral phone call. According to the Chinese readout, “Xi underscored the need for China and the U.S. to maintain communication on such important issues as coordinating macroeconomic policies, keeping global industrial and supply chains stable, and protecting global energy and food security.”
Analyst's note: global food security is incredibly important for global stability; food security is probably the one area where it makes the most sense for China and the United States to adopt a cooperative rather than competitive mindset.
According to the Chinese readout, Chairman Xi also threatens President Biden on the topic of Taiwan, saying “those who play with fire will perish by it.” Hunter Biden (obviously) isn’t mentioned in either sides’ readout of the call.
• https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx_662805/202207/t20220729_10729593.html
29 July 2022: A Nazarbayev-linked charity, “‘Nazarbayev Fund’ Private Fund,” sues the parent company of OCCRP (the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) — the Journalism Development Network, Inc. of Baltimore — for libel in U.S. court over a story (see 19 January 2022) claiming the ex-president used the fund to squirrel away hundreds of millions worth of valuable assets.
“The Plaintiff was founded to financially support NU [Nazarbayev University] and NIS [Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools] and help provide a bridge to the west by bringing Western style higher education to Central Asia,” the lawsuit (filed on behalf of “Nazarbayev Fund Private Fund” by Matthew L. Schwartz of Boies Schiller Flexner) says.
Analyst's note: Boise Schiller Flexner is the same law firm that employed Hunter Biden!!!
• https://courthousenews.com/kazakh-dictators-charity-sues-investigative-reporting-non-profit/
• PDF https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/122cv1880.pdf
• LittleSis: Boies, Schiller, & Flexner https://littlesis.org/org/36926-Boies,_Schiller,_&_Flexner_LLP
29 July 2022: One day after his call with President Biden, Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi hold a bilateral phone call. The Chinese readout states that “unswervingly deepening the Iran-China comprehensive strategic partnership is the priority and focus of Iran's established foreign policy.” Notably, in the Chinese readout of the call, neither Iran’s nuclear program nor the JCPOA are mentioned, however the readout does say that “both Iran and China oppose hegemonism, unilateralism, interference in other countries' internal affairs, illegal unilateral sanctions, and double standards.”
29 July 2022: Former Attorney General Bill Barr joins growing calls for a special counsel to be appointed in the Department of Justice's ongoing probe of Hunter Biden.
Analyst's note (30 Jan 2023): Merrick Garland has utterly beclowned himself before the entire galaxy by waiting so long to appoint a Special Prosecutor for Hunter Biden, so credit to Bill Barr for finally pointing that fact out.
• https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/barr-calls-for-special-counsel-in-probe-of-bidens/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Barr
31 July 2022: The Tehran Times reports that a senior Iranian lawmaker says that the energy crisis that erupted in the wake of the Ukraine war has prompted France to mediate between Iran and the U.S. in the nuclear talks in the hope of using Iran’s energy resources.
Analyst's note: no other reports confirm this assertion. The 3 December 2021 arms sale from France's Dassault of eighty (80) Rafale F4 fighter jets to the UAE, as well as other arms sales, strongly suggest that France has adopted a “fool me one, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on me” disposition towards the Iranian regime, especially in light of the regime's rush towards expanding its missile and drone capabilities, and no longer trusts the Iranian regime to engage in good faith negotiations or to honor its commitments. President Macron's words and actions both indicate that he has lost patience with the Iranian regime and with nuclear negotiations.
1 August 2022: The Washington Examiner reports that “Chinese officials think they have a major advantage over U.S. and European nuclear companies over the coming years, enabled by the fear of nuclear energy that has predominated as of late in Western societies.”
1 August 2022: Nikkei reports that “Satellite photos show China's new nuclear test site in Xinjiang,” at Lop Nur.
“Experts ask whether a nuclear arms race with the U.S. is underway.”
1 August 2022: The world's top uranium miner, Kazakhstan's Kazatomprom, claims that its uranium production has fallen 11% in Q2 2022 due to “supply chain issues.”
Analyst's note: is Kazatomprom actually simply diverting uranium to Iran again?
Or is it the case that they entered into a secret agreement with China in order to deliever more uranium to them than they've publicly announced? Given Kazatomprom's record with both countries, it's a question worth asking. Two years earlier (almost to the date) they announced a 20% decrease through 2022 (see footnote)… and now they claim there's an 11% drop on top of that due to “supply chain issues?”
In the midst of a global energy crisis, no less?
1 August 2022: Kazakhstan’s First Deputy FM Akan Rakhmetullin meets with Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins, PhD., Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, on the sidelines of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in New York City.
Analyst's note: it's unclear if Ambassador Jenkins expresses any concern about potential uranium diversion issues, given Kazakhstan's record of supplying Iran with yellowcake and their clear efforts to help China's genocidal regime pursue the fastest and most irresponsible peacetime nuclear weapons build up in human history.
1 August 2022: Two Telegram channels with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps post a 2-minute video vowing to quickly start building nuclear weapons if the “US or Zionist regime make any stupid mistakes” and to turn New York into “hellish ruins.”
• https://nypost.com/2022/08/01/iran-vows-to-build-nukes-turn-new-york-into-hellish-ruins/
1 August 2022: Mohammad Eslami, head of the country's atomic energy organization, claims that Iran has the technical capability to produce an atomic bomb but has no intention of doing so, reiterating comments made by Kamal Kharrazi, a senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in July.
1 August 2022: The United States, the United Kingdom, and France issue a joint statement concerning nuclear issues. It reads, in part:
❝ We are committed to addressing regional proliferation crises wherever they arise. We reiterate that Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon. We regret that, despite intense diplomatic efforts, Iran has yet to seize the opportunity to restore full implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). We urge Iran to return to full implementation of the JCPOA and UNSCR 2231 and to cooperate on an urgent basis with the IAEA in resolving questions related to possible undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran as required under its NPT-required safeguards agreement. We further note that continued advances in the DPRK’s nuclear and missile programs pose a growing threat to our common security. We remain committed to complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement by the DPRK of all its nuclear weapons and call on the DPRK to cease all nuclear tests and launches that use ballistic missile technology and related activities as required under multiple [U.N.] Security Council resolutions. ❞
1 August 2022: In his remarks to the 10th Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Review Conference, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken specifically mentions China, offering an olive branch on possible cooperation.
❝ The United States is committed to pursuing a comprehensive risk reduction package, including creating secure communications channels among nuclear weapon states. We stand ready to work with all partners, including China and others, on risk reduction and strategic stability efforts. As we look to the future, we also have to strengthen agreements preventing nuclear conflict – and create new ones. ❞
• https://geneva.usmission.gov/2022/08/02/secretary-blinken-remarks-at-npt-review-conference/
2 August 2022: In yet another unhinged tirade which has no doubt made her the laughing stock of the diplomatic world, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying bizarrely denounces Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s call for nuclear arms control talks as an attempt to “deflect blame” over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) visit to Taiwan.
Analyst's note: the Chinese side has no intention of entering into any type of nuclear arms control treaty, is likely in serious breach of the NPT with regard to technology transfers to at least two nations, and has likely not fully ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) because they're considering testing the use of low-yield nuclear warheads for the purposes of “nuclear fracking” (see 27 January 2019) in regions like Sichuan and Xinjiang. China is also most likely rapidly developing tactical nuclear weapons for theater-level use… a type of weapon which responsible nuclear nations haven't really pursued and which should be completely banned.
2 August 2022: The Biden administration approves two massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to help them defend against a nuclear-armed Iran.
The new sales approved by the Biden administration include USD $3 billion for (300) PATRIOT MIM-104E Guidance Enhanced Missile-Tactical Ballistic missiles (GEM-T) for Saudi Arabia specifically designed to protect itself from rocket attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthis, and USD $2.2 billion for ninety-six (96) Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile rounds, two (2) THAAD Launch Control Stations (LCS), and two (2) THAAD Tactical Operations Stations (TOS) for the UAE.
Analyst's note: the greatest weakness of the JCPOA as originally negotiated was the lack of controls on Iran's missile program. During the period when the JCPOA was still in effect, Iran continued to make massive strides in missile and drone development, likely aided by Chinese and Russian technology. Iran's missile and drone programs pose a far greater threat to U.S., allied, and partner interests in the region than its nuclear program does, at least for now, and any return to the JCPOA would be unlikely to reverse that, which makes efforts to revive the deal somewhat of a distraction from the extant threat. Ergo, these two arms sale notifications (but particularly the THAAD sale notification) should probably be seen as an act of “balancing the scales” rather than “gearing up for imminent war.”
2 August 2022: Times of Israel reports that at a ceremony marking the installation of a new head of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), Moshe Edri, on 1 August, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid alludes to Israel's own [alleged] nuclear deterrent in a veiled warning to Tehran. “These other capabilities keep us alive and will keep us alive so long as we and our children are here,” Lapid tells the audience. Describing Naftali Bennett's remarks, the Times of Israel reports:
❝ Bennett said Monday said that Israel has for the past year been working hard to counter the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, investing “enormous resources” in the effort.
“A year ago we made a series of decisions whose aim was to refine assessments on our side to deal with the Iranian nuclear [weapons],” Bennett said. “We allocated enormous resources to close gaps that kept me awake [at night].”
“The Iranians are making progress, but the Israeli system has been working at full strength for the past year,” Bennett continued. “I know you will continue to work, regardless of the political upheavals in the country.”
A series of assassinations and attacks in Iran have been attributed to Israel in recent months, though Jerusalem rarely if ever publicly takes credit for such operations. In a rare interview last month — and rarer yet comments on Israeli activity in enemy countries — National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata said Israel had “acted quite a lot in Iran over the past year.” ❞
3 August 2022: Shalom Lipner, who served seven consecutive Israeli premiers at the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, publishes an op-ed in the Emirati National News asking, “Is Israel warming up for a nuclear showdown with Iran?”
4 August 2022: Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf says China is providing Iranian proxies with drones. She also mentions that more than 70 Chinese nationals and entities have been sanctioned for supporting the Iranian regime and correctly points out that China has been the top destination for Iranian oil… “both legitimate exports and trade that circumvents sanctions.”
She also mentions that China has been “notably absent” from the fight against ISIS and made negligible efforts in Yemen and Syria.
4 August 2022: DVID's releases “NUCLEAR WEAPONS EFFECTS 101.” In this video, LTC James Gifford, Ph.D. removes the myths associated with nuclear detonations in order to help prepare U.S. and allied forces to fight in and through any post-nuclear detonation environment, if the need should arise.
• https://www.dvidshub.net/video/853114/nuclear-weapons-effects-101
4 August 2022: FBI Director Christopher Wray says that federal investigators tied to the Baltimore Field Office are investigating Hunter Biden's laptop. He also testifies that “I found it deeply troubling” to learn top FBI analyst Brian Auten helped close an investigation of Hunter Biden prior to the 2020 election by circulating an assessment finding that emails tied to his laptop were Russian “disinformation.” He also pledges to protect FBI whistleblowers.
Analyst's note: FBI whistleblowers may submit complaints to the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility here: https://www.justice.gov/opr/submit-fbi-whistleblower-complaint
5 August 2022: In a move likely to anger to France, China's human rights-violating regime announces that it's taking eight actions to protest Speaker Nancy Pelosi's short visit to Taiwan, including canceling climate change talks… climate change talks, between the world's two largest emitters, which had helped to spur the Paris Agreement. A full list of those eight actions is as follows:
Canceling U.S.-China Theater Commanders Talk
Canceling U.S.-China Defense Policy Coordination Talks (DPCT)
Canceling U.S.-China Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) meetings
Suspending U.S.-China cooperation on the repatriation of illegal immigrants
Suspending U.S.-China cooperation on legal assistance in criminal matters
Suspending U.S.-China cooperation against transnational crimes
Suspending U.S.-China counternarcotics cooperation
Suspending U.S.-China talks on climate change
• https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220805-china-scraps-cooperation-with-us-over-taiwan-spat
5 August 2022: The Institute for the Study of War reports the following in its 5 August “Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment” vis-a-vis Russia's illegal war of aggression in Ukraine:
❝ Ukrainian officials confirmed that Russia is using Iranian-provided drones in Ukraine. Advisor to the Ukrainian President’s Office, Oleksiy Arestovych, stated on August 5 that Iran handed 46 drones over to Russia and that the Ukrainian government has already noted the use of these drones in combat in Ukraine. At least a portion of the provided drones are older-generation “Shahed 129” heavy strike drones, which Russian forces may seek to use to attack US-provided HIMARS in Ukraine. It is unclear whether the 46 drones represent all the drones that Tehran has agreed to send, or the number of Iranian drones that are currently operating in Ukraine. ❞
6 August 2022: Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and the editor-in-chief of Lawfare, notices men taking a bulletproof vest and fire extinguishers into the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Fire extinguishers in the context of an embassy would seem to indicate that the Russians are preparing for the possibility of burning documents.
Analyst's note: the bulletproof vest would be needed in the event of a sudden revocation of diplomatic immunity, for the individual — in this case, likely a FSB or SVR officer acting under official cover, i.e. as a chargé d'affaires — who might be tasked with staying behind while burning documents. Vladimir Putin himself witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall while serving in Dresden, East Germany, as a KGB officer. Following the seismic event, Putin and his fellow KGB agents burned evidence of their intelligence activity amid fears that demonstrators would overwhelm their headquarters. He later admitted to destroying much of the evidence himself in his 2000 autobiography, “First Person,” writing, “I personally burned a huge amount of material […] we burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.”
• https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/1556043904486723592
8 August 2022: In an extremely dangerous move, in the midst of the NPT Review Conference and Iran nuclear negotiations, Russia suspends U.S. inspections of its nuclear arsenal, as required by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, citing US sanctions over Russia's illegal war of aggression against Ukraine as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. From the Russian Foreign Ministry:
❝ On August 8, 2022, the Russian Federation officially informed the United States of America through diplomatic channels that our country was temporarily withdrawing its facilities subject to inspections under this Treaty from inspection activities under the START Treaty. […]
The Russian Federation is now forced to resort to this measure as a result of Washington’s persistent desire to implicitly achieve a restart of inspection activities on conditions that do not take into account existing realities, create unilateral advantages for the United States and effectively deprive the Russian Federation of the right to carry out inspections on American soil.
Our goal is to eliminate such an unacceptable situation and ensure that all START mechanisms operate in strict accordance with the principles of parity and equality of the parties, as was implied when it was agreed upon and entered into force. Now these principles are not maintained. Thus, as a result of anti-Russian unilateral restrictive measures taken at the suggestion of Washington, normal air traffic between Russia and the United States was interrupted, and the airspace of states that are allies and partners of the United States is closed to Russian aircraft delivering Russian inspection teams to points of entry on American territory. At the same time, there are no similar obstacles to the arrival of American inspectors in Russia. The Russian Foreign Ministry raised this issue with the relevant countries, but did not receive an answer. Additional difficulties for Russian inspectors and crew members of Russian aircraft traveling to the United States arise due to the tightening — again as part of Washington-inspired unilateral restrictive anti-Russian measures — the visa regime in transit countries along their possible routes. American inspectors and flight crew members do not experience such difficulties. All these and other issues known to the United States, on which the parties are exchanging through the channels provided for this, require a solution, without which it would be premature to resume inspection activities under the START Treaty, on which the American side insists.
We believe that in the current circumstances, the parties should abandon deliberately counterproductive attempts to artificially speed up the resumption of START inspection activities and focus on a thorough study of all existing problems in this area, the successful settlement of which would make it possible to return to the full application of all verification mechanisms of the Treaty as soon as possible. ❞
Analyst's note: despite the statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry, Russia's actions most likely have nothing to do with COVID-19 pandemic and very little to do with air travel restrictions or a loss of inspection parity.
10 August 2022: The U.S. Department of Justice charges Shahram Poursafi, aka Mehdi Rezayi, 45, of Tehran, Iran, for attempting to arrange the murder of former National Security Advisor John Bolton, likely in retaliation for the January 2020 death of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Qods Force (IRGC-QF) commander Qasem Soleimani. Poursafi, working on behalf of the IRGC-QF, attempted to pay individuals in the United States $300,000 to carry out the murder in Washington, D.C. or Maryland.
Former State Department Spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus confirms that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was also being targeted by the human rights-violating Iranian regime, later telling Iran International News, a dissident news service:
❝ Even in light of this, Biden admin says they won't end the nuke talks & they’ll only respond ONCE Iran kills one of our former officials. THAT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. We can’t simply wait around for Iran to murder our leaders. ❞
• https://twitter.com/MorganOrtagus/status/1557441270699671553
• https://twitter.com/IranIntl_En/status/1557491888814440452
11 August 2022: The NY Post reports that the Biden administration is being accused by Iran watchers of slow-rolling action on Iranian assassination threats against U.S. officials in order to preserve nuclear talks with the human rights-violating regime. “It’s been going on since 2020,” said Gabriel Noronha, a fellow with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) and former special adviser to the State Department’s Iran Action Group.
The NY Post continues:
❝ Nathan Sales, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator during the Trump administration, also raised an issue with the language used in Wednesday’s indictment.
“The Iranian official hasn’t been charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization, which seems like an obvious charge to bring,” Sales said, “particularly considering that a material support charge carries a more severe sentence than the murder for hire charges that they’ve actually leveled against him.” ❞
Analyst's note: one of the key demands from the illegitimate Iranian regime has centered around removal of the IRGC's designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). Justice's decision in not bringing that charge would seem to suggest that the administration is open to removing the designation, even though most Americans would agree that an organization responsible for sophisticated IEDs which murdered 600+ U.S. servicemen and servicewomen in Iraq and which is seeking to carry out reprisals on U.S. soil is, indeed, clearly a terrorist organization.
12 August 2022: Author Salman Rushdie is stabbed repeatedly as he's preparing to give a speech at Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York about the importance of the U.S. offering asylum for writers and other artists in exile. The assailant, whom police have identified as Hadi Matar, is believed to be an Iranian regime sympathizer.
Analyst's note: Chautauqua is not to be confused with Chappaqua, which is over 6 hours away.
Rushdie has been a target of the Iranian regime since Iran’s self-proclaimed leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, condemned Rushdie's writing as blasphemy, issuing a fatwa calling for his death in February 1989.
12 August 2022: U.S. Special Envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, obliquely denies reports that the U.S. is considering lifting sanctions on the IRGC, but a careful reading of his tweet actually just says “sanctions compliance standards.”
Analyst's note: in other words, his denial is not actually a denial; it appears he's counting on people to misread it as denying something which he actually isn't explicitly denying (devious): having engaged in talks to remove the IRGC's designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in the past.
He's only denying having negotiated about “sanctions compliance standards that would remain under a mutual return to full JCPOA implementation,” but he doesn't specify what those would be or clearly deny that the FTO designation is — or was — in play. That being said — your humble author's prickly skepticism aside — if we intentionally misread the tweet to imply something that it doesn't explicitly say, it does give the families of those 600+ U.S. servicemen and servicewomen something to point to in demanding that IRGC not be delisted. That's what truly matters.
Robert Malley is no doubt is trying his best. This author doesn't mean to be overly critical given the hand the previous administration dealt this one (or the hand the previous administration was dealt by the previous one, and so on, and so on). Diplomacy is always a difficult task, regardless of which party (if any) the diplomat in question might be associated with. That being said, it's most likely time to walk away from negotiations. We are not on Iran's time table; America and our allies, friends, and partners are always — always — on our own time table. It would be tactically smart to disengage indefinitely in order to reassess if there's sunk cost thinking at play here. Iran likely already has some small number of nuclear weapons (don't let anyone tell you otherwise), they need the economic relief from a deal more than we do, and we have many more options than they do. Moreover, it's very possible that we haven't been applying pressure where it needs to be applied.
U.S. President Bill Clinton with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (right), National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (left) and other staff, including former Mideast negotiator Aaron David Miller (back left) and Robert Malley (back right) at Camp David during Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2000.
For background on Robert Malley, Wikipedia describes him this way:
❝ Malley was Director for Democracy, Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the National Security Council from 1994 to 1996 and Program Director for Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group and Assistant to National Security Advisor Sandy Berger from 1996 to 1998. He served in the National Security Council under President Barack Obama from 2014 to 2017. In 2015, the Obama administration appointed Malley as its “point man” on the Middle East, leading the Middle East desk of the National Security Council. In November 2015, Malley was named as President Obama's new special ISIS advisor. After leaving the Obama administration, Malley was President and CEO of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels non-profit committed to preventing wars. […] Malley argues that negotiations with the Palestinians today must include Hamas because the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is no longer considered the Palestinian people's sole legitimate representative. ❞
The Wikipedia page for the Crisis Group also informs us that, “Crisis Group's ‘In Pursuit of Peace Award’ was established in 2005, and is associated with a gala event in New York City. Recipients include U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton […], Hillary Clinton, [… and] Frank Giustra, founder of the Radcliffe Foundation and a prolific entrepreneur and financier.”
Analyst's note: this makes Robert Malley either the best or worst man for the job!
Kidding aside, Malley himself is his own interesting sort of character, especially his upbringing. For instance, he attended high school (boarding school) with Secretary of State Tony Blinken in France. Small world!
On 4 February 2021, Jewish Currents published a rather humanizing essay by Robert Malley, with a short introduction by Peter Beinart, about his father, Simon Malley (link in footnotes). It's worth reading; those he's negotiating with have no doubt read it.
An excerpt:
❝ THE ONE THING we know for sure is that he was born in Cairo. He left us with few other certainties. His parents appear to have originally hailed from Aleppo, moving to Egypt at the turn of the last century. There is good reason to believe he was born in the 1920s, though as for the precise year or day, one could trust either one’s imagination or his word — the former often proving more reliable than the latter. His old Egyptian passport indicates a birth date of May 25th, 1923, but he had more than one — passports as well as birthdays.
He also was Jewish, though the principal effect of his Judaism seems to have been that it provided him added reason to be an Arab nationalist of the fiercely secular, anti-Zionist sort. His life choices were dictated, one senses, by restrictions he faced as a Jew born in an Arab land. He embraced a strong Arab nationalistic worldview and I can’t recall him ever evincing much understanding for or even desire to understand Israelis and their state. […]
Born Selim Ménache (Selim presumably from the Arabic سليم and Ménache presumably being the French transliteration of מנשה), he’s gone by Sélim Malek and settled at some point on Simon Malley. He founded six magazines, of which Africasia and Afrique-Asie were the better known. He was journalist and owner, commented on politics and involved himself in it, blurring the line between observer and actor. And he acquired no less than nine different citizenships — including Egyptian, American, Algerian, Tunisian, Angolan, Mozambican, French and an honorary Palestinian one. ❞
This is a rather interesting vignette for many reasons. Robert Malley's father, no doubt, was a rather intelligent man. The author doesn't question that Simon Malley was likely born Cairo. Indeed, that much would make sense, but there are still questions. “No less than nine citizenships?” Does “no less” imply perhaps more than nine?
Did he perhaps somehow acquire Russian citizenship, as well?
What about his Afrique-Asie publication? Well, according to former French Interior Minister Christian Bonnet, it “supported the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, the Cuban intervention in Angola and Ethiopia, the seizure of American hostages in Iran, the Algerian-backed guerrilla war in southern Morocco, and the Arab opposition to Israel and the Camp David agreements.” The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America has offered the following summing-up: “The world in which Robert Malley grew up was one in which Yasir Arafat, Fidel Castro, Leonid Brezhnev and Todor Zhivkov were heroes, any American leader — even Jimmy Carter! — was villainous, and Israeli leaders were veritable demons.”
Wikipedia tells us a bit more:
❝ Simon Malley (May 25, 1923 – September 7, 2006), was a prominent francophone journalist and a strong supporter of Third World independence movements. […]
Simon Malley was born in Cairo to a Jewish family of modest circumstances. After graduating from high school, he became a journalist and was sent by an Egyptian newspaper to cover the United Nations. In New York City, he met his wife, Barbara [Silverstein], an American, when she worked for the United Nations delegation of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the Algerian independence group. Malley took up the cause of the FLN and was important in publicizing its cause.
Malley supported Gamal Abdul Nasser's revolution in Egypt in 1952, and Nasser made him the representative of the Egyptian daily newspaper Al Gomhuria in New York City. […]
Malley became the "best known voice" of Third World anti-colonialist movements. He conducted a 20-hour interview with Fidel Castro, and long interviews with Yasser Arafat and Oliver Tambo. ❞
The Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and Al Gomhuria newspaper. These seem pertinent. Let's see what Wikipedia has to say about Al Gomhuria:
❝ Al Gomhuria was established in 1954 following the Egyptian revolution and became the new regime's leading media outlet. The paper was published using the facilities of Wafd party's newspaper, Al Misri, which had been disestablished by the regime. Anwar Sadat became the editor of the daily. The publisher of the paper is Dar Al Tahrir which was founded following the 1952 revolution. ❞
The knee-jerk inclination by many, given his language skills, would be to presume that Simon Malley (AKA “Selim Ménache,” “Sélim Malek”), a holder of (at least) nine citizenships, was some kind of French spy.
Au contraire, Egypt has long been a hotbed of Soviet and Russian intelligence. The most famous of Soviet spies posted there was Vadim Kirpichenko. One shouldn't be surprised if Simon Malley crossed paths with one of his officers.
Paraphrasing from Wikipedia:
Born in 1922, Vadim Alekseyevich Kirpichenko (Вадим Алексеевич Кирпиченко, 25 September 1922 – 3 December 2005) initially trained to be a pilot, but with the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, he enlisted in the Red Army and served in Eastern and Central Europe during the closing stages of the war. Demobilized in 1946, he then studied at the Arab branch of the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies, and was then recruited into intelligence work with the KGB's First Chief Directorate. He began his overseas postings with a period in Egypt in December 1954 as the KGB's deputy resident. This came during the early administration of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Kirpichenko worked to gather information on Nasser's intentions. He passed information back to Moscow during the Suez Crisis in 1956, and worked to establish diplomatic relations with Yemen, before being recalled to the USSR in 1960. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1960 and spent two years working with the KGB's central organization, before moving to Tunisia as resident in February 1962.
Robert Malley and Tony Blinken during high school. They attended the prestigious bilingual École Jeannine Manuel in Paris and graduated together in 1980.
ABOVE: A young Simon Malley (Selim Ménache) during the height of his career as a journalist.
BELOW: China's Ministry of State Security probably not only has a file on Robert Malley, but probably had one on his father, Simon Malley, too.
Author's note: top photo colorized.
Vadim Alekseyevich Kirpichenko
Russian intelligence's hold on Egypt hasn't waned. Sergei Kirpichenko, the son of Vadim Kirpichenko, was Russia's Ambassador until his unexpected death on 2 September 2019.
There he was tasked with maintaining contacts with the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, the political arm of the National Liberation Front during the Algerian War. This posting lasted until August 1964. Returning once more to the Soviet Union, he spent between 1964 and 1967 with the central organization. In 1967 he was appointed head of the African Department of the First Chief Directorate, holding that position until 1970. During this time he made visits to Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, Libya, Algeria and Tunisia. Kirpichenko returned to Egypt in 1970, becoming foreign intelligence resident there until 1974. He was in that post during the Yom Kippur War between Egypt and Israel in 1973, and subsequently warned Soviet leaders that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was planning to reorient Egyptian foreign policy away from the Soviet Union and towards the United States, having learnt that Sadat had been in secret communication with US President Richard Nixon. His service brought him to the attention of Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, and in 1974 he was appointed deputy head of the First Chief Directorate and led the S Directorate — illegal KGB intelligence gathering — where he spent the next five years. Finally, in 1979, he became First Deputy Head of the First Chief Directorate, and would hold this position until 1991.
The cross-over between Selim Ménache's/Simon Malley's biography and Vadim Kirpichenko's biography is rather interesting, no?
Selim Ménache/Simon Malley started working for Al Gomhuria in 1954, the same year that spymaster Kirpichenko's appointed the KGB's deputy resident in Cairo.
Both Selim Ménache/Simon Malley and Kirpichenko get involved with the Algerian National Liberation Front.
Aside from America and France, seven of the (at least) nine places where Malley obtained citizenship were part of KGB spymaster Kirpichenko's pre-1974 turf.
What're the odds?!?
For those who may not know what the S Directorate was, or who may not be familiar with the KGB's illegals program, this excerpt, from The Americans fan wiki provides some background:
❝ As one of the many KGB's Directorates (or Lines) that constitute the KGB, Directorate S is responsible for matters relating to illegal intelligence, most famously the training and planting of so called ‘illegals’ in foreign countries. Russian intelligence placed a great emphasis on illegal intelligence as it was believed to be of greater value and return than legal intelligence due illegal agents being able to penetrate a wider range of targets. Heavy surveillance of Russian nationals and their exclusion from any job role that may compromise national security, coupled with the then widespread anti-Soviet climate in the US, made obtaining intelligence via openly Soviet persons virtually impossible. As such, illegal intelligence accounted for the bulk of the Soviet’s intelligence, making Directorate S the most vital part of the KGB’s network. […]
The most famous activity of Directorate S are the illegals — a program run by the KGB that trains, equips, and plants agents under cover in foreign countries.
Chosen from the exclusive ranks of Directorate S, the illegals were trained to be physically, mentally, and emotionally capable of living in a totally alien environment under the deepest of covers for up to 20+ years whilst performing politically controversial and/or potentially fatal missions.
In The Americans, the illegals are shown to be a tangible and persistent threat to the U.S. intelligence community. The FBI are shown throughout the show to be out-witted and/or out-maneuvered on many occasions by the illegals.
Considered the true elite of Soviet intelligence officers, they are revered as heroes by the Russians due to their complete and willing sacrifice of their former and future lives for the cause. ❞
Robert Malley's father, Simon Malley, isn't the only one with Egyptian ties.
Bill Clinton's biological father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., who died in a car accident three months before his son was born, was based in Egypt (and Italy) during WWII. Why would that matter? Blythe was married five times before he shipped off for war, which would strongly suggest that there was something about his character, physique, health, or sexual predilections that didn't jibe with his first four wives (and two children). Has last wife, Virginia (Bill Clinton's mother) allegedly didn't even know about his previous wives when they married. KGB-style blackmail can be inherited, can be sexually transmitted, and in rare cases, can even be congenital. If the Soviets somehow obtained leverage on the father, i.e. via an Egyptian (or less likely, Italian) GI-targeting mata hari — perhaps even a male one — or via a secret sixth wife, then they'd have pretty substantial leverage on the son… *if* he could somehow be maneuvered into a position of power (for instance, as the Governor of the diamond-rich state of Arkansas) and then elevated to the Presidency with the help of a little foreign cash (see notes on 21 January 2009) after his initial recruitment, probably circa 1969.
Anatoliy Golitsyn's The Perestroika Deception: Memoranda to the Central Intelligence Agency (PDF) was published in 1995…one of the things James Angleton encouraged Anatoliy Golitsyn to do before his death in 1987 to was publish as much as he could about the KGB's sources and methods, in order to warn the American public, our ossified bureaucracies, and (Jim feared) our increasingly infilted CIA. Interestingly, D/CIA Woolsey (to whom the memos were addressed) was dismissed by Bill Clinton in January of that same year (see notes re: Golitsyn on 28 July 2008). 1995 was a seminal year for another reason: it overlaps with John Brennan's time as Clinton's CIA briefer and Monica Lewinsky's time in the White House. The “handling” of a Presidential “asset” (or two, if you count Hillary) would have to be done with “gloves” (a liaison between an intelligence officer — which Jeffrey Epstein functionally appears to have been — and their asset). In the case of William Jefferson Clinton, Jr., those gloves may have been crimson, latex ones (but that's purely speculation).
A mechanic, by the way, would be a natural choice for low-paid foreign asset recruitment. Blythe was a traveling heavy equipment salesman for most of his brief career and in Egypt, he worked on tanks. He'd have a good eye for the comings and goings of heavy equipment in and out of the Suez Canal. Foreign asset recruitment of the father of a United States President would put a KGB spymaster into the league of being legendary, and basically cement his family's legacy. It's rather interesting, then, that Sergei Kiripichenko, the son of KGB spymaster Vadim Kiripichenko, was Russia's Ambassador to Egypt until his unexpected death on 2 September 2019. Indeed, it'd be a secret worth killing over, which would explain a large number of suspicious deaths on the Clinton Body Count list (but that, too, is purely speculation).
The circumstances of Bill Blythe's death could suggest foul play. In early 1946 Blythe purchased a small house in Chicago, likely with money he'd saved up during the war. He also purchased a used 1942 Buick sedan. Since they couldn't move into the house for two months, Blythe sent his pregnant wife home to her family in Arkansas (presumably having grown accostomed to not being around her during WWII), and on May 15 left Chicago to retrieve his wife. The man she married after his death, Roger Clinton, Sr. — whose surname young the young future President took — was the owner of the local Buick dealership. It isn't clear if Bill Blythe, Jr. purchased that 1942 Buick sedan from Roger Clinton, Sr., and if he did, what might've been wrong with it.
Bill Blythe, Jr. and Bill Clinton (both photos colorized)
Fromer D/CIA and Communist Party USA member John Brennan (and Bill Clinton's briefer from 1993-1995) studied in Egypt, at the American University in Cairo, before joining the Agency, too. (See notes on 19 October 2020.)
Any discussion of the Crisis Group's work would be incomplete without mentioning Michael Kovrig (top photo), taken hostage by China's illegitimate regime with his fellow Canadian, Michael Spavor (bottom photo) (see 16 May 2019).
❝ Michael Kovrig (born February 3, 1972) is a Canadian former diplomat and geopolitical analyst and advisor working for the International Crisis Group, a transnational, independent, non-governmental organization focused on preventing and resolving deadly conflict through research and advocacy.
Previously, Kovrig had worked as a diplomat and foreign service officer for Canada’s foreign ministry for nearly a decade. He also worked for the United Nations Development Programme in New York City as a strategic communications specialist, and as a researcher for the firm that later became Rhodium Group.
After being detained in December 2018, he was accused of “Spying on State Secrets or Intelligence for Parties Outside the Territory of China” by the Chinese government in May 2019. His arrest is widely considered to be political retaliation for the arrest of [Huawei heiress] Meng [Wanzhou], though the Chinese government has denied any connection between the two cases. Kovrig, Crisis Group and the Canadian government all insisted that he was innocent of all charges and US President Joe Biden declared that he and Spavor were being used as “bartering chips.”
On September 24, 2021, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the two Michaels were released and returning to Canada on a plane with Canadian Ambassador to China, Dominic Barton. Their release came on the same day that Meng was released after the dropping of her extradition request as part of her deferred prosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice. Kovrig and Spavor arrived at Calgary International Airport the next morning, where they were greeted by Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau. Spavor remained in Calgary, while Kovrig flew to Toronto Pearson International Airport to meet his family.❞
Analyst's note: now we're getting somewhere. China's initial informal detention of the two Canadians, 10 December 2018, was 5 days after Patrick Ho was convicted (see 5 December 2018) and 2 days before Joe Biden called Hunter Biden about the Patrick Ho/CEFC story in the NY Times (see 12 December 2018).
Their subsequent formal arrest (see 16 May 2019) was 8 days after Trump's new sanctions on Iran (see 8 May 2019).
The day before their release was the day that President Biden nominated Soviet Kazakh-American Saule Omarova to be U.S. Comptroller of the Currency (see 23 September 2021).
A rather curious and startling series of coincidences, no?
This isn't to suggest that these events are all necessarily related. Nor is it to suggest that they're all related in the minds of U.S. officials… but it's very possible that they might be related in the minds of Chinese, Iranian, and even Russian and Kazakh officials. That would be a problem… and all the more reason to disengage and regroup.
One last thing to note about the International Crisis Group — where China's Canadian hostage, Michael Kovrig, worked (and where the Biden administration's Iran Envoy, Robert Malley, worked) — is that Frank Giustra, a long-time Crisis Group Trustee and leading Canadian businessman and philanthropist, has been the Co-Chair of the Crisis Group’s Board of Directors since 17 March 2020. You'll no doubt recognize him from Part 1 of the timeline. It's a small world.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Malley
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Crisis_Group
• https://twitter.com/rob_malley/status/1330696427719241729
• https://jewishcurrents.org/an-anti-imperialist-father-and-his-american-diplomat-son
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Malley
• https://usefulstooges.com/tag/simon-malley/
• https://www.ebay.com/itm/203663916956
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Egypt#Since_1919
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vadim_Kirpichenko#Overseas_postings
• https://theamericans.fandom.com/wiki/Directorate_S
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Clinton_Sr.
• https://espionagehistoryarchive.com/2015/05/15/inside-kgb-directorate-s-the-illegals/
• https://espionagehistoryarchive.com/2016/06/03/kgb-directorate-s-training-an-illegal/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jefferson_Blythe_Jr.
• https://www.arkansasheritage.com/arkansas-register/boyhood-home-of-william-bill-jefferson-blythe-iii-bill-clinton
• https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/15/politics/john-brennan-cia-communist-vote
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_and_Michael_Kovrig#Michael_Kovrig
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Wanzhou
• https://www.crisisgroup.org/board-trustees-0
• https://www.crisisgroup.org/canadian-businessman-frank-giustra-appointed-co-chair-crisis-groups-board
11 August 2022: CGTN reports the following:
❝ China Petrochemical Corp, or Sinopec, the world's largest refiner by volume, has acquired crude oil and natural gas from a newly-drilled oil reserve about 8,000 meters deep in the Tarim Basin of Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The high-yield reserve in Sinopec's Shunbei oil and gas field is estimated to be capable of producing 244 tonnes of crude oil and 970,000 cubic meters of natural gas each day, the company said Wednesday.
Located in the central and western regions of the Tarim Basin, Sinopec's Shunbei project has an average reservoir burial depth of more than 7,300 meters. It has 41 ultra-deep drilling wells with a vertical depth exceeding 8,000 meters (8km). ❞
11 August 2022: Saudi Aramco and Sinopec sign an MoU to expand cooperation.
• https://www.ogj.com/general-interest/article/14281191/aramco-sinopec-sign-mou-to-expand-cooperation
13 August 2022: Hamish de Bretton-Gordon OBE, the former commanding officer of the UK's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Regiment and NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, warns in The Telegraph that “Britain should prepare for a nuclear war.”
• https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/13/britain-should-prepare-nuclear-war/
15 August 2022: “We are not far from an agreement,” the de facto spokesman for Iran's nuclear negotiating team Mohammad Marandi tells Al Jazeera, adding that the outstanding issues for returning to JCPOA have been resolved. State Department spokesman Ned Price, meanwhile, says that the only way to achieve a mutual return to compliance with the JCPOA is for Iran to drop further unacceptable demands that go beyond the scope of the JCPOA (presumably the delisting of the IRGC), adding that the State Department will confer privately with EU counterparts. In a carrot and stick ploy, Iran the same day renews threats to assassinate Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump after denying any links to the assassination attempt against author Salman Rushdie, which media reports fairly conclusively link to the Iranian regime.
• https://twitter.com/s_m_marandi/status/1559288404503937025
• https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/15/iran-signals-objection-final-nuclear-deal-text-sta/
• https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-714720
• https://english.alaraby.co.uk/news/us-provide-views-eu-iran-privately
16 August 2022: The Washington Times reports that Admiral John Aquilino, CDRUSINDOPACOM, is pushing back on flimsy propaganda being spouted by China's illegitimate regime which portrays the three-nation AUKUS effort to quickly and drastically modernize and upgrade Australia's inadequate, shorter-range diesel submarine fleet with next-generation, longer-range nuclear submarines as somehow constituting “nuclear proliferation.”
❝ “If you’d like to talk about nuclear weapons and the concern for a nuclear arms race, all you have to do is look into the PRC,” Adm. Aquilino said. He added that he has read reports of Chinese complaints about the AUKUS submarine program.
“The only nation increasing the nuclear arsenal right now is the PRC,” the four-star admiral said. China has “300 nuclear silos going in as we sit here today.” ❞
Analyst's note: given the timeline of events, it's clear that China's illegitimate (and financially bankrupt) regime is panicking, because their nuclear ambitions are finally being noticed by the highest levels of governments and militaries around the world, especially given their recent menacing actions towards their peaceful, democratic neighbors (most notably, India, Japan, and the sovereign, independent nation of Taiwan), their grave violations of Vienna Convention peremptory norms, their complete disregard for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), their shredding of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), their coddling of the Taliban, etc.
Consequently, the Chinese regime is falsely blaming others for violating the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in order to distract from their own violations… precisely what they did in 2020 with regard to their likely-still-ongoing breaches of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).
Aside from helping to destroy any and all credibility that the Xi Jinping regime had left with normal nations, China's anti-AUKUS propaganda is also clumsily seeking to drive a wedge into NATO cohesion over an already-settled, water-under-the-bridge issue. For context, the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal replaced a deal that the Australians had with France's Naval Group (~60% owned by the French state) for excellent diesel (albeit not nuclear) submarines. That cancellation was handled very badly and was done in such a way that it unfairly blindsided the French government, which was far more upset at the lack of consultation than the actual cancellation itself.
• https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/16/us-indo-pacific-commander-warns-about-chinese-nucl/
• https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/29/biden-admits-macron-us-was-clumsy-submarine-deal
17 August 2022: A report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery identifies the Chinese regime's actions in Xinjiang/East Turkistan vis-à-vis forced labor by Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and others as “a contemporary form of slavery” which, separately from the crime of genocide, may constitute a crime against humanity: the crime of enslavement. The report urges countries to implement due diligence requirements in their supply chains similar to Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
• PDF https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G22/408/97/PDF/G2240897.pdf
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_international_law
20 August 2022: Darya Aleksandrovna Dugina (Дарья Александровна Дугина) is assassinated by a car bomb placed under the seat of her car as she's driving on the Mozhayskoye Shosse in the settlement of Bolshiye Vyazyomy, just outside of Moscow, at around 9:45pm local time. She was driving to Moscow after attending the annual festival “Tradition,” which describes itself as a family festival for art lovers. The “Tradition” festival is held at the Zakharovo estate, approximately 1 km (0.62 mi) north of Bolshiye Vyazyomy.
Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of Russia's State Duma now living in exile in Ukraine, subsequently claims that a Russian partisan group calling itself the National Republican Army (NRA) is responsible for the attack. Ponomarev says the NRA is an underground group working inside Russia dedicated to overthrowing the Russian state. Appearing in front of a horizontally striped white-blue-white flag in a video released online, Ponomarev reads the following, attributing it to the NRA:
❝ We, Russian activists, military and politicians, now partisans and fighters of the National Republican Army, outlaw warmongers, robbers and oppressors of the peoples of Russia! We declare President Putin a usurper of power and a war criminal who amended the Constitution, unleashed a fratricidal war between the Slavic peoples and sent Russian soldiers to certain and senseless death. Poverty and coffins for some, palaces for others — the essence of his policy. We believe that disenfranchised people have the right to rebel against tyrants. Putin will be deposed and destroyed by us! […]
Long live Free Russia!
Wherever you are — fight like us, fight with us, fight better than us!
Let’s cleanse our Motherland from filth! Victory will be ours! ❞
Analyst's note: it isn't clear that the NRA carried out this attack. For their part, Russian authorities blame Ukraine's SBU. It's conceivable that the FSB or even Chechens were instead responsible. Speculation abounds: Dugin has called for the destruction of Saudi Arabia, so there would be motive there with the Chechens. Dugin's father was a Lieutenant General in the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces (the GRU). Even though it's claimed the his father left his mother when he was only a child, that still makes Dugin a child of the GRU, and, moreover, some of his earliest writings were likely written by virtue of his access to the KGB's archives. How do we know that Dugin had access to the KGB's archives? Marius Laurinavičius, a Lithuanian expert on Soviet intelligence, shed this bit of light, back in 2015:
❝ В 1990-1992 гг. самому А.Дугину, несмотря на упоминавшуюся якобы подпольную деятельность, разрешили работать даже в архивах КГБ, а позже он сам признал, что первый учебник по геополитике этот "философ" писал "в закрытом режиме в Академии генерального штаба". Невидимая рука ГРУ, кажется, охраняла А.Дугина и в другие этапы его карьеры, поэтому можно предположить, что он всегда был человеком ГРУ. ❞ // ❝ From 1990-1992 A. Dugin himself, despite the alleged underground activity mentioned, was allowed to work even in the archives of the KGB, and later he himself admitted that this "philosopher" wrote the first textbook on geopolitics "in closed mode at the Academy of the General Staff." The invisible hand of the GRU, it seems, guarded A. Dugin at other stages of his career, so it can be assumed that he was always a GRU man. ❞
One theory is that this was the work of the FSB. Indeed, in all likelihood, Dugin has always been a creature of both the GRU, where his father worked, and the KGB's Fifth Directorate — responsible for corralling and suppressing dissent — which later became the FSB's Directorate Z.
Dugin became the organizer and the first leader of the National Bolshevik Party from 1993 to 1998, with Eduard Limonov, which is *exactly* the type of thing one might expect a Directorate Z apparatchik do. Ergo, whoever moved on Dugin very well might've come from the GRU or FSB, as one would expect both Dugin and Dugina to be surrounded by them. Putin himself led the FSB, so the order may have come from there.
That said, it's very difficult to be sure. If the National Republican Army is real, and if it is indeed operating in a cell-like manner, one would expect it to be populated disaffected with FSB, SVR, and GRU operatives and veterans.
24 August 2022: President Joe Biden orders airstrikes against Iranian-backed groups in Deir ez-Zor, Syria. The strikes target “infrastructure facilities used by groups affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC),” Col. Joe Buccino, a spokesman for CENTCOM, says in a statement.
• https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/23/politics/syria-airstrikes-iranian-backed-groups-biden/index.html
25 August 2022: Mossad chief David Barnea has calls an emerging nuclear deal between the Islamic Republic of Iran and world powers “a strategic disaster” for Israel, in meetings about the agreement. “The Mossad is preparing and knows how to remove that threat,” Barnea said.
“If we don’t take action, Israel will be in danger.”
Analyst's note: one could easily be forgiven for looking at this timeline (never mind the timeline of Israel's own majestic history) and the myriad strategic disasters that Israelis (and Israeli-Americans, including Amos Hochstein) have authored and thinking that maybe — just maybe — part of Israel, deep down, actually wants to be in danger.
27 August 2022: Israeli news reports that Prime Minister Yair Lapid demanded an explanation from the head of Israel's intelligence agency about his sharply derogatory remarks about an expected nuclear deal between Iran and world powers. While Lapid had voiced his own negative view of the accord's terms earlier in the week, his dressing down of Barnea suggests that he feels Barnea was off the mark in ramping up the rhetoric against Israel's most important ally, the United States.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, meanwhile, suggests that the possibility of Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu and the extremist Ben-Gvir reaching government is “the greatest strategic danger that threatens Israel… more than nuclear Iran.”
Analyst's note: this is pure hyperbole. Israel is surrounded like Daniel in the Lion's Den, because Israel has nobody whom they can rely on — nobody — like they can rely on the United States, and the United States, presently (as this timeline shows well) isn't in a good spot, thanks to the termite-like infestation of corruption amongst its political class… corruption which Israel has benefitted from on many occasions. Unfortunately for Israel, a world in which China is the dominant power (or a world in which China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea together form a dominant Axis) is a world in which Israel will not fare well. Indeed, a world without American dominance — scientific, technological, and industrial dominance — is a world in which Israel may rather quickly cease to exist.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir
• https://www.haaretz.com/2013-04-19/ty-article/olmert-kazakh-tycoon-ally-on-venture-capital/0000017f-db49-db22-a17f-fff983260000
27 August 2022: Tsinghua University hosts its 2022 Carbon Neutrality Economic Forum, a greenwashing forum for Chinese oil and gas interests. Having seen America's shale gas revolution and America's fleeting moment of energy independence under the Trump administration — say what you will about his other policies and personality — China is clearly going all-in on hydrocarbons.
Analyst's note: a deep understanding of the structure of Tsinghua University, Xi Jinping's alma mater, and Tsinghua Holdings is necessary to understand the broader contours of what's happening with regard to Chinese energy policy and how these developments relate to two companies, Nuctech and Sinopec, whose importance will become clearer as the timeline develops.
Nuctech's parent company, Tsinghua Tongfang, is majority-controlled by China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC)… the massive PRC state-owned nuclear conglomerate that manages China's civilian and military nuclear fuel development program. Tsinghua Tongfang is minority-controlled by Tsinghua Holdings… the massive entity which commercializes research done at Tsinghua University. In other words, Nuctech, the crown jewel of China's sprawling global cargo and supply chain security apparatus, is the baby of Tsinghua and CNNC.
This explains why LIU Jing, vice president (formerly the chairman) of China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) — and also a member of the CCP's Party Leadership Group within CNNC — was also in attendance. (To non-CCP experts reading this, his status as a member of CCP Party Leadership
It's also important to understand that Tsinghua University is intimately involved in China's military-civil fusion strategy (see May 2020 for the US State Department's warnings on MCF) especially as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI). Even though we in Western democracies have only just started paying attention to MCF, Tsinghua University's Military Project Office (军工部) actually dates back to 2003. That's how entrenched the People's Liberation Army is within Chinese higher ed… and yes, in fairness, a number of US universities also have Pentagon research contracts.
Tsinghua's role in MCF as it relates to AI is also especially important in the case of Nuctech. Tsinghua University and Nuctech actually partnered to co-construct “the Chinese National Engineering Laboratory for Dangerous Articles and Explosives Detection Technologies,” which launched at Tsinghua University on January 11, 2017. It's unclear how much data from Nuctech's AI-powered cargo scanners (currently deployed in nations across NATO) makes its way back to this Tsinghua laboratory, but this ostensibly-civilian lab likely has overlap with the military-affiliated Chinese State Key Laboratory of High Energy Radiation Imaging Fundamental Science for National Defense (高能辐射成像国防重点学科实验室), which is also located at Tsinghua, and with the Ministry of Education-affiliated State Key Laboratory of Particle & Radiation Imaging (粒子技术与辐射成像教育部重点实验室)… the latter of which has been funded, in part, by a World Bank loan and which is also located at Tsinghua.
Sinopec and Tsinghua University have similar research relationships. Moreover, one “Mr. JIN Yong (金涌), aged 85, is an independent non-executive Director of Sinopec Engineering Group. Mr JIN currently is a member of Chinese Academy of Engineering, the dean of the Chemical Engineering Science and Technology Research Institute of Tsinghua University (清華大學化工科學與技術研究院), a professor of the Chemical Engineering department of Tsinghua University, an executive officer of China Society of Particuology (中國顆粒學會) and an executive officer of Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China (中國化工學會). […] Mr. Jin has been an independent non-executive Director of SINOPEC SEG since April 2013.”
While its very difficult for one to say how much money Tsinghua Holdings might have invested in Sinopec, or how many Tsinghua-developed patents Sinopec has licensed, etc., the presence of Mr. JIN Yong on Sinopec Engineering Group's board suggests that the relationship between Tsinghua and Sinopec is much deeper than is realized. (He's also listed right before China National Nuclear Corporation's LIU Jing as having participated in Tsinghua's Carbon Neutrality Forum. One wonders if they're friends.)
According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Tsinghua falls into the VERY HIGH RISK category in terms of its connections to the Chinese military. Among other things, it hosts at least 8 major defence laboratories. Moreover, “Tsinghua engages in a range of military research and was awarded secret-level security credentials for classified research in 2007. In advancing military-civil fusion, Tsinghua also continues its ‘fine tradition’ of serving China’s national security and defense, actively creating new platforms and initiatives to support this strategy. Not only its dedicated defence laboratories but also a range of key laboratories and research institutions at the university have received funding from the military. Since at least 2012, Tsinghua has also been jointly supervised by defence industry agency SASTIND as part of a program to deepen its defence research and links to the defence sector.”
LI Yizhong, former minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and president of the China Federation of Industrial Economics (CFIE), speaks at the 2022 Tsinghua University Carbon Neutrality Economic Forum in Beijing, August 27, 2022.
ZHAO Dong, director, general manager, and deputy secretary of Party Leadership Group at Sinopec Group, delivers his keynote at the 2022 Tsinghua University Carbon Neutrality Economic Forum in Beijing, August 27, 2022.
LI Shousheng, chairman of China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Federation (CPCIF), speaks at the 2022 Tsinghua University Carbon Neutrality Economic Forum in Beijing, August 27, 2022.
• https://www.sem.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1021/7884.htm
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuctech_Company
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Tongfang
• https://triplehelixjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40604-018-0061-9
• https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/universities/tsinghua-university/
• https://twitter.com/EBKania/status/1107417838971768837
• PDF 🔓 http://www.segroup.cn/segroup/Resource/pdf-21/PROPOSED%20APPOINTMENT%20OF%20DIRECTORS.pdf
• Company #05698682: NUCTECH LTD https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/05698682
• Company #12706206: NUCTECH LONDON COMPANY LIMITED https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12706206
31 August 2022: The Department of Justice releases the photo on the right as evidence supporting its raid of Mar-a-Lago. Did Trump actually have all of these physical documents along with 46 empty folders? (Eh, probably not.) Did the FBI “plant them,” as he alleged? (Eh, not exactly.) We'll get to the most likely explanation a bit later.
In the meantime, here's something to ponder. Assuming that we're looking at symbolism rather than something that the FBI literally found all stuffed into a Banker's Box, what's being symbolized by the gold framed Time magazine cover? And that classified document with the cover page flipped open behind the Second Amendment sign — err, sorry — behind the “Exhibit 2A” sign? That's a document dated Wednesday, May 9, 2018… the day after Trump announced America's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal that the French pushed for so hard. Curious, no?
Among the “classified documents” allegedly seized, by the way, was “info re: President of France…” (see 23 November 2021)
31 August 2022: The same day that information on “the President of France” is allegedly found in Donald Trump's possession, CBS News reports that Timothy Thibault, a top-level FBI agent who had been under fire for his role in investigations regarding President Biden's son, Hunter Biden, resigned late the previous week and was walked out of the FBI, per two U.S. officials. But these officials also said that Thibault had reached retirement age, and they added that all of those who retire hand over their badge and gun and are escorted out of the building.
Thibault, who worked in the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., had recently been removed from his position as assistant special agent in charge at the FBI's Washington Field Office (ASAC/WFO), which covers all of the District of Columbia and Northern Virginia.
• https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-fbi-agent-timothy-thibault-resigns/
12 September 2022: On Monday 12 September 2022, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announces the appointment of Dr. Yue (Nina) Chen as “Chief Climate Risk Officer.” Dr. Yue Chen previously worked with the Nature Conservancy and with the Rockefeller Foundation (which has its own very interesting, totally not-kosher China connections).
“I am excited to welcome Dr. Chen to the OCC,” said Acting Comptroller Michael J. Hsu (in English). “We are fortunate to have someone with her background and experience in both finance and climate-related financial risk to lead the agency’s risk management work in this area. She is an asset (analyst: super-helpful, thank you for that) to an already strong and dedicated team of OCC staff focused on the safety and soundness of our banks and the financial system.”
As the Washington Free Beacon notes:
❝ Chen earned her chemical engineering degree from Tsinghua University (see 27 August 2022), which one think tank [ASPI] deems a “very high risk” because of its involvement in a “high level of defense research and alleged involvement in cyberattacks” on behalf of the Chinese military. Tsinghua conducts research on “artificial intelligence, air-to-air missiles, navigation technology, instrument science, and materials science,” according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Chen, who previously held a climate regulator position at the New York State Department of Financial Services, is a proponent of “environmental, social, and governance” guidelines, a socially progressive approach to investing known as ESG. ❞
Analyst's note: these two particular counterintelligence threats at OCC (along with Saule Omarova, who hailed from the world's #1 miner of cryptocurrency, Kazakhstan) seem to suggest that a high-level intelligence is attempting to surreptitiously guide the United States towards embracing crypto… despite us not having the nuclear capacity to generate crypto as cheaply as other nations. “Hold on,” you might be thinking, “what's the correlation between crypto and nuclear?” Nuclear generates very cheap electricity. Crypto requires lots of electricity to mine. (Most crypto will eventually be worthless thanks to post-quantum cryptanalysis and the resulting transaction reversibility, however that's beyond the scope of this document.) By hollowing out the United States' nuclear industrial base, by debasing our currency through profligate spending, and by allowing foreign agents to infiltrate the highest levels of government, whatever high-level intelligence which appears to be directing events probably hopes to destroy the United States (petro)dollar in favor of some global (uranium)coin. That would *not* presently be in the interests of global freedom.
• https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2022/nr-occ-2022-110.html
• https://www.blocktempo.com/us-occ-fed-fdic-eyeing-on-interagency-group-for-crypto-regulations/
• https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-climate-appointee-studied-at-ccp-controlled-university-linked-to-chinese-military/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninaychen/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/fei-xue-78a67045/
21 September 2022: NBC News' Ken Dilanian reports that scientists at America’s top nuclear lab were recruited by China to design missiles and drones, according to a report by Strider Technologies. The NBC report continues:
❝ At least 154 Chinese scientists who worked on government-sponsored research at the U.S.’s foremost national security laboratory over the last two decades have been recruited to do scientific work in China — some of which helped advance military technology that threatens American national security — according to a new private intelligence report obtained by NBC News. […]
The report, by Strider Technologies, describes what it calls a systemic effort by the government of China to place Chinese scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons were first developed.
Many of the scientists were later lured back to China to help make advances in such technologies as deep-earth-penetrating warheads, hypersonic missiles, quiet submarines and drones, according to the report. ❞
Author's note: the number of Chinese scientists identified by Strider — 154 — should raise alarm with those who care about our national security in both parties. This September Strider report came six months after a decision in March of 2022 by Attorney General Garland to end the Department of Justice's “China Initiative” after accusations of racism and xenophobia, as well as one high-profile acquittal in court against a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, physics professor, Dr. Anming Hu, who who said he was falsely accused… an acquittal which reinforced pre-existing mainstream narratives about the China Initiative. The China Initiative was launched by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2018, and given the timing and the launch of AG Garland's Kleptocracy Initiative, one would assume that the resources from the former were, in part, re-tasked to deal with the latter.
As Georgetown CSET research analyst Emily Weinstein notes, “The order to dismiss the United States of America v Anming Hu case marked the end of a three-and-a-half-year legal ordeal that began even before February 2020, when Hu was indicted for violating the 2011 Wolf Amendment. The amendment prevents NASA from engaging in cooperation with China or Chinese organisations without the FBI’s approval.”
4 October 2022: The Department of Health and Human Services announces that it's purchasing $280M worth of a drug called Nplate from Amgen for use in radiological and nuclear emergencies. It's later discovered that at least one member of Congress, a Democrat, traded on foreknowledge of the purchase.
Analyst's note: this seems worrying. While the purchase was ostensibly justified by Putin's nuclear saber-rattling, that's *hardly* the only source of nuclear risk America faces. What are the Biden administration and Democrats really preparing for?
• https://aspr.hhs.gov/newsroom/Pages/ARS-Oct2022.aspx
• https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house/earl-blumenauer-hhs-stocks-investigation-watchdog-congress
• https://www.thecentersquare.com/oregon/ethics-watchdog-rep-blumenauers-wifes-stock-trades-emblematic-of-dc-swamp/article_eafeb9ec-8de8-11ed-8641-abbf8cd92590.html
16 October 2022: On 16 October 2022, hours before Xi Jinping’s opening speech to the 20th National Congress of China’s Communist Party, at a depth of approximately 10 km (that’s 10,000 meters), a 4.9-5.1 magnitude “earthquake” occurred near Kashgar, Xinjiang/East Turkistan. Among other sources, this “earthquake” was detected by a seismograph in Podgonoye, Kazahkstan.
The depth of the alleged earthquake is key. On 2 February 2022, Xinhua reported that China's newest, deepest well was being drilled, and also mentioned this:
❝ The Tarim Oilfield said it is expected to drill 110 ultra-deep wells this year, while it drilled 23 wells with a depth of over 8,000 meters in 2021. ❞
Author's note: is it possible that China has covertly drilled wells 1 km or more deeper than what it's publicly announced? Absolutely!
The world's deepest oil well was previously known as Z-44 Chayvo, and was drilled over 40,000 ft (12 km) into the ground. The world's newest, deepest well is the O-14, which reaches over 49,000 ft (15 km) into the ground. Both wells are operated by a joint Rosneft/Exxon partnership called Exxon Neftegas Ltd. and both are located in the same field, offshore from Russia's Sakhalin Island. While there are some differences between offshore and onshore wells, it isn't inconceivable to think that China's drilled onshore wells that are 1 km or more deeper than what they've publicly disclosed, especially if their reasons for doing so were to experiment with explosive (as opposed to hydraulic) fracking.
Sinopec's Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development actually publishes a Journal of Oil and Natural Gas Geology, and it's clear that they're focused intensely on the geology of the “Shunbei strike-slip fault zone.” The use of explosive fracking to access inaccessible oil and gas deposits certainly has to be on their radar.
But wait, there's more… October 16th was a significant day for another reason: on 16 October 1964, the People’s Republic of China conducted its first nuclear test (at Lop Nur, in Xinjiang), making it the fifth nuclear-armed state after the USA, the USSR, Britain and France. It was a uranium-235 implosion fission device with a TNT-equivalent yield of 22 kilotons.
Analyst's note: the significance of the 16 October 1964 nuclear anniversary wouldn't have been lost on those planning the CPC's 20th National Congress.
(See 19 July 2022 for background China's on “Two Bombs, One Satellite” (两弹一星; Liǎngdàn Yīxīng) nuclear and space “double sprint” project.)
• https://www.gdacs.org/report.aspx?eventtype=EQ&eventid=1342291
• https://english.news.cn/20220202/bddc8cb9e0ab441da2ca7181a61c550f/c.html
• 🔓 http://ogg.pepris.com/article/2020/0253-9985/20200507.shtml
• Company #FC026388: CHINA PETROLEUM & CHEMICAL CORPORATION https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/FC026388
• UK Establishment #BR012109: CHINA PETROLEUM & CHEMICAL CORPORATION https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/BR012109
23 October 2022: As the 20th Party Congress was ending — with the father of Nuctech founder Hu Haifeng (top photo), Hu Jintao, publicly ushered away from the Party Congress in a stunning moment (bottom photo) — a SECOND “earthquake” occurred with the same magnitude (5.0) and near the same depth in Xinjiang, not far from Kashgar (middle photo), as detected by the USGS.
A second report was later issued by the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), which listed it as a magnitude 4.9 earthquake. Other agencies reporting the same quake include France's Réseau National de Surveillance Sismique (RéNaSS) at magnitude 5.0, the citizen-seismograph network of RaspberryShake at magnitude 5.0, and the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) at magnitude 5.0.
People's Daily reported it like so:
❝ BEIJING, Oct. 23 (Xinhua) -- A 5.1-magnitude earthquake jolted Pishan County in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, at 11:06 p.m. Sunday Beijing Time, according to the China Earthquake Networks Center (CENC).
The epicenter was monitored at 37.71 degrees north latitude and 77.85 degrees east longitude, with a depth of 17 km, the CENC said. ❞
Analyst's note: given all the research China has done on nuclear fracking, readers mustn't discount the possibility that China's flirting with violating the Underground Test Ban Treaty. “Induced seismicity” from fracking and from waste water injection well over-pressurization is a very real phenomenon — just ask experts at the Colorado School of the Mines or at the University of Oklahoma — and if these earthquakes were indeed induced via nuclear fracking, the nuclear devices required would be relatively small by modern standards… perhaps proof-of-concept "demo fracks" to show that China has the capability of unlocking currently-inaccessible, newly-discovered oil and gas reserves (see 11 August 2022) in the precise region where these “earthquakes” occurred. A 5.0 magnitude rating on the Richter would equal a 5.8 kiloton TNT-equivalent yield (I think?). While that seems small for two tactical nuclear weapons (but by no means infeasibly small), the fracking charges could’ve also been exploding-bridgewire (EBW) detonators (which are used to detonate a nuke) rather than tactical low-yield warheads themselves. Coincidentally, these have been floated for possible use in Sichuan, rather than Xinjiang (see 27 January 2019)… both places, interestingly, where Sinopec is operating.
If China is indeed engaged in covert underground nuclear tests, especially for the purposes of attempting to destabilize global energy markets (and futures markets), the US government has a responsibility to disclose that to the IAEA, to Congress, and to the American public. Such activity threatens the very fabric of the global nuclear security regime, as well as environmental protocols which we honor, but which China clearly doesn't honor. America needs a strategy for responding to such activity. At the very least, America needs to demonstrate that we, too, can field such technology to unlock deep deposits of oil and gas, should that ever become necessary.
(See 19 July 2022 for background China's on “Two Bombs, One Satellite” (两弹一星; Liǎngdàn Yīxīng) nuclear and space “double sprint” project.)
• 🔓 http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/1024/c90000-10162584.html
• https://earthquaketrack.com/quakes/2022-10-23-14-53-19-utc-4-7-10
• https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/27/world/asia/hu-jintao-congress-videos.html
27 October 2022: In a revealing “hot mic” moment, while preparing to sign a historic Israel-Lebanon maritime border demarcation deal (just days after a massive deterioration in U.S.-Saudi relations over OPEC+ cuts), Israeli PM Yair Lapid tells State Department Senior Advisor for Energy Security Amos Hochstein (who speaks Hebrew and served in the IDF) “good, listen… you'll even be forgiven for ruining the relationship with Saudi Arabia.” They both laugh.
Analyst's note: [*Slaps knee.*] Ha! Good times!
If Amos wants to be forgiven — which one very much doubts, given the laughing — one would guess that he should maybe begin his Catechesis, because his teshuvah, if any, isn't obvious, and the vidui prayers don't seem to be doing the trick.
One doubts that G-d cares at all about the monetary aspects of things, but given Amos' time dismantling U.S. Enrichment Corp. to the benefit of Russia (see 29 March 2007), plus his time at Ukraine's Naftogaz while they were financing $1bn deals with the concentration camp-building Chinese regime (see 2 April 2019), one would presume that he's not in a very good spot to be forgiven… never mind this more recent failure, allowing Democrats to blame the Saudis for the Dems' own naïve energy policies as they were heading into November elections, to the clear benefit of the same G-d-hating, Holocaust-committing Chinese regime (see 8 December 2022) that's nearly wiped out the יהודים קאיפנג.
Of course, one wishes Amos well, but one imagines that the Muslims, Christians, and, yes, יהודים בוכרים who are languishing in China's concentration camps, prisons, labor camps, and factories probably wish he'd place much greater priority and emphasis on our relationships with our Gulf partners. (It's probably a safe bet to assume G-d's on the side of China's prisoners, slaves, and hostages on this one, too.)
LAPID: “You'll even be forgiven for ruining the relationship with Saudi Arabia.”
[*Laughing.*]
Sometime in the past few months, Amos Hochstein's Wikipedia was edited to clarify that he's “not a dual national,” which, if true, would imply that he either hasn't obtained American citizenship or that renounced his Israeli citizenship (having been born there and having served in the IDF). In the latter case, that would seem to be a complete overreaction to this unfortunate hot mic moment.
(Just to be clear, the maritime border demarcation deal seems to have been a good thing. That goes in the “win” column.)
30 October 2022: Hacktavist group Guacamaya releases leaked documents from the Mexican Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA) to the Spanish-language outlet Milenio. Among the surprises, there's this (translated):
❝ The Mexican government placed surveillance of at least 14 customs offices in the hands of a security company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, prompting an alert at the White House, which identifies the Beijing-based firm Nuctech as a entity that works for the interests of the Asian giant. […]
According to documents to which MILENIO had access , this type of non-intrusive scanning equipment is also available at customs in Tijuana, Colombia, San Luis Río Colorado, Nogales, Matamoros, Reynosa, Sonoyta, and Puerto Palomas. […]
Nuctech Limited Company describes itself as the market leader in the security industry, with customers in 140 countries and with its products in at least 80 airports in Europe. […]
Its founder, Hu Haifeng, is the son of the former president of China, Hu Jintao. Some of his shares are held by Chinese state-owned firms such as the National Nuclear Corporation. Haifeng stepped down as CEO of Nuctech in 2008 to join the leadership of the Communist Party of China. ❞
Analyst's note: per one of their Instagram posts, “Nuctech has provided Support and Technology at the following events in the People’s Republic of China: the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2009 China National 60th Anniversary Celebration, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games, the 2011 Shenzhen Universiade, the 2010 Eurasia Expo, the 2014 Shenyang National Games and the 2014 Nanjing Youth Olympic Games. In the same way, Nuctech teams have played a central role in other Events worldwide, such as the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia or the G20 held in the Argentine Republic.”
It'd be a safe bet to assume they provided security to the Beijing 2022 Olympics, as well.
Needless to say, this isn't good.
14 November 2022: After China's apparent/possible surreptitious detonation of two low-yield tactical nuclear devices (or the exploding bridgewire detonators which might be used to detonate such devices) in two apparent/possible well-timed demonstrations of "nuclear fracking" technology — coinciding with the opening and closing ceremonies of the Chinese Communist Party's National People's Congress — China and the United States agree to restart climate talks.
Analyst's note: not good. In the video, Biden even takes a running start as he crosses the lobby to shake Xi Jinping's hand.
• https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/business/china-us-climate-change.html
24 November 2022: According to the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian “held a phone conversation with Namibia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah to discuss some international issues and the expansion of bilateral cooperation in the areas of politics, economy, science, and university ties.”
Why is this relevant? Per Wikipedia, “the Rössing Uranium Mine in Namibia is the longest-running and one of the largest open pit uranium mines in the world. It is located in the Namib Desert near the town of Arandis, 70 kilometres from the coastal town of Swakopmund. Discovered in 1928, the Rössing mine started operations in 1976. In 2005, it produced 3,711 tonnes of uranium oxide, becoming the fifth-largest uranium mine with 8 per cent of global output. Namibia is the world's fourth-largest exporter of uranium.” (Arandis mining settlement shown at right.)
But what's this? “Shares in the mine are owned 69% by the Rio Tinto Group which announced an agreement to sell its share to China National Uranium Corporation Limited on 26 November 2018, 15% by the Government of Iran (purchased in 1976), 10% by IDC of South Africa, 3% by the Government of Namibia (with 51% of voting rights), and 3% by local individual shareholders.”
• https://en.mfa.ir/portal/newsview/700882/Top-diplomats-of-Iran-Namibia-discuss-bilateral-relations
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6ssing_uranium_mine
• GeoHack: Rössing uranium mine https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=R%C3%B6ssing_uranium_mine¶ms=22_29_03_S_015_02_56_E_region:NA_type:landmark
30 November 2022: Five cars — a Chevy Suburban, a Ford Explorer, an Infiniti QX80, a Ford Expedition, and a Jeep Gladiator — burst into flames 40 feet from a 25,000 jet fuel tank after having been returned to the rental service by the Secret Service. The cars were owned by Hertz and had recently been driven by the Biden entourage over Thanksgiving. The Ford Expedition was under a battery recall. Thankfully, nobody was injured.
• https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/biden-rental-cars-catch-fire-secret-service-b2235839.html
• https://twitter.com/ACKCurrent/status/1597193896014278656
2 December 2022: The US Air Force unveils the Northrup Grumman-designed B-21 Raider, a next-gen stealth bomber capable of carrying nuclear payloads, i.e., for Global Strike Command.
Analyst's note: for those who marvel at aviation and avionics, it's a very cool plane… price tag and destructive potential notwithstanding. That being said, if China is indeed using its nuclear tech to pursue an asymmetric offset strategy against the United States (and our massive military apparatus) by applying nuclear weapons technology to the field of energy extraction and resource development, this very expensive ($550 million/per) stealth bomber isn't going to do us much good.
Unfortunately, the United States needs to demonstrate the same “nuclear fracking” capabilities so that futures markets don't incorrectly assume that our hands are tied vis-à-vis nuclear fracking while China's aren't. This isn't a partisan recommendation, either. It's a national security recommendation. Energy security is national security.
Key point: if one devoutly believes in clean, green, domestically-produced renewable energy, that's all the more reason why one mustn't allow China to corner energy futures markets or outmaneuver the United States in interpersonal politics with major oil and gas-producing sovereigns through the use of nuclear (or EBW) fracking. The United States must have a response, and a new stealth bomber is *not* a sufficient response.
Aside: Nor would, i.e., the announcement of partial, unsustained fusion ignition at NIF be an adequate response.
In all likelihood, if China did use two low-yield tactical nuclear warheads or two EBW detonators as fracking charges (see 16 and 23 October) to demonstrate, in theory, that it could unlock future oil and gas reserves in the Tarim Basin, the full cost of each frack was probably far, far less than $550 million (probably closer to $10 million), and the lifetime value of each deep hypothetical nuclear/EBW-fracked well could probably finance a comparable next-gen Chinese-made stealth bomber.
Ergo, the United States and our allies need to demonstrate this exact same capability, so as to remove China's perceived asymmetric advantage, and we need to do so quickly. “Perceived” is a key word, as the actual operationalization of nuclear fracking at scale is different from the mere demonstration of such a capability. Indeed, the United States experimented with nuclear fracking in decades past, including via a 1969 nuclear fracking experiment in Colorado called Project Rulison, but (perhaps unwisely) stopped that research… at least as far as the publicly-disclosed information is concerned.
The demonstration of a nuclear fracking capability is not to show that we necessarily will use it, but only that we could, in theory, if unforeseen circumstances should require it. Aside from China, the demonstration of such a capability would send strong signals to OPEC and Russia, as well. America is rich in natural resources, including hydrocarbons, and we could very quickly unlock those resources if that were necessary. Plus, if the science of climate change should swing dramatically in the other direction — if, for instance, scientists determine that we actually need to induce global warming to compensate for the chilling effects of a cyclical decline in solar magnetohydrodynamics — then we might actually be glad that we didn't completely destroy the American and European oil and gas industries through the imposition of ESG standards (while allowing China to play the nuclear fracking card unopposed).
The Project Rulison 40-kiloton nuclear device is lowered into its 8,442-foot deep emplacement hole on Aug. 14, 1969.
Robert Campbell, right, and California congressman Craig Hosmer visit the well head at Project Rulison Surface Ground Zero.
Part of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory contingent at Ground Zero Site, of Project Rulison, seen here capped until the explosive was inserted. Dr. Robert H. Campbell, left, was the operations director for the project.
Cross-section of the Rulison blast crater published in November 2018 by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Legacy Management.
7 December 2022: Defense News reports that China may have surpassed the US in the number of nuclear warheads they have on on ICBMs.
❝ The U.S. may no longer enjoy a numerical advantage against China in certain elements of its Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program, according to Strategic Command, which oversees the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
STRATCOM recently sent a classified determination to Congress pursuant to a clause in the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, which requires congressional notification if China overtakes the U.S. in at least one of three components regarding its ICBM stockpile.
James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, pushed the Pentagon to declassify the determination as required under the law in a letter sent Monday to STRATCOM commander Admiral Charles Richard. ❞
7 December 2022: Kazatomprom says that 30 tons of low-enriched uranium (LEU) had been sent by rail in the form of nuclear fuel assemblies (large bunches of fuel rods) to China where they had been “received by their end user," China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGNPC). Per Eurasianet, “the French-designed assemblies were manufactured at an Oskemen plant controlled by a company called Ulba-TVS LLP, which is 51 percent owned by Kazakhstan’s state uranium giant Kazatomprom and 49 percent by CGNPC – China's largest state-owned nuclear company.”
• https://www.kazatomprom.kz/ru/media/view/first_delivery_nfc
• https://eurasianet.org/kazakhstan-sends-first-nuclear-fuel-assemblies-to-china
8 December 2022: Chinese leader Xi Jinping — a major supporter of Iran's nuclear program — meets with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman while on a visit to the kingdom.
13 December 2022: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announce the achievement of fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which it calls “a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power.”
Analyst's note: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility is unlikely to produce a self-sustaining fusion reaction (though the author certainly hopes to be wrong). Indeed, the type of confinement used at NIF — inertial confinement fusion, or ICF, using lasers — will, in this author's opinion, prove inferior to next-gen magnetic confinement designs currently being studied elsewhere… designs which may well result in major fusion breakthroughs within the next decade. LLNL's NIF is unlikely to see similar success. In fact, it currently drains 130 times more power from the grid than it puts out. This announcement didn't change that. That being said, ICF technology could have applications for other high-energy purposes in the 20-year horizon, if coupled with magnetic confinement technology, however this author isn't inclined to elaborate on that any further.
• https://www.llnl.gov/news/national-ignition-facility-achieves-fusion-ignition
• https://bigthink.com/the-future/fusion-power-nif-hype-lose-energy/
16 December 2022: The Biden administration reverses a 1954 decision by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to revoke the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for his work on the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist, headed the top secret Los Alamos Laboratory, which was established under President Franklin Roosevelt as home of the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb during World War Two. He later became an opponent of nuclear weapons.
• https://www.yahoo.com/now/biden-admin-says-u-wrongly-224424831.html
28 December 2022: A piece in IEEE Spectrum covers the likely potential for China National Nuclear Corporation's next generation of breeder reactors — specifically, sodium-cooled pool-type fast-neutron reactors — to be used for military purposes… specifically, for producing weapons-grade fissile plutonium for nuclear weapons.
❝ Jutting out from the coast of China’s Fujian province, Changbiao Island may seem small and unremarkable. It is anything but. This is where the China National Nuclear Corp. is building two fast-neutron nuclear breeder reactors, the first of which is slated to connect to the grid in 2023, the second in 2026. So China could start producing weapons-grade plutonium there very soon.
They are called breeder reactors because they produce more nuclear fuel than they consume. According to Chinese authorities, the ones on Changbiao are civilian power reactors, designed to generate 600 megawatts of electricity each, which amounts to a little more than 1 percent of the total capacity of China’s nuclear power sector. But each reactor could also yield up to 200 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium each year, enough for about 50 nuclear warheads—which is making nuclear-arms-control experts in Western countries nervous.
“China is in the middle of a big buildup of its nuclear-weapon arsenal,” says Frank von Hippel, a physicist and nuclear-policy expert at Princeton University. “My belief is that one of the purposes of these reactors is to produce weapons-grade plutonium for that buildup.” ❞
Analyst's note: the Changbiao Island complex is heavily guarded, and lies just 17km SSE of the PLAAF's Shiumen Military AIrbase, which is an extremely hardened airbase which the Chinese regime likely intends to use during its planned assault on Taiwan. According to the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Power, “the airfield is known to house J-10 and Su-30MKK fighters along with UCAVs, and it has an S-300 or HQ-9 surface-to air missile (SAM) battery at the airfield.” Moreover, “Shuimen airfield oversaw significant expansion with the completion of 24 new hardened and lightly camouflaged shelters in September of 2018. These shelters joined the 22 hardened, underground, and camouflaged shelters built sometime around 2009. In July of 2017, two additional small to medium capacity fuel depots were added to the airfield. These depots are now buried.”
(One wonders if Shuimen has facilities used for temporarily storing and transporting plutonium. Transporting plutonium by air is much more complex than transporting other items. It's the type of activity that would be strictly handled by the PLA.)
By the way, the U.S. currently lacks the ability to produce nuclear warheads because we don’t have the capacity to produce plutonium pits, which compose the core of any nuclear weapon. We're currently working to reconstitute our ability to produce plutonium pits, with the goal of producing 80 pits per year. But this capability isn’t expected to be fully operational until 2032 (at the earliest). In other words, in the very best case scenario — absent some minor miracle whereby competent experts are placed in charge of things and red tape gets cut in an “Operation Warp Speed”-like manner — the Chinese have a 9-year lead on producing new plutonium pits.
• https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-breeder-reactor
• https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-building-two-secret-nuclear-123800582.html
• https://neutronbytes.com/2021/05/28/chinas-cfr-600-draws-concerns-as-a-breeder-reactor/
• https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms/c_42152/sodium-cooled-fast-reactor-sfr
• Changbiao Island https://goo.gl/maps/cGM3BNgDzRsLy4aR7
• Shuimen Military Airbase https://goo.gl/maps/qGHVmiJUfJAufGhr6
• https://mitchellaerospacepower.org/watch-these-airfields-to-know-if-china-may-attack-taiwan/
• https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featuredeveloping-a-spent-fuel-cask-for-air-transport-4210559/
29 December 2022: Voice of America reports that Namibia has halted Russian uranium exploration over environmental concerns. VOA reports:
❝ Namibia is Africa’s biggest producer of the nuclear fuel, the world’s second, and in 2019 granted Russia’s Rosatom subsidiary, One Uranium, exploration rights. But this month, Namibia’s Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform refused to grant it a water use permit required for mining, saying the company failed to prove its uranium extraction method would not cause pollution.
Namibia’s Minister for Agriculture, Water, and Land Reform Calle Schlettwein told VOA this month they could not grant Russia’s atomic energy agency a permit for uranium mining.
Namibia, Africa’s biggest uranium producer and the world’s second, in 2019 gave Rosatom exploration rights.
But its local subsidiary, One Uranium, still requires a water use permit to begin mining.
Schlettwein said no further permit would be granted because the method of mining the company proposed, known as the in-situ leaching, was raising environmental concerns. ❞
This is a diagram of the in situ leaching processs as it's commonly done in Kazakhstan. While the analyst hasn't seen configurations for Russia's planned Namibian operations, there's nothing to suggest that the process would be drastically different in Namibia.
The VOA story continues:
❝ “The permits that we’d given had conditions to make sure that we can monitor the activities and that we can ensure ourselves continuously that no risk to the aquifer is happening," Schlettwein said. "Now, unfortunately, the company did not conform to the conditions and we have now suspicion that the mining operation, which is called in situ leaching ... mining, in fact, I see there is risk to the aquifer by polluting it.”
In situ mining involves recovering minerals by dissolving them in an acid pumped into the ground and then pumping the solution back to the surface.
Schlettwein said farmers in Namibia’s eastern Omaheke region had petitioned against the technique.
Roy Miller is a retired underground water geologist and member of the management committee of the Stampriet Aquifer Uranium Mining Association (SAUMA).
He also petitioned against in-situ mining and read his statement to VOA.
“Mine solutions do escape because of improper operations, leaks, equipment breakdowns, borehole problems, and geological problems. Spreading mine solutions become a major threat to the safety of the drinking water way beyond the confines of the mine area," Miller said.
Analyst's note: perhaps the Clintons shouldn't have facilitated Rosatom's purchase of Uranium One in the first place!
One Uranium’s spokesperson, Riaan Van Rooyen dismissed the concerns.
He told VOA the extraction method was used in Kazakhstan, the world’s largest uranium producer, without harming the environment.
“Because it is a fairly new way in Africa, there is no such mine. It is the fear of the unknown that is mostly of concern for the local farmers," Van Rooyen said.
Van Rooyen said halting the project would deprive one of Namibia’s poorest regions of about 600 jobs and a $55 million investment. ❞
Analyst's note: it's very interesting the way this announcement comes just after the call between Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and Namibia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah (see 24 November 2022) and, as we'll later see, before Iranian dissident media confronts possible foreign agent Robert “Malley” Ménache on secretly meeting with the Iranians at least three times (see 17 January 2022) in the midst of horrific, large-scale massacres of protestors (mainly women).
It's almost like there's some kind of illegal, illicit coordination between the State Department and the (sanctioned) Iranian regime here there on the issue of Namibian uranium mining. It's almost as if it's being done in such a way as to avoid Congressional oversight.
29 December 2022: Amid an eight-day strike by Border Force staff, a shipping consignment of metal is discovered at London's Heathrow airport containing uranium. Initial reports — which don't end up surfacing until 11 January 2023 — describe the consignment as having contained “kilograms” of the radioactive element, however later reports attempt to minimize the amount. Authorities trace the shipment's origins to an Oman Air flight from Pakistan. No reports dispute the possibility that the radioactive material could've been used to make a dirty bomb, but experts suggest that Iranian terrorists may have been staging a “dry run” to test the capabilities of UK customs authorities. MI5 is reportedly investigating.
6 January 2023: Afghanistan’s Taliban signs a $540 million oil/gas development deal with China’s Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Co (疆中亞石油天然氣), a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) (中國石油天然氣集團).
Analyst's note: CNPC owns/operates the China-Kazakhstan Oil Pipeline and the China-Central Asia Natural Gas Pipeline, 中亞-中國天然氣管道 along with Kazakhstan's KazMunayGas (KazMunaiGaz) (and in the latter case, with participation from the relevant authorities in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan).
Ergo the signal here is that China intends to capitalize on NATO's tunnel vision-like focus on Russia in order to consolidate gains in Central Asia (to the West), while continuing to threaten to invade Taiwan (in the East) in order to keep us distracted. Those with a background in energy market financial risk arbitrage might do well to try to wrap their minds around what's happening here. After all, it appears that China as a government is functionally insolvent and probably has been for some time (simply look at their state-owned enterprises, banks, and construction firms etc.). The only thing keeping their economy churning is the relative difference between producing goods in China versus producing them anywhere else. Aside from raw inputs relative currency valuations, energy and labor are the two biggest factors in that equation.
Those who have studied the Thirty-Six Strategems of Wáng Jìngzé (則傳), the famed Qi Dynasty general, will recognize this as “make a sound in the east, then strike in the west” (聲東擊西)… 敌志乱萃，不虞。坤下兑上之象，利其不自主而取之。
• https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2023/01/07/2003792127
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan%E2%80%93China_oil_pipeline
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Asia%E2%80%93China_gas_pipeline
• https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9C%8B%EF%BC%8D%E4%B8%AD%E4%BA%9E%E5%A4%A9%E7%84%B6%E6%B0%A3%E7%AE%A1%E9%81%93
• https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%81%B2%E6%9D%B1%E6%93%8A%E8%A5%BF
6 January 2023: Reuters reports that CrowdStrike claims that it's uncovered a Russian phishing operation targeting U.S. nuclear laboratories. CrowdStrike claims that the operation was led by a group they call "Cold River" and further alleges that the phishing operation (allegedly targeting nuclear scientists) lasted from August to September of 2022, at the same time that Vladimir Putin was indicating that Russia would be willing to use nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory. According to the Reuters story, Cold River targeted the Brookhaven (BNL), Argonne (ANL) and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories (LLNL).
Analyst's note: it's unclear if CrowdStrike was attempting to paper over recent alarming news regarding Chinese targeting of U.S. nuclear labs, however their stock price plummeted 9% during the week leading up to this Friday news drop and was down by over 50% from its 52-week high, as of 6 January.
8 January 2022: The Tehran Times reports that Iran is determined to set up a joint military working group with Pakistan. The news comes following a high-level military-to-military (M2M) phone call between Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri and General Sahir Shamshad Mirza, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC) of Pakistan’s army. According to the Tehran Times:
❝ He [Pakistani General Mirza] announced that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has always supported the interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran in international forums, especially in the issue of nuclear energy, and there is no obstacle to the expansion of bilateral interaction, according to Iran’s official news agency IRNA.❞
Analyst's note: Mirza was intimately involved in the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) that brokered intra-Afghan talks involving Pakistan, China, Afghanistan and the United States. Following his appointment in late November, China's Embassy in Pakistan tweeted:
1.Our warm congratulations to new COAS General Asim Munir and new CJCSC General Sahir Shamshad Mirza. We also highly appreciate the contribution General Qamar Javed Bajwa and General Nadeem Raza made in developing bilateral ties and cooperation between the two militaries. 2.China and Pakistan are all weather strategic cooperative partners. We are proud of our time-tested friendship and are committed to build a closer community of shared future for the benefit of two peoples, the region and the world at large.
Recall that China and Pakistan recently entered into a new strategic nuclear pact (see 8 September 2021). This announcement (which hasn't been denied by the Pakistani side) should draw immediate global scrutiny about the proliferation risk from Pakistan (and by extension, from China).
12 January 2023: Reporting on an upcoming publication by the Hoover Institute’s Jeffrey Stoff, Newsweek reports that the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense had funded multiple collaborations with links to Chinese military researchers.
Stoff, et al., examined some 43,000 academic papers published between 2016 and May 2022, with about one sixth of those studies having a U.S. co-author. Of those 43,000 papers, Stoff found some 835 joint papers where researchers from Germany — and sometimes other allied nations — worked with the People's Liberation Army in the People's Republic of China.
Asked by Newsweek about the findings, the National Science Foundation “said it could not for now comment on the finding that it had been a funder in 24 publications involving collaboration with China's premier nuclear weapons development institute, the China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP), but added that it was ‘very challenging’ to come up with a law or policy drawing red lines for fundamental research.”
• https://www.hoover.org/profiles/jeffrey-stoff
• https://www.newsweek.com/how-us-scientists-are-collaborating-chinas-military-wake-call-1773079
12 January 2023: Investigative reporter John Solomon reports that the University of Pennsylvania, which hosts the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement — where classified documents were found in November — received $47.7 million from China during the three years when Biden was affiliated with it.
Analyst's note: Solomon also rightly takes note of the fact that Attorney General Merrick Garland shut down the FBI's “China Initiative” in February 2022 shortly after more than 160 members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty signed and made public an open letter demanding the program be shuttered, claiming that the initiative amounted to racial profiling. Two weeks after the letter was sent, Garland announced the termination of the program, sending shockwaves through federal law enforcement.
Penn currently has over 20 international partnerships with Chinese institutions (some of which are noted below, along with their risk ratings from the ASPI Chinese Defence Universities Tracker), including Shanghai Jiao Tong University, with whom Penn first entered into an agreement in 1980. Faculty from all of Penn's 12 schools have reported over 350 research projects and instructional activities in China.
Beijing Normal University 北京师范大学 BNU 北师大 (LOW/SECRET)
Chinese Academy of Sciences 中国科学院大学 国科大 UCAS (MEDIUM)
Fourth Military Medical University (Air Force Medical University)中国人民解放军空军军医大学 (VERY HIGH/SECRET)
Fudan University (MEDIUM)
Northwest Agricultural and Forestry University 西北农林科技大学 (LOW)
Peking University (Beijing University) 北京大学 (HIGH)
Renmin University of China 人民大学 (LOW)
Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) 上海交通大学 SJTU (HIGH/SECRET)
Sichuan University (SCU) 四川大学 SCU (VERY HIGH/SECRET)
Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) 中山大学 (HIGH) (Analyst's note: I'd revise this assessment upwards to VERY HIGH/SECRET)
Tsinghua University (THU) 清华大学 (VERY HIGH/SECRET) (see 27 August 2022)
Zhejiang University (ZJU) 浙江大学 (HIGH/SECRET)
[An unrelated aside: one thing which has perplexed this author for a couple years now relates to UPenn's Perelman School of Medicine leading the investigation into sonic attacks targeting American diplomats (“Havana syndrome”). Despite being called Havana Syndrome, the sonic attacks also seemed to affect staff in China. One would presume that a university — the University of Pennsylvania — that's partnered with the PLAAF's Medical University might not be the best place for conducting such an investigation.]
At least 10 current and former high-ranking Biden administration officials — including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl (currently on leave from Stanford) and White House counselor Steven Richetti — worked at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement… which makes UPenn's apparent targeting by Chinese intelligence all the more worrying. Blinken and Richettei were managing directors of the center while Kahl was a strategic consultant. It's unclear if any of the 10 current and former high-ranking Biden administration officials in question privately objected to Attorney General Garland's cancellation of the Department of Justice's “China Initiative.”
• https://global.upenn.edu/global-initiatives/penn-china
• https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/
• https://dsiac.org/articles/with-sonic-weapon-attack-china-demonstrates-experimental-program/
16 January 2023: The New York Post reports that ex-CIA/DIA operative Doug Wise, one of 51 signatories of the embarassing letter (see 19 October 2020) falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, now admits they “all” knew the files “had to be real.” Still, he says he has no regrets. For background, Douglas H. Wise retired from the CIA as a member of CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service on 30 August 2016 after being employed by taxpayers for nearly three decades. His finished his service with CIA in a Joint Duty Assignment as the Deputy Director of the Defense intelligence Agency.
Analyst's note: presumably Doug Wise's lack of regret has something to do with his likely continuing role as a government contractor. If your author sounds slightly annoyed by Mr. Wise, there's a reason for this: his tenure saw catastrophic failures in the U.S. intelligence enterprise (some of which are evident in this timeline) and systemic compromises of U.S. intelligence sources and methods by adversarial foreign powers (most notably, by Russia and China).
17 January 2023: Photos unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon show Hunter Biden driving his dad’s Corvette in 2017. That means Hunter — who has extensive business ties to Communist China — likely had access to the garage where his dad hid classified documents.
Meanwhile, legendary investigative reporter Paul Sperry tweets the following (edited for clarity): “BREAKING: Property records show Hunter Biden ended his office lease in DC building listing Chinese CEFC as tenant in Feb 2018 — the same month Penn Biden Center opened its DC office. Classified documents were found at Penn Biden Center, which officially opened its doors Feb 8, 2018.”
Analyst's note: Hunter Biden shared an office building with CEFC until the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement opened up? What a small world!
18 January 2023: The Washington Free Beacon reports that since Biden’s inauguration, the University of Pennsylvania (which hosts the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement) has received $51 million in foreign funding, including $14 million from unnamed contributors in China and Hong Kong, as well as $2.4 million from unnamed contributors in Saudi Arabia. The Beacon reports that the school also received $1 million from a source in the Cayman Islands in June to fund its Penn Wharton China program.
This $51 million in overseas funding reported by the Beacon is in addition to the $61 million that the University of Pennsylvania received from Chinese donors between 2017 and 2020, which was also reported by the Free Beacon in 2021.
Analyst's note: it could be interesting for we, the people, to learn what the University of Pennsylvania provides to the Penn Biden Center, aside from its name (i.e. a legal umbrella, IT services, payroll services, administrative services?).
• https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/since-biden-inauguration-anonymous-chinese-donors-poured-millions-into-university-that-houses-his-think-tank/
• https://freebeacon.com/democrats/watchdog-calls-for-transparency-from-university-of-pennsylvanias-biden-center/
17/18 January 2023: Jimmy Quinn at the National Review flags an important story from Iran International. On 17 January, Iran International directly asked the state department if Robert Malley (AKA Robert Ménache) had surreptitiously met with Saeid Iravani, Iran's Ambassador to the United Nations. According to information obtained by Iran International, the two met “at least three times in the last two months.”
Analyst's note: “in the last two months”… that's during the same period that Biden's administration was hiding his mishandling of classified documents. It sounds almost like Robert “Malley” Ménache was trying to rush things to evade House Republican oversight.
Lest we forget, Robert “Malley” Ménache's fellow francophone — John “the Xinjiang Ketchup King” Kerry — colluded with Iran to salvage the flawed JCPOA, likely spilling classified information (in this analyst's opinion) on at least two occasions during the Trump administration, thereby violating the Logan Act, as Marc Thiessen and others have rightly noted. It was essentially an act of sabotage against Tillerson (who wanted to stay in the in JCPOA) and Pompeo (who didn't).
It'd therefore be unsurprising if possible Russian agent Robert “Malley” Ménache, feeling emboldened by virtue of being fellow francophone Tony Blinken's high school friend, decided to betray Iran's brave protestors in order to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory over the past two months… just as John Kerry betrayed his nation with his self-serving “diplomatie de l'ombre” in attempting to salvage the JCPOA, undermining two consecutive Secretaries of State during the Trump administration. All signs point to there being something deeply compromising amongst this cohort.
This obsession with diplomatic engagement with a regime that's terrorizing and murdering its own people strongly suggests that the leverage the Iranian regime has on America (which this author believes relates to the Khobar Towers bombing, see 19 October 2020) and on Kerry specifically (as he violated the Logan Act and certainly had to discuss something during his clandestine rendezvous with Iranian intelligence) isn't the only leverage they have on the West.
Pourraient-ils aussi faire du chantage sur la France?
As of 2/25, the Iranian protests are fizzling, and its worth asking if the United States and its weak negotiators and diplomats have secretly backed themselves into a corner, and whether they've decided to pull back on public (and perhaps covert) support to Iranian protestors in order to re-open the door for Iran's possible return to the JCPOA. What might such an ill-advised and disasterous deal entail? As far back as 2011, these fallen men acknowledged Iran's “right to enrich” (note: regimes which do not respect human rights and which violate peremptory norms have no “right to enrich”) and we would clearly like Iran to stop supporting Russia in its war on Ukraine. Iran knows this. We also clearly have an appetite for HALEU and those of us with amputated souls clearly aren't bothered by uranium supply chains which snake past China's concentration camps in Xinjiang/East Turkistan.
What betrayal of human rights are our so-called leaders plotting next? And are they prepared for such a betrayal to be mercilessly exposed?
• https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/robert-malley-met-irans-u-n-envoy-anti-regime-outlet-claims/
• https://www.iranintl.com/en/202301183386
• https://www.akronbeaconjournal.com/story/opinion/columns/2018/05/13/marc-thiessen-did-john-kerry/10570521007/
20 January 2023: Bill Melugin of Fox News, based in Los Angeles, reports that the U.S. Border Patrol arrested 17 people on the terror watchlist who crossed the southern border illegally in December. There have now been 38 terror watchlist arrests at the southern border since FY’23 began on October 1st. Two days later, he follows up with this breakdown:
FY’23: 38 (so far)
FY’22: 98
FY’21: 15
FY’20: 3
FY’19: 0
FY’18: 6
FY’17: 2
21 January 2023: The NY Post reports that a mysterious professor named Dr. Frank Plantan, Jr. (if that *is* his real name) tried to entice Naomi Biden, Hunter Biden's daughter, into attending the 2019 Boao Forum — “the Davos of Asia” — in Hainan, China, in order to cash in on her family name, according to messages found on Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop.
“I don’t think it would surprise you that they are interested in you thanks to your family name. I would not take offense at that — it is truly the Chinese way. (And frankly, better you than that dolt Tiffany Trump),” Plantan wrote to Naomi, taking a dig at the then-First Daughter… err, the Second First Daughter (after Ivanka).
According to the Post, “Tiffany Trump and Naomi Biden were classmates at Penn and both graduated in 2016. The China invitation came when Naomi Biden was studying law at Columbia University, and her grandfather Joe Biden was gearing up for his 2020 presidential campaign.”
In a message to Hunter, Naomi identified Plantan as the “head of the IR department at Penn” and asked for his thoughts on whether she should go.
Hunter, smelling an opportunity to expand the family business, pushed Naomi to attend. “Yes- I would,” he advised, urging her to ask for a second ticket for then-boyfriend Peter Neal. (If Hunter Biden was thinking Naomi might be a good ambassador of the Biden family brand, he may have been looking at the examples set by Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump, rather than the much better examples set by the Reagan, Bush, and Obama children.)
“Don’t be shy,” Hunter Biden said. “I like the frankness of your professor but also the event seems worthwhile and something you could benefit from.”
Naomi — like the good kid she is (she was 25 or 26 at the time) — seems to have gotten spooked by the pretty obvious spook urging her to go to China (although the NY Post attributes her decision to her grandfather's election team putting the kibosh on things). Whether she wrote the response or had someone else write it, it's difficult to tell, but she seems to go out of her way to play up her Pop's “due diligence.”
“It is with great regret that I write to tell you I will not be able to attend the Boao Forum,” Naomi Biden wrote to Plantan in a message — a draft of which she shared with Hunter Biden in an email. “In doing his due diligence, my Pop [Joe Biden] asked his China experts and advisors to brief him on how my attendance may be perceived by the press and Chinese government,” she continued. “After he has all the information and upon the advice of his staff my Pop asked that I respectfully tell the Boao Forum that I would in fact not be able to attend.”
Analyst's note: it must be nice living in a fairy tale. This humble analyst wonders if innocent Naomi realizes that her Pop's Camelot appears to be built on RICO-predicate level rackeetering (with an exceedingly thin veneer of “due diligence”). I digress. Beautiful wedding dress (she was married at the White House in November 2022). Perhaps if we paid our politicians more, they'd be less inclined to go sending their kids to collect bribes from foreign nations, and perhaps they'd also be also be less inclined to spend obscene amounts of taxpayer money on massive NDAA, omnibus, and stimulus (err… “inflation reduction”) bills in the vain hope that the industries they reward will kick some of that money back into their campaign funds.
Who is Dr. Frank Plantan, Jr., exactly, by the way? Well, he teaches “Introduction to International Relations,” “International Relations Theory and Practice,” “Senior Seminar for Thesis Research,” “Theory and Practice of Counterintelligence,” and “Political Risk Analysis.” Sure, it's possible that he was just testing her, but it doesn't seem that way. Apparently, he's “the National President of Sigma Iota Rho, the ‘National Honor Society for International Studies’ with chapters on over one hundred and seventy campuses in the U.S. and abroad.”
And what's this? “He served as a consultant to […] Chongqing Municipality, People’s Republic of China on the development of a new international school to serve Chongqing. He also served as a consultant to the World Bank as a member of the Corporate Restructuring Team in Seoul during the Asian economic crisis in 1998 – 1999. Early in his career he also worked for the Economic Planning Board of the Republic of Korea. He has also advised the U.S. National Pork Board on their strategic vision.”
Analyst's note: Chongqing is a massive city. It isn't clear from his bio which international school Chongqing Municipality asked Dr. Frank Plantan, Jr., to consult on, but one assumes it might've been the Yew Chung International School of Chongqing 重庆耀中国际学校 in 2001, or, perhaps more likely, the Chongqing Bachuan International High School and Middle School 重庆市巴川国际高级中学校 in 2012 (bottom photo, although their old website appears to have gone offline sometime in 2019). Chongqing is notorious for its triads and corruption, and as a result, has built up a robust Public Security Bureau. There's probably fairly significant Ministry of State Security activity there, as well. While the analyst isn't asserting that Frank Plantan, Jr., Naomi's professor, is anything more than a minor cameo in the Hunter Biden saga, his biography reads as if he's omitted a few things in terms of his prior work… things that folks in Chongqing might've noticed. Might the counterintelligence professor be a counterintelligence risk himself?
• https://nypost.com/2023/01/21/upenn-teacher-urged-hunter-bidens-kid-to-cash-in-on-name/
• https://ir.sas.upenn.edu/people/frank-plantan-jr
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Iota_Rho
• http://www.sigmaiotarho.org/2157
• https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/media/article/raising-the-bar-for-hedge-funds-self-policing-preferable-to-over-regulation
• PDF https://www.cisabroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/INTELLIGENCE-COUNTERINTELLIGENCE-THE-PROTECTION-OF-DEMOCRACY-1.pdf
• ARCHIVED https://web.archive.org/web/20151001072349/http://www.bcihs.com/en/
• INACCESSIBLE https://www.bcschool.cn/
• https://jamestown.org/program/chongqings-mafias-expose-grave-woes-in-chinas-legal-apparatus/
22 January 2023: Major media reports that the FBI had been at Joe Biden's home the previous day, searching for 13 hours and seizing 6 more “classified documents,” including from his time in the Senate. CNN describes the state of play this way:
❝ US Attorney John Lausch’s initial review of the Biden’s documents matter was not a full-blown criminal investigation, and he did not use a grand jury. Even an interview with a key witness — Biden attorney Pat Moore, who first discovered the classified material at the Washington office — appears to have been an informal conversation that did not generate a 302 form that the government uses to memorialize interviews. […] Now Hur, who has yet to formally take up the role, is in the process of assembling his team, and legal experts expect he will use a grand jury. ❞
Fake experts on the left immediately jump to defend Joe Biden, claiming that there's some kind of substantive difference between Joe Biden's case and Donald Trump's case — both cases are not what they appear, and there's no real difference in terms of wrongdoing — while fake experts on the right point out that each of those “documents” could've been a binder (rather than a page) worth of information. Neither interpretation of events is probably remotely correct.
Analyst's note: two things to always remember when watching the fake news: (1) everyone who knows the correct interpretation of what's happening isn't talking, and (2) the people who actually are talking (or tweeting, including fake experts, like Peter Strzok and Allison “Mueller, She Wrote” Gill) (a) either don't know, or (b) are misleading you, the public.
What is actually happening is that AG Merrick Garland and Special Counsel Jack Smith are preparing to indict Donald J. Trump. In order to do that, there has to be an appearance of even-handedness.
This FBI raid (which we're told Joe Biden cooperated fully with) served two functions:
(1) Political function: It created the appearance of even-handedness, as it will be used politically by partisans — whom you, the reader, should remember to never trust — as evidence that Joe Biden has done nothing wrong “going back decades,” to quote his attorney. Of course, it's absolutely, verifiably false to suggest that Biden is un-compromised and has done nothing wrong. Truth be told, Biden came from modest beginnings. Every bribe that Joe had Jim and Hunter facilitate (sure, with John Brennan & Company's full knowledge) bought a big piece of real estate in Joe's mind… even though only 10% was most likely going to the Biden family (“10% for the big guy”), a fact which probably had a nasty way of making everything seem okay to Joe, Hunter, and Jim. On the other hand, every bribe that Jared, Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric went to fetch for Donald as he was heading down that golden escalator was merely the price of renting a temporary room in Trump's head. That's the only substantive difference between the two cases.
(2) Investigatory function: Each “classified document” that was found at Joe Biden's house is most likely simply a “counterintelligence narrative device” (CIND). A CIND is essentially a metaphor that exists in the public telling of a story to obscure some private truth. It's classified, so, in theory, you'll never know. For instance, each “classified document” found at “Joe Biden's home” could represent a discrete counterintelligence case involving his family, or it could represent a counterintelligence case concerning somebody in his orbit. Each document could represent a large, suspicious transaction (Suspicious Activity Report) or a business deal that he or his immediate family were involved in. Each document could serve as a placeholder representing cases involving the Bidens and any given country of counterintelligence concern (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Ukraine, etc.). If any actual physical “documents bearing classification markings” were found, each one of those could count as one of the “classified document” narrative devices (because each instance of classified spillage requires the opening of its own case). So it could be a mix. (Think about it: you can't exactly sneak classified documents out of the Senate. Biden qualifies as “elderly,” but in terms of modern history, that material has had to be viewed inside a secure room.)
Congratulations, dear reader, you live in a counterintelligence state, along with the two frontrunners for President in 2024! Fortunately, for the most part, it's a “benevolent (albeit very corrupt and incompetent) counterintelligence state,” and its existence (in theory) is validly necessitated by actual, real, tangible foreign intel threats. To an extent, every modern, developed nation is a counterintelligence state. It's the world we live in. In Russia and China, however, the existence of the counterintelligence state can't be openly acknowledged, or else you'll be institutionalized, imprisoned, or killed. That's one of the primary differences between freedom and tyranny.
Armed with an understanding of CINDs, we can make slightly better sense of the “roughly 300 classified documents” allegedly recovered from Donald J. Trump (see 31 August 2022). Did Donald Trump *actually* have “roughly 300 physical classified documents?” That's doubtful. From this analyst's perspective, it's theoretically possible that he did have some physical documents in his possession; the most likely case, however, is that some good portion (if not all) of those “roughly 300 classified documents” are narrative devices representing other things, just as we're seeing play out with Joseph R. Biden.
California Governor Gavin Newsom standing behind Joe Biden.
NOTE: Please contact me if there are additional items which you believe should be added.
Permission to redistribute this open-source research and accompanying header graphic, with attribution (a link back to this page), is hereby granted. The image was produced under Fair Use. Similarly, thumbnails are property of their respective creators or owners and their inclusion on this timeline — for teaching, scholarship, and research purposes — also constitute Fair Use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 107.