With the (justifiable) outrage swirling around FBI director (and Mitt Romney backer) James Comey’s public discussion of the discovery of more of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails having been discovered, another election-related investigation has gone largely unexamined. Indeed, the importance of the investigation has been downplayed.
Computer experts discovered a link between a server registered to the Trump organization and two servers registered to the Alfa Bank in Moscow, a bank that is part of the Alfa conglomerate discussed in FTR #’s 530 and 573.
In the Foer piece, and in attempted discrediting articles of same, it is apparent that the investigators do not understand the nature of the entity they are investigating. The journalistic “spin” put on Alfa in the coverage is “Russia/Putin/Kremlin” new Cold War context. Alfa is very, very different.
In FTR #’s 530, 573 we examnined the nature of Alfa’s history, operations and institutional and economic foundations. It is anything BUT “Kremlin/Putin/Russia.”
It appears to be Underground Reich, all the way, with evidentiary tributaries running in the direction of: the Iran-Contra scandal; the Iraqgate scandal; the oil-for-food scam vis a vis Iraq; malfeasanace by a coterie of GOP bigwigs including Dick Cheney and others close to George W. Bush, and Haley Barbour; money-laundering by powerful international drug syndicates; Chechen warlords and drug-trafficking syndicates; the Royal family of Liechtenstein; the Bank al-Taqwa (which helped finance al-Qaeda); the Marc Rich operations; Eastern European and Russian associates of Wolfgang Bohringer, one of Mohamed Atta’s close associates in South Florida; and the Carl Duisberg Fellowship, which brought Mohamed Atta to Germany from Egypt and may have helped him into the U.S.
The program highlights major aspects of the investigation into the Alfa/Trump link:
The Trump/Alfa link was not a malware attack, as some of the computer scientists initially thought: ” . . . . The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank. . . .”
The set-up was highly unusual: ” . . . . The researchers had initially stumbled in their diagnosis because of the odd configuration of Trump’s server. ‘I’ve never seen a server set up like that,’ says Christopher Davis, who runs the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc. and won a FBI Director Award for Excellence for his work tracking down the authors of one of the world’s nastiest botnet attacks. ‘It looked weird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.’ The server was first registered to Trump’s business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump. (Click here to see the server’s registration record.) But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. ‘I get more mail in a day than the server handled,’ Davis says. . . .”
The article details more unusual aspects of the link: ” . . . . That wasn’t the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses. . . . Eighty-seven percent of the DNS lookups involved the two Alfa Bank servers. ‘It’s pretty clear that it’s not an open mail server,’ Camp told me. ‘These organizations are communicating in a way designed to block other people out.’ . . . .”
Paul Vixie–one of the premier experts in the field–felt the connection was highly unusual: ” . . . . Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, ‘The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.’ Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. . . .”
The available evidence indicates that the hookup indicated “human-level communication”: ” . . . I put the question of what kind of activity the logs recorded to the University of California’s Nicholas Weaver, another computer scientist not involved in compiling the logs. ‘I can’t attest to the logs themselves,’ he told me, ‘but assuming they are legitimate they do indicate effectively human-level communication.’ . . . ”
More about the nature of the communication, from the scientist using the code-name “Tea Leaves”: ” . . . . Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. ‘At election-related moments, the traffic peaked,’ according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions. . . .”
The scientists attempted to get the public to pay attention to their investigation and New York Times writers turned their attention to the case: ” . . . In September, the scientists tried to get the public to pay attention to their data. One of them posted a link to the logs in a Reddit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story.* (They are still pursuing it.) Lichtblau met with a Washington representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump. . . .”
Things got “interesting” after that. According to the computer scientists, the Trump Organization shut down the server! As the brilliant Berkeley researcher Peter Dale Scott noted, in a different context, “The cover-up obviates the conspiracy. ” . . . . In September, the scientists tried to get the public to pay attention to their data. One of them posted a link to the logs in a Reddit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story.* (They are still pursuing it.) Lichtblau met with a Washington representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump. . . . The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was ‘very sloppily removed.’ Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like ‘the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.’. . . . Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. ‘That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],’ Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. ‘If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,’ Vixie says. ‘The only look-ups came from this particular source.’According to Vixie and others, the new host name may have represented an attempt to establish a new channel of communication. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank, which suggested that their communications were being monitored, may have deterred the parties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the servers stopped cold. . . .”
Not surprisingly, the FBI has dismissed the relevance of the computer link.
This dismissal comes against the background of several late-breaking developments:
The unsuccessful attempt by Alfa subsidiary Crown Resources to buy Marc Rich’s commodities firm: ” . . . A deal to sell the Swiss-based commodities operation of former U.S. fugitive financier Marc Rich to Russia-owned energy trading group Crown Resources is off. . . . Crown is owned by the Alfa Group conglomerate. . . . .”
The subsequent successful attempt by Alfa player Mikhail Fridman to purchase the Marc Rich firm: ” . . . Mikhail Fridman: ‘Defendant Mikhail Fridman currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of co-conspirator Alfa Bank and as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Defendant Consortium Alfa Group. Fridman further served on the Board of VimpelCom, a NYSE company, and has control over Golden Telecom, a NASDAQ company … purchased the United States trading firm owned by American, Mark Rich, the one time commodities baron pardoned by President Clinton with much controversy. . . .”
The FBI’s long-dormant Twitter account began tweeting files about Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, shortly after the official dismissal of investigations into the Alfa/Trump link: ” . . . . Now, a new interagency mystery is raising questions about whether the F.B.I. has become politicized, just days before the presidential election. On Sunday, a long-dormant F.B.I. Twitter account suddenly sprung to life, blasting out a series of links to case files that cast the Clintons in a decidedly negative light. . . . Then, on Tuesday, the “FBI Records Vault” account—which had not tweeted at all between October 2015 and Sunday—published a link to records related to the 15-year-old, long-closed investigation into former President Bill Clinton’s pardoning of onetime commodities trader turned fugitive Marc Rich. The post, which was quickly retweeted thousands of times, links to a heavily redacted document that repeatedly references the agency’s “Public Corruption” unit—less-than-ideal optics for Hillary Clinton, who has spent her entire campaign fighting her image as a corrupt politician. . . .”
FBI Director James Comey was in charge of the original Marc Rich investigation and the pardon of Rich by Bill Clinton. Is there a connection between the official dismissal of the investigation into the Alfa/Trump link by the FBI, the tweeting by the FBI of the files on the Clinton pardon of Marc Rich and the fact that it was Comey who presided over the Marc Rich investigations? ” . . . . In 2002, Comey, then a federal prosecutor, took over an investigation into President Bill Clinton’s 2001 pardon of financier Marc Rich, who had been indicted on a laundry list of charges before fleeing the country. The decision set off a political firestorm focused on accusations that Rich’s ex-wife Denise made donations to the Democratic Party, the Clinton Library and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign as part of a plan to get Rich off the hook. Comey ultimately decided not to pursue the case. The kicker: Comey himself had overseen Rich’s prosecution between 1987 and 1993. . . .”
Program Highlights Include: details of the Carl Duisberg Society’s links to Atta and to major German corporations; discussion of the Alfa Fellowhip against the background of German Ostpolitik discussed in FTR #’s 918 and 919; detailed analysis of Viktor Kozeny associates Fridman and (Pyotr) Aven (Kozeny employed Bohringer as a pilot); a summary analysis of the major points in FTR #’s 530 and 573.
Al-Qaeda linked jihadists continue to dominate the so-called “moderate” opposition in Syria. The U.S. and Western tactic of using Muslim Brotherhood-linked combatants as proxy warriors and armed heralds of corporatist economics began well before the 9/11 attacks and has continued apace ever since. Failure to pursue the Operation Green Quest investigation looms ever larger.
Bringing up to date topics covered in previous programs and posts, this broadcast begins with further coverage of the development of UFOs–so-called “flying saucers.” They were observed at the Roswell and Area 51 military bases and described as having been developed by the CIA, not “space aliens.” In numerous posts and programs, we have noted that the GOP/Underground Reich element of U.S. intelligence has used Muslim Brotherhood-derived jihadis as proxy warriors and armed heralds of corporatist economics. In that context, we highlight the frankly suspicious release of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s immigration file–only 206 of 651 pages were released in their entirety. The use of Islamists as proxy warriors also bears consideration in light of law enforcement’s casual attitude toward 17 Muslim men who fired “hundreds of shots” and were “chanting” in the early morning hours in a park in San Bernardino County in California. Why wasn’t the FBI more concerned? With tensions rising in the Western Pacific between the U.S. and China, newly-elected Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte harbors deep resentment of the U.S. over the extraction of a self-proclaimed CIA agent who incurred criminal charges in Mindanao while apparently looking for Golden Lily loot in the Islands. After detailing yet another “suicide” of a key executive of Swiss Re, we present a significant analysis of the recent replacement of the head of the Israeli Defense Force with Avigdor Lieberman, the head of a far-right wing Israeli political party: “Israel has been ‘infected by the seeds of fascism,’ he [former Prime Minister Ehud Barak] said.” Program Highlights Include: The CIA’s use of Gerhard von Mende, Nazi Germany’s top official coordinating Islamist forces working for the Third Reich; The Carl Duisberg Society’s sponsorship of Mohamed Atta associate and Chechen jihadi Mohamedou Ould Slahi.
Keyed by the victory of a Crimean Tatar singer in the Eurovision song contest–she sang about their deportation by Stalin in 1944–the Crimean Tatars are in the political spotlight again. Agitating and conspiring alongside OUN/B fascist heirs Pravy Sektor in Ukraine, the Crimean Tatars have become something of a cause celebre in the course of collaborating to destabilize Crimea and Russia. What has been eclipsed by the current controversy is the long history of Crimean Tatar collaboration with the Third Reich, initially, and then Western intelligence. Utilized as a wedge against the former Soviet Union, the Crimean Tatars were enlisted in the anti-Soviet Promethean League in the period between the two world wars and subsequently turned to the Third Reich as sponsors and allies, seeing the Nazi armies as their ticket to autonomy. Throughout this almost century-long odyssey, the Crimean Tatars have served alongside the Ukrainian fascists of the OUN/B and its successor organizations. ” . . . Berlin began forging plans for winning over Soviet linguistic minorities (‘Volksgruppen’) to collaborate with the Nazis in the war against Moscow. The attention of strategists in the German Foreign Ministry and in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories fell on the approx. 200,000 Crimean Tatars. The idea was encouraged by the hope that, with the Tatar’s help, officially neutral Turkey could also be won over to enter the war. Ankara saw itself as the protective power for Turkic-speaking minorities, including the Tatar linguistic group on the Crimean Peninsula. . . . The Battle Group D began immediately to recruit Crimean Tatar volunteers for the war against the Soviet Union. In December 1941, this battle group had massacred more than 13,000 people – 11,000 Jews and over 800 Roma – in Simferopol (Crimea). . . .” Following military defeat in the Second World War, the Crimean Tatars and their primary sponsor in the Ostministerium–Gerhard von Mende–continued their work apace under the auspices of Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles’s CIA and the Gehlen organization, both in its CIA incarnation and after it’s incorporation as the BND, the intelligence service of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Crimean Tatar/Ukrainian fascist collaboration has continued into the post-Maidan period. Program Highlights Include: Review of Crimean Tatar/Pravy Sektor blockading of road traffic into Crimea; review of Crimean Tatar/Pravy Sektor collaboration in the sabotage of Crimea’s electric grid; contemporary German political liaison with dissident Crimean Tatars; Turkey’s ongoing support for the Crimean Tatars, part of Erdogan’s “neo-Ottoman”/Pan-Turkic policy; von Mende’s use of Third Reich collaborator Edige Kirimal during the Cold War; review of the UNA-UNSO’s collaboration with Chechens and other Caucasian Islamists following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
As Americans process the Orlando nightclub shooting, we highlight the Brussels attacks by ISIS devotees. Against the background of deep and longstanding Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of Belgian and European civil society and political infrastructure, we once again underscore that elements of Western intelligence, including elements of CIA, continue to use jihadist groups as proxy warriors and armed heralds of corporate economics. In addition to the Caucasus, where Chechen jihadis have emigrated to Iraq and Syria and have formed a major foundational element of ISIS, Syria has been a major theater of operations for U.S., Saudi, Turkish and Qatari-backed Islamist fighters. Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the Brussels attacks is the fact that the assaults appear to have been a “plan B,” put into effect when other plans to attack Belgian nuclear facilities fell through. Belgian nuclear facilities are poorly secured and have been infiltrated by ISIS-linked individuals. In addition to video footage surveilling personnel from Belgian nuclear facilities, a security guard at one of them was found murdered and his security badge had been stolen. This comes as King Abdullah of Jordan has charged that Turkey is deliberately sending ISIS fighters to Europe, where their actions have precipitated the kid-glove treatment the EU has afforded Erdogan and his burgeoning Islamic fascist government’s suppression of journalistic and political freedom. In Syria, the U.S. refrained from bombing ISIS fighters when they were engaging Assad’s troops and has continued to back a variety of jihadi groups, including the Al-Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front. Tellingly, it was not until the U.S. began bombing ISIS at all that the group’s fighters in Europe began launching terrorist attacks, apparently feeling betrayed by their “allies.” Program Highlights Include: Turkey’s alleged backing of Islamists in Libya and Somalia; support for ISIS expressed by Haikan Fidan, the chief of Turkish intelligence; the presence in the Syrian conflict of Hassem Batahet, the most important Belgian Muslim Brother; U.S. support for a constellation of jihadist groups in Syria. ” . . . Similarly, the U.S. resisted classifying a Salafist army known as Ahrar al-Sham as terrorist even though it collaborates closely with Al Nusra and its ideology is virtually identical, as Stephen Gowans recently noted at the Global Research website. . . . The same goes for a Free Syrian Army unit known as the 13th Division, which the US has long backed even though it maintains “a tacit collaboration with Nusra” according to The Wall Street Journal “and even shared with the group some of its ammunition supplies. . . . Mohammad Alloush, who enjoys strong US backing as the chief rebel negotiator at the Geneva peace talks, is a leader of yet another Salafist group called Jaysh al-Islam, which issued a blood-curdling call to exterminate Syria’s Alawite community in July 2013. . . . But while one might think this would place Jaysh al-Islam beyond the pale, former Ambassador to Syria Robert S. Ford praised it a year later as one of the “moderate” rebel forces that were making life “particularly painful” for the Damascus government. . . .”
In San Bernardino County, California, 17 Muslim men fired hundreds of shots and were heard chanting, yet no arrests were made. With the transnational/GOP/Underground Reich faction of U.S. intelligence funding jihadists as proxy warriors and armed heralds of corporatist economics, we wonder if these men might have been trainees, with protection by covert action sponsors? We wonder if “Islamic terrorists/ISIS” will be allowed to do to isolationist and maverick Trump what was done to Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and George Wallace in 1972? This would make Obama look “weak” and “soft on terrorism,” at the same time as eliminating Trump, enraging his followers and channeling them toward the GOP candidate of choice. All of the contents of this website as of 12/19/2014–Dave Emory’s 35+ years of research and broadcasting–as well as hours of videotaped lectures are available on a 32GB flash drive. Dave offers his programs and articles for free–your support is very much appreciated.
Predictably ignored by the media are the profound links between the jihadist milieu in Belgium, the milieu of the Bank Al-Taqwa and the Muslim Brotherhood. Also ignored–again predictably–are the evidentiary tributaries leading from the most important Belgium Muslim Brother–Bassem Hatahet–and the Syrian jihadists, backed by elements of Western intelligence. All of the contents of this website as of 12/19/2014–Dave Emory’s 35+ years of research and broadcasting–as well as hours of videotaped lectures are available on a 32GB flash drive. Dave offers his programs and articles for free–your support is very much appreciated.
QUICK: Who said this?: “ ‘It seems like the [United States Dollar] and [Great Britain’s Pound] are both likely to go the way of the zimbabwe dollar,’ he suggested in March 2009. ‘Especially with that cockbag Bernanke deciding to magically print 1.2T more dollars.’ . . . Obama was ‘planning to devalue the currency absolutely as fast as theoretically possible,’ he wrote. . . .” Ted Cruz? Donald Trump? Marco Rubio? Paul Ryan? Rand Paul? No, it is Edward Snowden. Note how this jibes with Paul Krugman’s description of the GOP primary field: ” . . . . After all, Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, not only berated Ben Bernanke, Ms. Yellen’s predecessor, for policies that allegedly risked inflation (which never materialized), but he also dabbled in conspiracy theorizing, accusing Mr. Bernanke of acting to “bail out fiscal policy.” . . . But Wall Street isn’t the only source of malign pressure on the Fed, and in the actually existing U.S. political situation, such a bill would essentially empower the cranks — the gold-standard-loving, hyperinflation-is-coming types who dominate the modern G.O.P., and have spent the past five or six years trying to bully monetary policy makers into ceasing and desisting from their efforts to prevent economic disaster.” This program highlights the far-right, fascistic forces underlying Eddie the Friendly Spook. Much of the program consists of excerpts of past programs, stretching back to the late 1990’s. The electronic “vacuum cleaner” approach of NSA and GCHQ has been on the public record for years. In the 1990’s NSA, GCHQ and the ECHELON/Five Eyes network came under joint assault by Germany and the Free Congress Foundation. The latter is very close to Nazi alumni of the Third Reich, the OUN/B in particular, and is an element deeply involved in projecting the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations back into the former U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. GOP bigwig Grover Norquist has been a vociferous opponent of NSA spying, as well as shepherding Muslim Brotherhood-linked elements in the United States. Program Highlights Include: Mr. Emory’s first post on “L’Affaire Snowden,” in which he wondered aloud what all the fuss was about, since this has been on the public record for years; review of the fact that other European countries do the same thing as NSA/GCHQ; Review of Snowden’s views on Social Security: ” . . . Snowden wrote that the elderly ‘wouldn’t be fucking helpless if you weren’t sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day.’ ”
Analyzing the possibility that American use of Muslim Brotherhood Islamists as proxy warriors and armed heralds of corporatist free-market economic values might backfire on the United States, we look at the development of ISIS, the curious Turkish about-face on the Fetullah Gulen organization and fallout from the so-called “Arab Spring.” Beginning with discussion of a “doomsday” contingency plan concocted by al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to back each other up militarily in the event either or both were overthrown by the U.S., we examine the prominent role of former members of Saddam’s officer corps in administering ISIS. ISIS and al-Qaeda are holding forth in Libya, which is serving as a base for spreading their operations into Africa. Like the bloody Syrian civil war, the overthrow of Khadafy (which set the stage for the Islamist presence in Libya) is an outgrowth of the so-called “Arab Spring”–one of the “conga-line ops” we highlighted in FTR #885. Much of the program highlights the operations of the Fetullah Gulen organization in Turkey. Alleged to be a CIA front organization and Islamic extremist in nature, the Gulen organization was formerly an ally of Tayyip Erdogan. Now, it is among his most bitter opponents. Program Highlights Include: review of Hitler’s view that Islamists were a crucial Third Reich ally; review of a critical meeting in Switzerland at which prominent Euro-fascists and al-Taqwa director Ahmed Huber met; speculation that the Swiss “Euro-fascist” summit may have helped generate the intelligence disinformation that helped lure the Bush administration into the ill-advised Iraq war; “ex” CIA officer Graham Fuller’s ridicule of the allegation that the Gulen organization is a CIA front organization; the close connections between Erdogan’s AKP Party, Germany and the EU.
For most of this decade, Mr. Emory has analyzed an overlapping series of “ops” that have determined much of contemporary political reality. At the epicenter of this dynamic is the Earth Island. “The Earth Island Boogie” embraces an overlapping series of “ops” including: the so-called “Orange Revolution” of Ukraine, WikiLeaks, the so-called “Arab Spring,” “L’Affaire Snowden” and the Maidan coup of 2014. ISIS is a direct outgrowth of the so-called “Arab Spring.” This broadcast presents a detailed overview of “the conga-line ‘ops,'” featuring links to key text excerpts providing longer analysis of these dynamics.
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