Reblogged from http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/06/18/309609/how-to-identify-cia-limited-hangout-op/
American technical contractor and former CIA employee Edward Snowden (file photo)
Tue Jun 18, 2013 8:45AM GMT
By Dr. Webster G. Tarpley
The
operations of secret intelligence agencies aiming at the manipulation
of public opinion generally involve a combination of cynical deception
with the pathetic gullibility of the targeted populations.
There is ample reason to believe that the case of Edward Joseph
Snowden fits into this pattern. We are likely dealing here with a
limited hangout operation, in which carefully selected and falsified
documents and other materials are deliberately revealed by an insider
who pretends to be a fugitive rebelling against the excesses of some
oppressive or dangerous government agency.
But the revelations turn out to have been prepared with a view to
shaping the public consciousness in a way which is advantageous to the
intelligence agency involved. At the same time, gullible young people
can be duped into supporting a personality cult of the leaker, more
commonly referred to as a “whistleblower.” A further variation on the
theme can be the attempt of the sponsoring intelligence agency to
introduce their chosen conduit, now posing as a defector, into the
intelligence apparatus of a targeted foreign government. In this case,
the leaker or whistleblower attains the status of a triple agent.
Any attempt to educate public opinion about the dynamics of limited
hangout operations inevitably collides with the residue left in the
minds of millions by recent successful examples of this technique. It
will be hard for many to understand Snowden, precisely because they will
insist on seeing him as the latest courageous example in a line of
development which includes Daniel Ellsberg and Julian Assange, both
still viewed by large swaths of naïve opinion as authentic challengers
of oppressive government.
This is because the landmark limited hangout operation at the
beginning of the current post-Cold War era was that of Daniel Ellsberg
and the Pentagon papers, which laid the groundwork for the CIA’s
Watergate attack on the Nixon administration, and more broadly, on the
office of the presidency itself. More recently, we have had the case of
Assange and Wikileaks. Using these two cases primarily, we can develop
a simple typology of the limited hangout operation which can be of
significant value to those striving to avoid the role of useful idiots
amidst the current cascade of whistleblowers and limited hangout
artists.
In this analysis, we should also recall that limited hangouts have
been around for a very long time. In 1620 Fra Paolo Sarpi, the dominant
figure of the Venetian intelligence establishment of his time, advised
the Venetian senate that the best way to defeat anti-Venetian propaganda
was indirectly. He recommended the method of saying something good
about a person or institution while pretending to say something bad. An
example might be criticizing a bloody dictator for beating his dog -
the real dimensions of his crimes are thus totally underplayed.
Limited hangout artists are instant media darlings
The most obvious characteristic of the limited hangout operative is
that he or she immediately becomes the darling of the controlled
corporate media. In the case of Daniel Ellsberg, his doctored set of
Pentagon papers were published by the New York Times, the Washington
Post, the Boston Globe, and eventually by a consortium totaling
seventeen corporate newspapers. These press organs successfully argued
the case for publication all the way to the United States Supreme Court,
where they prevailed against the Nixon administration.
Needless to say, surviving critics of the Warren Commission, and
more recent veterans of the 9/11 truth movement, and know very well that
this is emphatically not the treatment reserved for messengers whose
revelations are genuinely unwelcome to the Wall Street centered US
ruling class. These latter are more likely to be slandered, vilified
and dragged through the mud, or, even more likely, passed over in
complete silence and blacked out. In extreme cases, they can be
kidnapped, renditioned or liquidated.
Cass Sunstein present at the creation of Wikileaks
As for Assange and Wikileaks, the autumn 2010 document dump was
farmed out in advance to five of the most prestigious press organs in
the world, including the New York Times, the London Guardian, El Pais of
Madrid, Der Spiegel of Hamburg, and Le Monde of Paris. This was the
Assange media cartel, made up of papers previously specialized in
discrediting 9/11 critics and doubters.
But even before the document
dumps had begun, Wikileaks had received a preemptive endorsement from
none other than the notorious totalitarian Cass Sunstein, later an
official of the Obama White House, and today married to Samantha Power,
the author of the military coup that overthrew Mubarak and currently
Obama’s pick for US ambassador to the United Nations.
Sunstein is
infamous for his thesis that government agencies should conduct covert
operations using pseudo-independent agents of influence for the
“cognitive infiltration of extremist groups” - meaning of those who
reject in the establishment view of history and reality. Sunstein’s
article entitled “Brave New WikiWorld” was published in the Washington
Post of February 24, 2007, and touted the capabilities of Wikileaks for
the destabilization of China. Perhaps the point of Ed Snowden’s
presence in Hong Kong is to begin re-targeting these capabilities back
towards the original anti-Chinese plan.
Snowden has already become a media celebrity of the
first magnitude. His career was launched by the US left liberal Glenn
Greenwald, now writing for the London Guardian, which expresses the
viewpoints of the left wing of the British intelligence community.
Thus, the current scandal is very much Made in England, and may benefit
from inputs from the British GCHQ of Cheltenham, the Siamese twin of the
NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. During the days of his media debut, it
was not uncommon to see a controlled press organ like CNN dedicating one
third of every broadcast hour of air time to the birth, life, and
miracles of Ed Snowden.
Another suspicious and tell-tale endorsement for Snowden comes from
the former State Department public diplomacy asset Norman Solomon.
Interviewed on RT, Solomon warmly embraced the Snowden Project and
assured his viewers that the NSA material dished up by the Hong Kong
defector used reliable and authentic. Solomon was notorious ten years
ago as a determined enemy of 9/11 truth, acting as a border guard in
favor of the Bush administration/neocon theory of terrorism.
Limited hangouts contain little that is new
Another important feature of the limited hangout operation if that
the revelations often contain nothing new, but rather repackage old wine
in new bottles. In the case of Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, very little
was revealed which was not already well known to a reader of Le Monde
or the dispatches of Agence France Presse. Only those whose
understanding of world affairs had been filtered through the Associated
Press, CBS News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post found any
of Ellsberg’s material a surprise.
Of course, there was method in Ellsberg’s madness. The Pentagon
papers allegedly derived from an internal review of the decision-making
processes leading to the Vietnam War, conducted after 1967-68 under the
supervision of Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb.
Ellsberg, then a young
RAND Corporation analyst and militant warmonger, was associated with
this work. Upon examination, we find that the Pentagon papers tend to
cover up such CIA crimes as the mass murder mandated under Operation
Phoenix, and the massive CIA drug running associated with the
proprietary airline Air America. Rather, when atrocities are in
question, the US Army generally receives the blame. Politicians in
general, and President John F. Kennedy in particular, are portrayed in a
sinister light - one might say demonized. No insights whatever into
the Kennedy assassination are offered. This was a smelly concoction,
and it was not altogether excluded that the radicalized elements of the
Vietnam era might have carried the day in denouncing the entire package
as a rather obvious fabrication.
But a clique around Noam Chomsky and
Howard Zinn loudly intervened to praise the quality of the exposé and to
lionize Ellsberg personally as a new culture hero for the Silent
Generation. From that moment on, the careers of Chomsky and Zinn
soared. Pentagon papers skeptics, like the satirical comedian Mort
Sahl, a supporter of the Jim Garrison investigation in New Orleans and a
critic of the Warren Commission, faced the marginalization of their
careers.
Notice also that the careers of Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb
positively thrived after they entrusted the Pentagon papers to Ellsberg,
who revealed them. Ellsberg was put on trial in 1973, but all charges
were dismissed after several months because of prosecutorial misconduct.
Assange lived like a lord for many months in the palatial country
house of an admirer in the East of England, and is now holed up in the
Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He spent about 10 days in jail in
December 2010.
Assange first won credibility for Wikileaks with some
chum in the form of a shocking film showing a massacre perpetrated by US
forces in Iraq with the aid of drones. The massacre itself and the
number of victims were already well known, so Assange was adding only
the graphic emotional impact of witnessing the atrocity firsthand.
Limited hangouts reveal nothing about big issues like JFK, 9/11
Over the past century, there are certain large-scale covert
operations which cast a long historical shadow, determining to some
extent the framework in which subsequent events occur. These include
the Sarajevo assassinations of 1914, the assassination of Rasputin in
late 1916, Mussolini’s 1922 march on Rome, Hitler’s seizure of power in
1933, the assassination of French Foreign Minister Barthou in 1934, the
assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, in 1963
Kennedy assassination, and 9/11. A common feature of the limited
hangout operations is that they offer almost no insights into these
landmark events.
In the Pentagon Papers, the Kennedy assassination is virtually a
nonexistent event about which we learn nothing. As already noted, the
principal supporters of Ellsberg were figures like Chomsky, whose
hostility to JFK and profound disinterest in critiques of the Warren
Commission were well-known. As for Assange, he rejects any further
clarification of 9/11. In July 2010, Assange told Matthew Bell of the
Belfast Telegraph: “I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by
false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of
real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.” This is on top of
Cass Sunstein’s demand for active covert measures to suppress and
disrupt inquiries into operations like 9/11. Snowden’s key backers
Glenn Greenwald and Norman Solomon have both compiled impressive records
of evasion on 9/11 truth, with Greenwald specializing in the blowback
theory.
The Damascus road conversions of limited hangout figures
Daniel Ellsberg started his career as a nuclear strategist of the
Dr. Strangelove type working for the RAND Corporation. He worked in the
Pentagon as an aide to US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He
then went to Vietnam, where he served as a State Department civilian
assistant to CIA General Edward Lansdale. In 1967, he was back at RAND
to begin the preparation of what would come to be known as the Pentagon
papers. Ellsberg has claimed that his Damascus Road conversion from
warmonger to peace angel occurred when he heard a speech from a
prison-bound draft resister at Haverford College in August 1969. After a
mental breakdown, Ellsberg began taking his classified documents to the
office of Senator Edward Kennedy and ultimately to the New York Times.
Persons who believe this fantastic story may be suffering from terminal
gullibility.
In the case of Assange, it is harder to identify such a moment of
conversion. Assange spent his childhood in the coils of MK Ultra, a
complex of Anglo-American covert operations designed to investigate and
implement mind control through the use of psychopharmaca and other
means. Assange was a denizen of the Ann Hamilton-Byrne cult, in which
little children that were subjected to aversive therapy involving LSD
and other heavy-duty drugs. Assange spent his formative years as a
wandering nomad with his mother incognito because of her involvement in a
custody dispute. The deracinated Assange lived in 50 different towns
and attended 37 different schools. By the age of 16, the young nihilist
was active as a computer hacker using the screen name “Mendax,” meaning
quite simply “The Liar.” (Assange’s clone Snowden uses the more
marketable codename of “Verax,” the truth teller.) Some of Assange’s
first targets were Nortel and US Air Force offices in the Pentagon.
Assange’s chief mentor became John Young of Cryptome, who in 2007
denounced Wikileaks as a CIA front.
Snowden’s story, as widely reported, goes like this: he dropped out
of high school and also dropped out of a community college, but
reportedly was nevertheless later able to command a salary of between
$120,000 and $200,000 per year; he claims this is because he is a
computer wizard. He enlisted in the US Army in May 2004, and allegedly
hoped to join the special forces and contribute to the fight for freedom
in Iraq. He then worked as a low-level security guard for the National
Security Agency, and then went on to computer security at the CIA,
including a posting under diplomatic cover in Switzerland.
He moved on
to work as a private contractor for the NSA at a US military base in
Japan. His last official job was for the NSA at the Kunia Regional
SIGINT Operations Center in Hawaii. In May 2013, he is alleged to have
been granted medical leave from the NSA in Hawaii to get treatment for
epilepsy. He fled to Hong Kong, and made his revelations with the help
of Greenwald and a documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. Snowden voted
for the nominally anti-war, ultra-austerity “libertarian” presidential
candidate Ron Paul, and gave several hundred dollars to Paul’s campaign.
Snowden, like Ellsberg, thus started off as a warmonger but later
became more concerned with the excesses of the Leviathan state. Like
Assange, he was psychologically predisposed to the world of computers
and cybernetics. The Damascus Road shift from militarist to civil
libertarian remains unexplained and highly suspicious.
Snowden is also remarkable for the precision of his timing. His
first revelations, open secrets though they were, came on June 5,
precisely today when the rebel fortress of Qusayr was liberated by the
Syrian army and Hezbollah. At this point, the British and French
governments were screaming at Obama that it was high time to attack
Syria. The appearance of Snowden’s somewhat faded material in the London
Guardian was the trigger for a firestorm of criticism against the Obama
regime by the feckless US left liberals, who were thus unwittingly
greasing the skids for a US slide into a general war in the Middle East.
More recently, Snowden came forward with allegations that the US and
the British had eavesdropped on participants in the meeting of the G-20
nations held in Britain four years ago. This obviously put Obama on the
defensive just as Cameron and Hollande were twisting his arm to start
the Syrian adventure. By attacking the British GCHQ at Cheltenham,
Britain’s equivalent to the NSA, perhaps Snowden was also seeking to
obfuscate the obvious British sponsorship of his revelations.
Stories about Anglo Americans spying on high profile guests are as
old as the hills, and have included a British frogman who attempted an
underwater investigation of the Soviet cruiser that brought party leader
N. S. Khrushchev for a visit in the 1950s. Snowden has also accused
the NSA of hacking targets in China -- again, surely no surprise to
experienced observers, but guaranteed to increase Sino-American
tensions. As time passes, Snowden may emerge as more and more of a
provocateur between Washington and Beijing.
Limited hangouts prepare large covert operations
Although, as we have seen, limited hangouts rarely illuminate the
landmark covert operations which attempt to define an age, limited
hangouts themselves do represent the preparation for future covert
operations.
In the case of the Pentagon papers, this and other leaks during the
Indo-Pakistani Tilt crisis were cited by Henry Kissinger in his demand
that President Richard Nixon take countermeasures to restore the
integrity of state secrets. Nixon foolishly authorized the creation of a
White House anti-leak operation known as the Plumbers. The
intelligence community made sure that the Plumbers operation was staffed
by their own provocateurs, people who never were loyal to Nixon but
rather took their orders from Langley. Here we find the already
infamous CIA agent Howard Hunt, the CIA communications expert James
McCord, and the FBI operative G. Gordon Liddy.
These provocateurs took
special pains to get arrested during an otherwise pointless break-in at
the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the summer of
1972. Nixon could easily have disavowed the Plumbers and thrown this
gaggle of agent provocateurs to the wolves, but he instead launched a
cover up. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, equipped with a top
secret security clearance from the Office of Naval Intelligence, then
began publicizing the story. The rest is history, and the lasting
heritage has been a permanent weakening of the office of the presidency
and the strengthening of the worst oligarchical tendencies.
Assange’s Wikileaks document dump triggered numerous
destabilizations and coups d’état across the globe. Not one US,
British, or Israeli covert operation or politician was seriously damaged
by this material. The list of those impacted instead bears a striking
resemblance to the CIA enemies’ list: the largest group of targets were
Arab leaders slated for immediate ouster in the wave of “Arab Spring.”
Here we find Ben Ali of Tunisia, Qaddafi of Libya, Mubarak of Egypt,
Saleh of Yemen, and Assad of Syria.
The US wanted to replace Maliki with
Allawi as prime minister of Iraq, so the former was targeted, as was
the increasingly independent Karzai of Afghanistan. Perennial targets
of the CIA included Rodriguez Kirchner of Argentina, Berlusconi of
Italy, and Putin of Russia. Berlusconi soon fell victim to a coup
organized through the European Central Bank, while his friend Putin was
able to stave off a feeble attempt at color revolution in early 2012.
Mildly satiric jabs at figures like Merkel of Germany and Sarkozy of
France were included primarily as camouflage.
Assange thus had a hand in preparing one of the largest
destabilization campaigns mounted by Anglo-American intelligence since
1968, or perhaps even 1848.
If the Snowden operation can help coerce the vacillating and
reluctant Obama to attack Syria, our new autistic hero may claim credit
for starting a general war in the Middle East, and perhaps even more.
If Snowden can further poison relations between United States and China,
the world historical significance of his provocations will be doubly
assured. But none of this can occur unless he finds vast legions of
eager dupes ready to fall for his act. We hope he won’t.
WT/HN
Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley
was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1946. A philosopher of history,
Tarpley seeks to provide the strategies needed to overcome the current
world crisis. He first became widely known for his book
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992),
a masterpiece of research which is still a must read. During 2008, he
warned of the dangers of an Obama presidency controlled by Wall Street
with
Obama: The Postmodern Coup, The Making of a Manchurian Candidate and
Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography. His interest in economics is reflected in
Surviving the Cataclysm: Your Guide Through the Worst Financial Crisis in Human History Against Oligarchy.
His books have appeared in Japanese, German, Italian, French, and
Spanish. Tarpley holds a Ph.D. in early modern history from the Catholic
University of America.
More articles by Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley
