Following is a slightly edited excerpt from The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and The World (Clarity Press, 2016). Ryan Dawson is Webmaster and host for www.ANCreport.com which features podcasts on politics and economics with professionals from around the world. He interviewed Mr. Valentine in May 2014.
*****Ryan Dawson: This is Ryan Dawson of the ANC Report. With me today is Doug Valentine. I’m going to be asking him tonight about the CIA’s role in Ukraine and in infiltrating the media. Mr. Valentine, it’s a pleasure to have you back on the show.
Douglas Valentine: It’s my pleasure, thank you.
RD: I want to ask you about this organization working with NGOs in the Ukraine. It’s called United Action Centre. I want to read something short from their page and get your thoughts. It says:
The NGO Centre UA has a strong professional human potential. The team has experience running projects in the sphere of European and EuroAtlantic integration. At the same time, the Centre UA consists of experts and activists who have experience in journalism, public service, PR, public activities, et cetera. Also, the Centre UA has an extensive database of contacts with international experts, politicians, and journalists. At the moment, The Centre UA is the coordinator of the New Citizen’s Public Campaign which brings together around 40 NGOs.
We know from the Carl Bernstein report on the media how much the CIA has infiltrated the media. Could you give your thoughts about Centre UA and what they’re doing there with 40 NGOs, supposedly to promote democracy and have activists and experienced journalists working together?
DV: The Centre UA is the organization that Pierre Omidyar co-funded two years ago. Center UA is an umbrella organization that is linked to various activist projects and NGOs,1 one of which is the New Citizen campaign which, according to the Financial Times, “played a big role in getting the protest up and running.”2
In fact, according to the Kyivpost, the “Center UA received more than $500,000 in 2012,… 54 percent of which came from Pact Inc., a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Nearly 36 percent came from Omidyar Network, a foundation established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife. Other donors include the International Renaissance Foundation, whose key funder is billionaire George Soros, and the National Endowment for Democracy, funded largely by the U.S. Congress.”1
Why did Omidyar prove willing to come on board with such known regime-change sponsors as USAID and NED – to say nothing of Soros? Where else is he [co]operating? It should never be forgotten that this is the kind of company he keeps. Why?
While Omidyar was born in Paris and his parents moved to Maryland when he was young, he appears to be of Iranian descent. His mother was a Farsi linguist and as of 2016, was president of the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute. As bizarre as it may seem, little information is publicly available about his father, including his name. He apparently was a urologist or surgeon at John Hopkins, and if that was the case, his name should be available. The secrecy suggests some sort of intelligence connection, perhaps to the type of upper class émigré circles the CIA cultivates in America. It is a fact that the CIA station in Iran served as one of the Agency’s main bases for agent operations against the Soviets. The CIA and MOSSAD created SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious internal political security service, and the Shah in turn gave the CIA a free hand to run operations against the Soviets.
Maybe Pierre Omidyar is accessible to US foreign policy agencies due to some prior family connections. Maybe that accounts for why he spent a few hundred thousand dollars (a paltry sum for a billionaire) to help put the Centre UA in place in the Ukraine: so the CIA could run operations against the Russians, like it did out of Iran. I’ve never heard any explanation from inquisitive Glenn Greenwald. When it comes to his sugar daddy’s monkey business, Greenwald’s policy is “see no, hear no, speak no evil.” Why? Is that the quid pro quo for the handout?
What I do know is that billionaires like Omidyar and Soros and the Rockefellers – to say nothing of USAID and NED – aren’t funding political action out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re doing it to advance their interests. That’s why an organization like Centre UA is created: to advance the interests of its financial backers. To me it looks like a CIA-facilitated mechanism to create a crisis in Ukraine and exploit it. The 40 NGOs it coordinates are perfectly placed to provide cover for covert CIA political action.
The Centre UA must have a tech team. Let’s say, hypothetically, this tech team is a CIA proprietary which, for purposes of plausible deniability, the CIA staffed with consultants (as opposed to on-the-books employees) from a third country. Maybe the consultants are professional underworld Guccifer-style hackers, and the CIA has provided them with fully back-stopped fake identities. Maybe the hackers subvert governments for hire. Given its cutting-edge technology, the CIA’s new Digital Directorate could easily run such a mercenary tech team without ever being discovered. Maybe the team organizes color revolutions and resistance movements in nations like Ukraine, using CIA-supplied intelligence to expose official corruption, infiltrate and subvert security forces, and even deploy and direct private militias in a national emergency in places like Donetsk. Maybe it’s the CIA’s equivalent of Mr. Robot’s Dark Army.
Given the CIA’s history of placing its officers under commercial cover, one might plausibly wonder if this applies to members of Omidyar’s private tech security team as well. His enterprise reportedly invested in InnoCentive, a company that markets crowd sourcing technology. The CIA’s venture capital firm, IN-Q-TEL, also invested in InnoCentive. So a business connection may already be there too.
All that is speculation, of course, but the Centre UA does, in fact, coordinate politicians and journalists with experts on international affairs and public relations. It says so on its website. All these people are involved in managing information; maybe they’re linked on a private server like Hillary Clinton used while secretary of state. It will have occurred to the political and psywar experts in the CIA’s digital Dark Army that they could easily garner public support for their color revolutions by creating websites that unite and direct people; that they could manipulate potential rebels using the same, albeit updated “motivational indoctrination” methods people like (US Information Service officer) Frank Scotton pioneered in Vietnam.3
The Centre UA’s public relations experts certainly guide pro-American candidates in Kiev the same way American PR people manipulated Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. As is well known, Yeltsin gave away the store after he became President of the Russian Federation. In the same way the CIA promoted Yeltsin, Centre UA journalists certainly make sure that pro-American politicians get favorable press. They spin the facts in such a way that Omidyar, who has made their operation possible, will be happy.
The Centre UA’s stated purpose was to pull Ukraine out of the Russian orbit and deliver it to Western corporations. And that’s what happened, along with the obligatory political payoffs. Indeed, a few short years after Centre UA was established, Vice President Joe Biden’s son joined the board of directors of the largest Ukraine gas producer Burisma Holdings. Hunter Biden heads Burisma’s legal department and liaises with international organizations.
The book Flashpoint in Ukraine4 provides ample evidence that the Obama regime and its privateering corporate partners overthrew the pro-Russian Ukraine government and installed a government packed with neo-Nazis and American elites. They did this for their own enrichment, and yet the US media never made it an issue. It’s business as usual. The average Ukrainian citizen doesn’t benefit; just the “super-predator” American elite who organized the coup. It’s amazing to behold.
Biden’s smash and grab operation occurred in 2014. In 2016, another super-predator, Natalie Jaresko, took control of Datagroup, the company that controls Ukraine’s telecom market. Jaresko at one time held a top job at the State Department coordinating trade and commerce agencies that dealt with the former Soviet Union, including the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Check her out on Wikipedia. She’s a part of the global elite: the IMF/World Bank /European Bank for Reconstruction and Development network. In the Clinton Administration she served as Chief of the Economics Section of the US Embassy in Ukraine, and helped paved the way for the coup d’état that occurred there 20 years later. These coups take years to organize. Many more are planned.
Jaresko acquired Ukrainian citizenship on the same day as her appointment as Minister of Finance of Ukraine in 2014, at which point she squeezed her competitor, the owner of Datagroup, out of business using the kind of foreign currency loan debt scam favored by Mafia hoods and economic hitmen. That’s how freewheeling capitalists work: they overload targeted nations and business people with debt and then clean them out. Again, not a word of protest from the mainstream media: it’s non-political “free trade” in action.
The CIA plays a central but secret role in these schemes, doing the illegal but plausibly deniable things that require high tech espionage and underworld assets – reaching into a nation’s secret police files or using private investigators to get dirt on people, then setting them up and blackmailing them. These kinds of subversion operations can’t be done publicly by the likes of Biden or Jaresko or their PR people. Foreign shakedowns have to be done secretly through the criminal underworld, and that’s where the CIA comes into play.
Other times the media plays the central role. In the US, for example, people win elections through negative campaigning. The Democratic Party hires investigators to get dirt on Republican candidates. Republicans do the same thing. The truth doesn’t matter because events are happening instantaneously. Hyperbole becomes fact before anyone can respond. Senator Elizabeth Warren reportedly claimed to be part Native American in her application to Harvard, and once she started campaigning for Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump called her “Pocahontas” every chance he got. There are all sorts of ways, within the eternal present of spectacular domination, of influencing events through manufactured scandals and misrepresentations without it being illegal or secret. It just requires celebrity status, a Twitter account, and the attention of the networks of information control.
As Guy Debord said long before the internet in his book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, “One aspect of the disappearance of all objective historical knowledge can be seen in the way that individual reputations have become malleable and alterable at will by those who control all information: information which is gathered and also – an entirely different matter – information which is broadcast. Their ability to falsify is thus unlimited.”
Anyone can be smeared, and apart from the unknown Protected Few in the CIA and National Security Establishment, there’s no defense. Overseas, the CIA is perpetually collecting information on adversaries like Vladimir Putin and passing it along to the Western media, which rejoices in spinning it a million different ways.
What is less well known is the CIA is engaged in tipping the balance in the domestic as well as international contests. That’s why it’s secret, and why all the corporate privateers protect it. They share the same business ideology. CIA officers, PR people, journalists, politicians, and academics who get paid to give “expert” testimony on Fox or MSNBC, are knowingly manipulating social and political movements here in the US, just like they do for the Ukrainian opposition or the Venezuelan opposition.
The CIA sets up Twitter accounts and Facebook pages and social websites to move people into mass organizations to achieve its secret ends. In May 2016 Twitter “cut off U.S. intelligence agencies from a service that sifts through the entire output of Twitter’s social media postings.”5 The guilty party was the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise, which contracted with a private contractor, Dataminr, through the CIA’s ubiquitous venture capital fund In-Q-Tel, to spy on American citizens. Such super-secret “intelligence” operations are frequently used as cover for highly illegal “offensive counterintelligence” operations.
RD: We saw the National Endowment for Democracy, which is totally CIA, at the forefront in the Ukraine. But why does the CIA need so many NGOs as middlemen? What is their purpose for having 40 different non-governmental organizations?
DV: I’ll give you an example. When the CIA moved into Vietnam, which had a culture the US hadn’t dealt with before, the first thing it did was buy a lot of property. This was during the First Indochina War and they did this clandestinely, through cut-outs, so they’d have safe houses to set up organizations later on. It’s always best for them to buy real estate during times of crisis when prices are down. Like Trump always says, “Buy low.” And when are prices lowest? As Baron Rothschild famously said, “When there’s blood in the streets.”
The CIA bought huge tracts of property in Saigon in between 1952 and 1955, during the First Indochina War, when there was blood on the streets. The CIA bought prime property at ten percent of its value. That’s the first step – get your nose in the tent. These buildings served as places where CIA officers could meet their agents and plot dirty deeds. They passed some to NGOs and civil organizations to operate.
William Colby introduced me to one of his cohorts, Clyde Bauer, the CIA officer who ran Air America in Vietnam in the early days. Bauer told me he set up South Vietnam’s Foreign Relations Council, Chamber of Commerce and Lions Club, “to create a strong civil base.” That’s what the CIA is doing in Ukraine through the Centre UA. It’s creating a pro-American civil base, from which political candidates emerge.
The CIA influences politics in foreign nations in many ways. CIA officers are constantly funneling money to all political parties, right and left, and establishing long-range agents to monitor and manipulate political developments. That’s standard operating procedure.
The next thing the CIA does is seize control of a nation’s secret services. That’s what they did in Vietnam, and in Ukraine. As I’ve explained elsewhere, they offer training and high tech gadgetry to people in the secret services; they corrupt them and use them for their own purposes, like they used SAVAK in Iran. It’s highly illegal to suborn officials in foreign nations. We don’t like it when it’s done to us, and it’s not something even an influential billionaire like Omidyar is trained to do (although his private security force is probably staffed by former CIA officers or FBI agents who do know how to do it).
The CIA infiltrates all the political parties and as soon as a politician they own is in place, right or left, they can elevate him or her to Defense Minister or Interior Minister. These ministers are on the CIA payroll and appoint military, security and police officials who do the CIA’s bidding. The CIA tries to place its people throughout the captive nation’s government and civil society. In South America they recruit junior military officers via the School of the Americas (now innocuously renamed) and when the time is right, have them stage a coup with the support of all the other people they’re been cultivating for years, sometimes decades.6
US corporations need the CIA to help put these parallel governments in place. The CIA penetrates the military and security services, and simultaneously creates a civil base through deniable organizations like Centre for UA. This is how societies are ruled when there’s no overwhelming popular support: through the ownership of property and by having the proper people in government and civic institutions. The CIA recruits people in place, someone like union leader Lech Walesa in Poland.
Often the people running the unions are on the CIA payroll; people running the education system too, someone like preacher Fethullah Gülen in Turkey. The CIA can recruit these people because it has so much money. The Russians can’t compete, when billionaires like Soros are sprinkling a million here and five million there – money that goes into building civic institutions that are ideologically attuned. Whether people do it for love or money, or belief of a brighter future, the CIA is manipulating the social and political processes. Its officers and their agents are recruiting people and putting them in place, having them sign contracts that effectively say, “In exchange for working for us in advancing our interests here in Kiev you will get $100,000 in a Swiss bank account and your life will be rosy.”
It’s illegal. It’s treasonous. You can’t take money from a foreign intelligence agency and work against your own country, but that is what the CIA is doing in the Ukraine right now and around the world on a massive scale.
For reviews of Douglas Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime. read:
- As cited in Chris dePloeg, Ukraine in the Crossfire, Clarity Press, Inc., 2017.
- R. Olearchyk, (2013, December 14). Ukraine: Inside the pro-EU protest camp. Cited in dePloeg, Ukraine in the Crossfire.
- Scotton’s psychological operations are described in detail elsewhere in the book.
- Stephen Lendman, ed., Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2014.
- Eamon Javers, “Why Twitter chose to do battle with the CIA”, CNBC, 13 May 2016.
- See Chapter 4 of CIA as Organized Crime: The Systematic Gathering of Intelligence.