II: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SYNTHETIC TERRORISM
And yet the entire Republic is shaken and disconcerted by these seditious provocations, and precisely by the action of those who should have been the first to prevent them….
-- Sallust
The original title for this section was “the theory and practice of state-sponsored, false-flag, synthetic terrorism. Instead, I have let “synthetic terrorism” sum up this entire concept. In any political system which relies to even a small extent for its continued existence on the consent of the governed, some form of popular legitimation is necessary. But what happens when the wars, policies and institutional changes desired by the ruling elite cannot be understood or supported by the vast majority of the citizens? What happens if the oligarchical nature of the system endows it with such inertia that it cannot be motivated to act in the way in which the most powerful oligarchical factions desire? Under these conditions, especially if the political and economic systems are in crisis, state sponsored terrorism may emerge. Here we are not describing the way in which statesmen, generals and intelligence officers ought to act; we are describing the way in which they have acted and continue to act. What we offer here can be thought of as a theory of synthetic terrorism. This terrorism is synthetic because it brings together the efforts of a number of disparate components: patsies, moles, professionals, media, and controllers. It is also synthetic in the sense that it is artificial: it does not grow up spontaneously out of despair and oppression, but is rather the product of an effort of organization and direction in which factions of government play an indispensable role.
We are not offering erudite scholarship isolated from public affairs, but an active intervention against the ongoing attempt to build an entire international system on a monstrous falsehood.
We must stress the idea that the vast majority of international terrorism conducted on a spectacular scale is indeed state-sponsored terrorism. This does not mean that such terrorism is sponsored by the entire government, down to the last GS-4 clerical worker doing data entry for the Social Security Administration. It does mean that a faction or network of the government uses its access to the levers of power to promote the terrorist action in various ways. In Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the Arab and Islamic world today, there have been deluded and naïve individuals and institutions who have somehow associated large-scale international terrorism with revolutionary or progressive change, or with the establishment of international justice. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the Italian left of the 1970s and the German left of the same period sympathized with the Red Brigades or the Baader-Meinhof group/Red Army faction, they only showed their own stupidity, since both of these terrorist operations were created by and controlled by NATO intelligence. Similarly, any Arab who feels sympathy for al Qaeda needs to be forcefully reminded that al Qaeda was created by the CIA and continues to be steered by the CIA, through various cut-outs and mediations. Terrorism, which was advertised as a desperate aid to oppressed peoples, has most often had the opposite effect: the attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, the first spectacular blowing up of airliners, the Achille Lauro – these were actions which set the Palestinian cause back 20 years.
Terrorism in the modern era is the means by which oligarchies wage secret wars against the people, under conditions in which it would be politically impossible to wage the same war openly. Oligarchy, in turn, always has one and the same political program, which has not changed since the time of Thucydides, Plato and the writer that classical historians call The Old Oligarch: the purpose and program of oligarchy is to perpetuate oligarchy. The specific political and economic form of the oligarchy is much less important. The nomenklatura of the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was supposedly based on state property of the means of production, the primacy of the Communist Party, and Marxist ideology, but they proved more than willing to throw all that out the window when they realized that their oligarchical status and special privilege could not be preserved under communist auspices. Having understood this, the Soviet oligarchs were eager to transform themselves into stockjobbers, speculators, profiteers, and young wolves (as Zhirinovsky put it) under the auspices of wild laissez-faire capitalism. What was important to them was to preserve their status as an oligarchy. This is an important lesson, since it shows that we must be deeply suspicious of the ruling elite of the United States, which is of course also an oligarchy, but an oligarchy which operates behind the mask of democratic institutions and formal democracy. The experience of the USSR suggests that the US oligarchy will be more than willing to trade in its democratic costumes for a bureaucratic-authoritarian or even totalitarian garb if the democratic forms prove to be impossible to maintain, most likely because of financial and economic difficulties.
The naive view of terrorism is that it grows up directly out of oppression, economic misery, and political despair. Oppressed and exploited people, or those who have been colonized by a foreign power, come together spontaneously in ones and twos, create an organization, and after a certain time of preparation go over to armed struggle against their oppressors or occupiers. But this is the rarest of exceptions.
This view pays no attention to the most important institutional actor in the world of terrorism – secret intelligence agencies like CIA, FBI, NSA, KGB, Stasi, MI-6, and the rest. Secret intelligence agencies are institutions in which the very essence of oligarchy is at work. Secret intelligence agencies in their modern forms go back to the Republic of Venice, which was famous for its intelligence directorate, the Council of Ten, and its pervasive network of spies, informers, and provocateurs. And the Republic of Venice was the longest-lasting oligarchical system in world history. Despite their cultural differences, all of these secret intelligence agencies are fundamentally alike. Terrorism generally starts within these secret agencies, or nowadays more likely in their privatized tentacles – as for example the intelligence community in the United States has existed since President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333.
Secret intelligence agencies are fatalists to the extent that they regard all large-scale sociological and political changes as inevitable. As soon as they identify a new phenomenon which they have not yet penetrated, their only thought is how to infiltrate their agents and assets into it, so they can steer it or influence it when the time comes. Whenever the leaders of intelligence agencies see a train leaving the station, their only thought is to climb on board, quite irrespective of the destination, as Gen. Paul Albert Scherer, the former head of West Germany’s Military Counter- intelligence (Militärischer Abschirmdienst) and one of the greatest experts in this field, assured me some years back. This applies to terrorist groups most emphatically. Here the attention of the secret intelligence agencies is so strongly focused that their task is most often that of founding, and much more seldom that of infiltrating and taking over some group which already exists.
The world of secret intelligence agencies is a realm of falsehood, camouflage, deception, violence, unspeakable cruelty, treachery, and betrayal. It is the most desolate and grim sector of human endeavor, where no human values can subsist. It knows neither hope nor mercy nor redemption. It is the one area of human life where Hobbes’s maxim holds true – it is the war of all against all. But not as chaos – as an ultimately controlled phenomenon which serves the goal of preserving the state power that the intelligence agencies serve. During the Cold War, the conflict of CIA, MI-6, SDECE, KGB, BND, Stasi and the rest was called the wilderness of mirrors, a desert populated by agents, double agents, triple agents, multiple agents, their case officers, their counterintelligence opponents, and the omnipresent specialists in mokrie dela – wetwork, or assassinations, as the KGB described them.
We start from the strong presumption that terrorism is therefore an activity which is controlled by a faction of government, probably acting under the influence of financier factions which are generally the ultimate source of authority in the globalized universe after 1991. Terrorism cannot be described as a spontaneous sociological phenomenon, as the old saying goes – it must rather be seen as a phenomenon developed by sociologists, along with psychologists, profilers, psychiatrists, case officers, handlers, and cut-outs. For every terrorist and terrorist group in the field, an extensive bureaucratic support system is necessary. Spontaneous combustion is the last thing that should be expected.
This is an important point, to which we will return. The naïve or spontaneous theory of terrorism sees the terror group as sprouting up directly out of the compost of misery, poverty, and desperation. Our point here is that this explanation neglects the crucial, indispensable role of the secret intelligence agency, which is usually present at the creation of the terror group, or very soon thereafter. The well-known Indian author Arundhati Roy told the American Sociological Association in San Francisco on August 16, 2004 that “terrorism is the privatization of war” and that “terrorists are the free marketers of war.” These are striking formulations, but this does not prevent them from leading in the wrong direction. Synthetic terrorism remains very much under state control; it is only that the puppetmaster’s strings are well concealed from those who do not know what to look for, or who do not want to know. Thus, a CIA front corporation is not really part of the private sector – it is an emanation of Langley just as surely as the local station chief and his staff.
But it should also be clear that state sponsored terrorism cannot call itself by its own real name. It must necessarily masquerade as an authentic voice of the oppressed – be they Arabs, Moslems, workers, national minorities, or whatever. The terror groups cannot be labeled CIA or KGB – they must call themselves Red Brigades, Red Army faction, ETA, or al Qaeda. The false flag and false ideology allows the terror group to pretend that it is something that it is not, and to convince billions of naïve viewers of CNN or al Jazeera that the false dumb-show is indeed reality.
In the nineteenth century, the great headquarters of international terrorism was London. The defense of the empire required operations which the public decorum of the Victorian era could not openly avow. The main vehicle for British terrorist operations in Europe was Giuseppe Mazzini and his phalanx of organizations starting from Young Italy: Young Germany, Young France, Young Poland, Young Turkey, Young America. Mazzini was a paid agent of the British Admiralty, and received his funding through Admiralty official James Stansfeld. Mazzini’s terrorism was directed against what the British called “the arbitrary powers”: Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Each of these had a large population of oppressed nationalities, and Mazzini created a terrorist group for each one of them, often promising the same territory to two or more of his national sections. The important thing was that rulers and officials be assassinated, and bombs thrown. The net effect of all this can be gauged by the complaint of an Austrian about Mazzini’s operations in Italy: Mazzini aimed at making Italy turbulent, he lamented, which was bad for Austria, but without making Italy strong, which might be bad for the British. Mazzini operated out of London during his entire career, which simply means that he was officially sanctioned, as were anarchists like Bakunin and a whole tribe of nihilists. Mazzini worked well for Europe – including the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. For other parts of the world, the Admiralty had specialized operations.
State-sponsored terrorism can have a number of goals. One of these is to eliminate a politician, business leader. Back around 1500, Niccolò Machiavelli included a long chapter on conspiracies in his masterwork, The Discourses. For Machiavelli, a conspiracy meant an operation designed to assassinate the ruler of a state, and to take his place by seizing power. Modern terrorism is more subtle: by eliminating a leading politician, it seeks to change the policy direction of the government that politician was leading. The paradox here is that a faction or network penetrating the state sometimes undertakes the elimination of the head of state or head of government, and often a very eminent and beloved one.
A good example is the French Fifth Republic under President Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle would not accept the demand of the US and UK to dictate policy to France as a member of the Atlantic Alliance. De Gaulle took France out of the NATO supernational command, ejected the NATO headquarters from its home near Paris, condemned the Vietnam war, refused the British entry into the European Economic Community, challenged the US to pay its foreign obligations in gold rather than paper dollars, called for a free Quebec, and otherwise demonstrated creative independence from the Anglo- Americans. The result was a series of approximately 30 assassination attempts, carried out by French right- ing extremists. but with the Anglo-American secret services lurking in the background. None of the attempts to assassinate De Gaulle was successful.
Another example was Enrico Mattei, the head of the Italian state oil company ENI. Mattei challenged the hegemony of the US-UK seven sisters oil cartel. He offered Arab oil producers a 50-50 split of the profits, far more than the Anglo-Americans were offering, and he was willing to help the Arabs with their own economic development. Mattei was growing powerful enough to challenge the subordination of Italy to the US- UK domination of NATO when his private jet crashed near Milan in October 1962, an event which can be attributed to sabotage on the part of the CIA and its alliances, among them some of the French Algerians who were also the enemies of de Gaulle. After Mattei’s death, ENI began to abide by the rules of the Anglo-American oil cartel.
The classic example of political assassination was the murder of President Kennedy. Kennedy had been alerted by the Bay of Pigs debacle to the treachery and incompetence of CIA director Allen Dulles, whom he fired. He refused to listen to the adventurist advice of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He overrode his main military advisers, Lyman Lemnitzer and Curtis LeMay, who wanted to make the Cuban missile crisis the occasion for general thermonuclear war with the USSR. Kennedy clashed with Roger Blough of US Steel, who was acting as a representative of Wall Street. Kennedy challenged the power of the Federal Reserve to be the sole controller of the US money supply. Kennedy seemed determined to return to the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and also to the strong presidency Roosevelt had embodied, but which the US oligarchy was determined never to permit again. (There had in any case been an attempt to assassinate FDR in Florida before he was even inaugurated.) Kennedy was probably planning to fire FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, who regarded himself as an unaccountable state within the state. Documents indicate that Kennedy was scaling down the US presence in Vietnam, rather than escalating it as his incompetent hawkish advisers wanted, and that he may have been preparing to liquidate the Vietnam matter entirely after his re-election in November 1964. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November, 1963.
Somewhere in the mid-1960s a watershed in the annals of terrorism is passed. Up to this point, key person assassinations are carried out by disgruntled officers or colonial refugees, by itinerant misfits like Oswald, or are simply anonymous. After this point, assassinations start to be attributed to revolutionary or subversive groups. During the 1980s and 1990s, those groups gradually drop their Marxist-Lenininst camouflage and in many cases assume a right-wing anarchist or Islamist coloration.
In Germany, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder was the chief of the Trusteeship Agency (Treuhand), which was in 1991 the largest corporation in the world. In the communist German Democratic Republic, all industry was the property of the state, and when the GDR collapsed in 1989, this property was transferred to the Trusteeship Agency. Rohwedder, as the head of this entity, preferred to keep the vast state property of the GDR as a state sector, trying to maintain existing levels of employment and production so as to facilitate the absorption of the East German regions into unified Germany. Anglo-American financiers, however, wanted all the GDR state property to be put on the auction block at once, so that it could be sold off at bargain basement prices from which Wall Street and the City of London had everything to gain. When Rohwedder proved reluctant to accept this policy, he was assassinated around Easter 1991, just after the first Gulf War, by a group claiming to be the Baader-Meinhof group, also known as the Red Army faction. Rohwedder’s successor immediately began selling off GDR state property in the way the Anglo-Americans wanted.
Aldo Moro was the head of the Italian Christian Democratic Party. During the 1970s he was the leading advocate of a policy of bringing the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into the government. This would have given the Italian government a solid majority for the first time in many decades, putting an end to the constant parade of government crises and weak, unstable coalitions cobbled together with the help of splinter parties. At a certain point, Moro was warned by a key US figure, identified by some as former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to cease his efforts to bring the PCI into the government, as Moro’s widow later reported. In March, 1978 this warning was followed by a terrorist attack on Moro’s motorcade, in which several of his security detail were killed. Moro himself was abducted. Responsibility was claimed by the Red Brigades. After two months of captivity, Moro was killed by his captors and his body found in the trunk of a car in downtown Rome. After his death, the PCI was not allowed to enter the government.
As the examples have suggested, the leading terrorist state of the post-1945 era in Europe was unquestionably the United States, often acting together with the British MI-5 and MI-6 in the framework of NATO intelligence. US state-sponsored terrorism generally aimed at maintaining what can be called the division of the world into spheres of influence as established at the Big Three (US, UK, USSR) conference at Yalta in the Crimea in early 1945. Since the US could not simply arrest and execute its opponents in the way that Stalin could, terrorism was a favored tool of the US in attempting to maintain domination and discipline within the western bloc. Terrorism was thus used against political challenges, like that of Moro, against economic challenges, like those of Mattei and Rohwedder, or against figures who represented multiple challenges, like President de Gaulle. In the cases of President Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, terrorism was employed to prevent reforms of the system which decisive groups did not desire, and which they despaired of blocking through normal political means. The anti- slavery reforms of the Gracchi brothers were the only way to preserve the Roman Republic, but the latifundists and slaveholders felt mortally threatened by them, so the Gracchi were both assassinated.
Terrorism can also be employed to create a radical change in a political situation or political process. A good example from the postwar period is the terrorist bombing attack on a bank located in Piazza Fontana in Milan, Italy, on December 12, 1969, killing 16 and seriously injuring 88 more – a shocking toll in those days, and a source of horror for public opinion in general. This bombing took place at the height of the biggest strike wave that Italy had seen since the end of World War II, the so-called Hot Autumn, in which the automobile workers and metal workers had proven to be especially aggressive and militant. The bombings achieved the remarkable feat of stopping this broadly based and energetic strike wave dead in its tracks, with all strikes being called off as the police ran wild, hauling suspected leftist sympathizers in for questioning and intimidating their families. This successful method of social control was called the “strategy of tension,” and it included emergency laws against suspected terrorists and other favorite measures of Ashcroft today. The Piazza Fontana bombs were blamed by the police and the press on a pathetic group of anarchists, the Bakunin Club. Among the members of the Bakunin Club, which had been thoroughly penetrated by the Italian intelligence service, the SID, were the railroad worker Giuseppe Pinelli and the male dancer Pietro Valpreda. Pinelli was pushed to his death from a fourth-story window in police headquarters, while Valpreda was vilified as a subhuman beast by the mass media. When the absurd attempt to pin the atrocity on the anarchists collapsed of its own weight, the next prime suspects became Freda and Ventura, two self-styled “Nazi-Maoists.” More than twenty years after the fact, information came into the public domain that the bombs of Piazza Fontana had been placed by a secret network called GLADIO operating under the control of NATO intelligence, which evidently feared that the success of the strike wave might lead to the entry of the PCI into the government, which in turn might have led to the erosion of the NATO alliance as against the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact.
All during the 1970s and into the 1980s, US, NATO and Italian ruling circles were obsessed with keeping the PCI out of the government, and with breaking the back of workers militancy. Terrorists incidents included a bomb which went off during a trade union demonstration against fascism at Piazza della Loggia in Brescia in May 1974 (8 dead, 100 injured), a bomb on the Italicus express train in August 1974 (12 dead, 48 injured), and many more. The most spectacular event in this series was the bomb at the Bologna railway station on August 2, 1980, which killed 85 and injured some 200. This was the biggest terrorist attack in Europe before the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, and shows a similar modus operandi.
Terrorism thus has been known to provide a means of social control. Parts of the US oligarchy are today almost euphoric about the seemingly endless panorama of possibilities for exploiting terrorism they believe they see before them. But it is not wise to try to build an entire state and social order on terrorism.
Another major goal of terrorism has been to provoke war. In this variant, state-sponsored false flag terrorist groups carry out an attack against the power that wants to go to war, which uses the attacks as a moral pretext to rally its own population for conflict, whipping up sentiment by waving the bloody shirt of the victims, the insult to the national honor, and the monstrous evil of the sub- human perpetrators.
The logic here is that of the provocation which can be observed along the fringes of any demonstration which the government does not want to take place. The demonstration proceeds peacefully and responsibly, with marchers walking an orderly fashion within the cordons of parade marshals who are there to prevent trouble. Families with children, elderly people, and youth are all petitioning effectively for the redress of their grievances. The political effect is potentially quite positive. All of a sudden, a group of radical demonstrators, calling themselves anarchists but in reality police agent provocateurs, breaks away from the main body of the demonstration and begins smashing the windows of stores along the route. The anarchists have Molotov cocktails in hand, and they hurl them at the first units of riot police who arrive, injuring some of them seriously. The police, by now thoroughly provoked indeed, begin to fire tear gas grenades in all directions, and wade in to the peaceful crowd with their truncheons, mercilessly beating everyone who falls into their hands. Demonstrators are herded into blind allies, beaten, arrested, and carted off. It will be a long time before some of them come to another demonstration. Television coverage focuses on the violent minority, trying to make it look like the anarchist police agents are typical of the demonstration as a whole. Pundits pontificate; George Will is particularly indignant. This is the model for provocations of all types. It represents a spectacle for the gullible, a theatrical if bloody manipulation of staged pseudo-reality, and it points toward the reality of 9/11.
War commonly begins with provocations of this sort. The colossal bloodletting of World War began in Sarajevo, Bosnia with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist fanatic named Gavrilo Prinkip, an activist of the group called the Black Hand, a Mazzini-style Serbian underground national liberation group. But the Black Hand was controlled by Serbian military intelligence. Colonel Apis of Serbian military intelligence was in turn an asset of the Okhrana, the Russian intelligence, through the Russian military attaché in Belgrade, and he and Prinkip may also have been under the influence of the British-backed Grand Orient freemasons, which had been working towards a general European war since about 1906-7.
Another case was the explosion of the battleship USS Maine in the harbor of Spanish-controlled Havana, Cuba in 1898. The jingoistic Hearst newspapers, the original of modern yellow journalism, blamed the Spanish government and called for war against Spain, which soon ensued. The Hearst papers argued that the US warship had been sunk by the detonation of a Spanish mine, and drew imaginative cartoons to show how this might have happened. This war is a fateful turning-point in world history, since it marks the launching of US imperialism on the world stage. But an inquiry conducted decades later by retired Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the US nuclear Navy, led to the conclusion that the explosion had taken place inside the Maine, probably as the result of sparks amidst the coal dust of an empty coal bunker, a fairly well-known danger in those days. But it may also be that the internal explosion was not an accident, but rather the result of a deliberately placed bomb.
World War II also began with a provocation, at least as far as Germany is concerned. When Hitler wanted to invade Poland in September 1939, he knew that the majority of the German population did not want war. He accordingly hatched a plot which centered on the Gleiwitz radio station, a German broadcasting station located near the border with Poland. In late August 1939, Hitler obtained a group of German convicts, and dressed them in Polish army uniforms. These wretched men were then taken to the Gleiwitz radio station and machine-gunned to death. Their bodies were arranged around the radio station in such a way as to suggest that they had been shot while storming the building. Nazi agents inside the radio station then broke into the ongoing program to read a raving anti-German declaration in Polish, proclaiming that Polish forces had taken over Gleiwitz and the radio there. This crude farce, when amplified and repeated hundreds of times by Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda machinery, secured at least minimal acceptance by the German population of the inevitability of war, which broke out with Hitler’s attack on Poland, September 1, 1939.
The classic case of strategic terrorism of this type is doubtless the Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1605, a day that is still marked each year in the English calendar as Guy Fawkes’ Day. In 1605 James I Stuart, a Protestant who united in his person the crowns of Scotland and England for the first time, was considering a policy of accommodation with the Spanish Empire, the leading Catholic power. James was also considering some measures of toleration for Catholics in England, where the majority of the landed gentry in the north of the country was still loyal to Rome. An influential group in London, backed by Venetian intelligence from abroad, wanted to push James I into a confrontation with the Spanish Empire, from which they hoped among other things to extract great personal profit. They also thought it was politically vital to keep persecuting the Roman Catholics. Chief among the war party was the royal chancellor, roughly the prime minister, who was Lord Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury. Cecil set out to convince James I to adopt his policy, and to accomplish this by means of terrorism. Acting behind the scenes, Cecil cultivated some prominent Catholics, one of them Lord Thomas Percy from the famous Catholic Percy family, and used them as cut-outs to direct the operations of a group of naïve Catholic fanatics and adventurers, among them a certain gullible gentleman named Guy Fawkes. Thomas Percy was supposedly a Catholic fanatic, but in reality was a bigamist. This group of Catholic fanatics hatched the idea first of tunneling into the basement of the Houses of Parliament from a nearby house, and then simply of renting the basement of the Houses of Parliament, in order to pack that basement with explosives for the purpose of blowing up King, Lords, and Commons when James I came to open the Parliament early that November. But instead Guy Fawkes was caught going into the basement the night before the great crime was scheduled to occur. Fawkes and the rest of the plotters were tortured and hanged, and several Catholic clergy were also scapegoated. James I put aside his plans for toleration of Catholics, and England set out on a century of wars against the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, from which in turn the British Empire was born. Guy Fawkes Day became the yearly festival of “no popery” and hatred for Spain.
Concerning the Gunpowder Plot, the Jesuit Gerard concludes that “for purposes of State, the government of the day [meaning Cecil] either found means to instigate the conspirators to undertake their enterprise, or, at least, being, from an early stage of the undertaking, fully aware of what was going on, sedulously nursed the insane scheme till the time came to make capital out of it. That the conspirators, or the greater number of them, really meant to strike a great blow is not to be denied, though it may be less easy to assure ourselves of its precise character; and their guilt will not be palliated should it appear that, in projecting an atrocious crime, they were unwittingly playing the game of plotters more astute than themselves.” (Gerard 17) Here we have an excellent definition of state-sponsored terrorism. Gerard’s method of proof is this: “It will be enough to show that, whatever its origin, the conspiracy was, and must have been, known to those in power, who, playing with their infatuated dupes, allowed them to go on with their mad scheme, till the moment came to strike with full effect.” (Gerard 55) This can also be applied to 9/11.
It should be added that James I does not seem to have been aware of the operation in advance. The plot was not directed against James I; it rather intended to push him in a specific policy direction. After November 1605, James I does appear to have realized what Cecil’s role had been, at least to some extent.
Father Gerard speaks of Thomas Percy, Cecil’s agent in the Gunpowder Plot, as a “tame duck employed to catch the wild ones.” (Gerard 152) But the fact that he was Cecil’s agent did not prevent Percy from being killed as part of the coverup after November 5. At the risk of mixing metaphors, we can cite the opinion of a contemporary observer that Cecil, one he had secured the game birds he was seeking, hanged the spaniel who had actually caught them for him, “that its master’s art might not appear.” (Gerard 153)
Towards the end of the 1600s, some leaders of the Whig ministry decided that France, not Spain, was now the leading Catholic power. In 1678 they brought forth the charlatan Titus Oates to allege that he had proofs of a “popish plot” backed by France to restore Catholicism in England, including by manipulating the royal succession. Oates may be usefully compared to the many “anti-terrorism experts” who appear on television news broadcasts to report on what the terrorists are doing, since it is clear that most of what these commentators say they have simply invented. When Oates began to recite his charges there was mass hysteria in England, and several Jesuits were hanged. The diarist John Evelyn had never seen “the nation in more apprehension and consternation.” So great was the fear that “…before the end of 1678 not only did a majority of the English people believe that there was such a plot, but anyone who ventured to deny it ran the risk of impeachment as an accessory. ‘’Twas worse than plotting to suspect the Plot.’” (Hay 122) The popish plot had enormous mass appeal: “the extravagant frenzy of the London mob took most people by surprise … London witnessed an exhibition of emotional fanaticism which has seldom been equaled in the history of a civilized nation. Mobs have often been as wicked, but not often so stupid. ‘The imposture known as the Oates Plot,’ wrote Lingard, ‘supported by the arts and declamations of a numerous party, goaded the passions of men to a state of madness, and seemed to extinguish the native good sense and humanity of the English character.” (Hay122-3) The great sponsor of Titus Oates was Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, the founder of the Whig Party and a member of the oligarchical cabinet called the CABAL after the initials of its members: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. The philosopher John Locke was Ashley’s secretary. In the late summer of 1679 the hysteria began to subside, and it became apparent that Titus Oates was a fraud and an imposter. At this point King Charles II put Ashley on trial for treason. Ashley escaped conviction but had to flee to Holland, where he died.
We now turn to a structural analysis of modern false-flag terrorism of the type that is commonly sponsored by factions or networks embedded in the secret intelligence agencies of modern states. This discussion draws on the work of Andreas von Bülow, Gerard Wisnewski, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, and on my own research on the Moro assassination, the Red Brigades, and Italian terrorism in general.
PATSIES
“I’m just a patsy.”
-- Lee Harvey Oswald, November 1963
Speaking of Guy Fawkes and his confreres, Father Gerard comments that “many intelligent men took for granted that in some way or other the actual conspirators were but the dupes and instruments of more crafty men than themselves, and in their mad enterprise played the game of ministers of State.” (Gerard 43) In this sense, Guy Fawkes may represent the archetype of the category of person known in modern intelligence parlance as the patsy.
The real authorship of state sponsored terrorism is to be successfully concealed, then a collection of scapegoats is the first ingredient required. These may be defined as the patsies, or alternatively as fall-guys, scapegoats, useful idiots, or dupes. It is necessary that they be of low mental ability and great gullibility, since their mission is to be part of false-flag groups which pretend to be working for a cause, such as the restoration of the caliphate, while in reality they are under the control of a private network inside the US government. It is vital for the terrorist controllers that the patsies not realize that this or that comrade in arms is actually a double agent, a provocateur working for the parallel CIA or some other complicit agency, or which more will be said later. The best candidates for the patsy role are psychotics, psychopaths, or sociopaths. They may be fanatics bursting with criminal energy and criminal intent, or they may be pathetic ideologues and naifs. Frequently they are also misfits, bunglers, and generally maladroit in what they undertake.
According to research sponsored in 1999 by the Library of Congress, in a 1972 study “psychologist B.J. Berkowitz described six psychological types who would be most likely to threaten or try to use WMD: paranoids, paranoid schizophrenics, borderline mental defectives, schizophrenic types, passive-aggressive personality types, and sociopath personalities. He considered sociopaths the most likely actually to use WMD. Nuclear terrorism expert Jessica Stern disagreed. She believed that "Schizophrenics and sociopaths, for example, may want to commit acts of mass destruction, but they are less likely than others to succeed." She pointed out that large-scale dissemination of chemical, biological, or radiological agents requires a group effort, but that "Schizophrenics, in particular, often have difficulty functioning in groups ...." (Hudson)
Because the patsies are usually such low-grade subjects, they require comprehensive support of many types. They may need help in renting an apartment or in finding a cover job. They always seem to be getting in trouble with the police, and then it is necessary to see that they get out on bail as quickly as possible. If they are lonely, they may need specially trained sex operatives to comfort them or even to marry them (the KGB and the Stasi called their sex troops “The Swallows”). Above all they require constant financial assistance to be able to travel around the world, as they so frequently seem to be able to do despite the fact that they are most often without any visible means of support. The most important things about patsies are that they are almost always physically, mentally and technically unable to carry out the crimes of which they are accused. This is a matter of insufficient ability and capability, and not of the lack of criminal intent, which is often abundant.
Patsies can then be used in many combinations. They can be merged together in false flag terror operations. These organizations will assume a distinct ideological or religious coloration and will advertise it, and that will become the key to the process of creating or reinforcing the enemy image desired by the terrorist controllers after the terrorist action has been successfully carried out. That coloration or affiliation will constitute the false flag, and it will be assiduously prepared. Here some of the members may be witting; these are the double agents and police informers. Other components are not witting, at least about the most important things. What patsies can accomplish by themselves is often supplemented by the actions of doubles, double agents, and informers, who do things for them when they can not show up. Sometimes patsies are sent to make contact with other groups, a process known as sheep-dipping. If a terrorist controller wants to implicate the Podunk Democratic Party in terrorism, then he sends a patsy to sign up with them and attend their meetings before the terrorist act is carried out. That gives the police a good reason to raid the Podunk Democratic Party headquarters.
Thus, in 1992 and 1993, the New York City FBI informant and agent provocateur Emad Salem repeatedly tried to implicate the Sudanese UN Mission in his own "Islamic terror cell" World Trade Center bomb plot conspiracy. Here we see how a false flag terror cell sheep-dips its dupes into contact with a target, which then becomes the object of police investigation, and possibly later of military attack.
In January 2002, the Supreme Court of Germany had to call off all proceedings in the ongoing constitutional trial concerning the Schroeder government’s attempt to ban the extreme right-wing or reputedly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany because it turned out that the government's chief witness, a member of the national NPD party executive, had worked as an informant for the German Constitutional Protection Agency (Verfassungsschutz, comparable to the FBI), for many years. The Court ruled that the trial could not go forward until this issue was clarified.
Osama Bin Laden, the rich misfit, has often been described in terms which seem to suit him for this category. A CIA agent named Beardman has asserted that Osama Bin Laden, during the entire time that he was organizing his mujaheddin fighters to do battle with the Soviets in Afghanistan, never realized that the operation was being financed and directed by the CIA. The CIA's Beardman confirmed, in this regard, that Osama Bin Laden was not aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of Bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): "neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help." Bin Laden thus may also qualify as a clueless dupe.
The patsies ultimately have three vital functions. The first is that they have to be noticed. They must attract lots and lots of attention. They may issue raving statements on videotape, or doubles can be used to issue these statements for them if they are not up to it. They need to get into fights with passersby, as Mohammed Atta is said to have done concerning a parking space at the airport in Maine early in the morning on September 11. Even if they are presumed dead they must remain prominent, as in the case of Atta’s passport, which is alleged by the FBI to have survived the fiery collapse of the World Trade Center towers to be found undamaged and unsinged on a nearby street. Even when presumed dead they must be eloquent about themselves and their activities, as they accused 9/11 hijackers when they left behind a copy of the Koran, airline schedules, terrorist literature and videotapes, and Atta’s crudely forged last will and testament in a car and in luggage.
Despite the need to be noticed as much as possible, the patsies have to stay out of jail. If they are all in jail, the planned terror action cannot take place. This is not because the patsies are needed to carry it out, but rather because they must be on hand in order to be blamed for it, whether they are on the scene or far away. If the patsies are in jail, they cannot be scapegoated. Therefore a lawyer and bail money must be provided, or a complicit judge told to release the defendant. Immigration authorities and Customs must be told to look the other way. To keep the patsies out of jail so they can serve their vital purpose is the job of the moles, as will soon be shown.
Finally, if all else goes well, it is the destiny of the patsies to take the blame for the terror action once it has happened. At this point the moles in the government apparatus, who had earlier been the patsies’ greatest friends and protectors, become their most implacable enemies. The patsies must be hunted down and, preferably, liquidated on the spot, as the British Special Air Services anti-terrorist force always prefers to do, with a maximum of firepower. Their faces and stories will be demonized as the latest manifestation of absolute evil. The nationality, philosophy, or religion which the media portray them as representing will become the target of raving vilification, arrest, economic sanctions, cruise missile retaliation, and armed invasion, as the case may be.
A pathetic case in point is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber of December 2001. Shortly after Reid was arrested for having attempted to blow up the transatlantic airliner in which he was traveling with the help of explosives planted in the soles of his shoes, sources in the Washington DC mosque said that they had acquired the following profile of Reid from Dr. Abdul Haqq Baker of Brixton mosque in London. According to Baker and others from Brixton, Richard Reid could only be described as mentally deficient. "He was not someone who would be medically classified as mentally retarded," the source reported, "but he was definitely slow." He could not have hatched any kind of terror attack on his own, and could not have even put the shoe bombs on his own feet without help, the source had been told by officials of the Brixton Mosque. Yet, according to news accounts, Reid spent time in Iran three or four years before his terror attempt, and traveled to Tel Aviv from Heathrow Airport near London in the summer of 2001. He was thoroughly frisked before being allowed on to the El Al flight, and was forced to sit next to a sky marshal at the back of the plane. Israeli officials claimed to know nothing about what Reid was doing in Israel. From Israel, Reid went to Egypt, and then to Turkey, before returning to London Heathrow. Reid had been sleeping on the floor at the Brixton Mosque, had no visible means of support, etc. Reid's father, who was also a convert to Islam, and encouraged his son to do the same, told the American press that his son must have been brainwashed by radical Islamists to get him to undertake the suicide attack. (New York Times and Washington Post, December 29, 2001)
Another case may well be that of Jose Padilla, the man who was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and who has been designated as an enemy combatant by Attorney General Ashcroft and held incommunicado without charges or a lawyer for months. Although he may only be a walk-on in Ashcroft’s larger spectacle, what kind of an Islamic fighter was Padilla supposed to be? According to Maureen Dowd, this “plotter was a Chicago street punk named Jose Padilla, a hothead with a long criminal record who was thrown in jail in Florida for shooting at a motorist in a road-rage incident. The mind games of fear begin with Abu Zubaydah, the U.S. captive, one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants, who fingered Padilla.” (New York Times, June 12, 2002)
The most famous patsy is of course Lee Harvey Oswald, the archetype of the embittered, lonely misfit and drifter. But he was a misfit with a difference, one who was able to move from the Marine Corps to émigré status in the USSR, then back to Texas and New Orleans as an activist for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Oswald was someone who seemed to go out of his way to be abrasive and to attract attention. He handed out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and got involved in altercations with anti-Castro Cubans. He appeared in a radio debate, and was interviewed on television. He took a surprise trip to Mexico City to visit the Soviet Embassy there. He did everything possible to get noticed. Indeed, he got noticed so much that at various time there may have been two or even three Oswald doubles running around, something that would have required the resources of a major intelligence organization like the CIA or the FBI. But Oswald was also unable to manage the petty details of his own everyday life without the assistance of others, notably of the European aristocrat Georges de Morenschildt, a patrician who had George H.W. Bush’s name and phone number in his address book. Oswald was most likely an FBI informant, working for Special Agent Guy Bannister in New Orleans. But this did not protect him from being fingered as the assassin, nor did it save him from being silenced by Jack Ruby before he could ever testify in his own defense. The problem with Oswald, as with so many patsies, is that he was neither physically nor technically capable of carrying out the crime which has been ascribed to him: using his antiquated Italian 1917 Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with its crude little telescopic sight, it is clear that Oswald could never have fired with sufficient speed and accuracy the four or five shots (at minimum) that were actually heard on Dealey Plaza that day, and which are necessary to account for the number of wounds suffered by President Kennedy and Governor Connally, plus other shots that missed their target. This question of physical impossibility is often the most obvious weak point of the official explanations of terrorist actions. In the Kennedy assassination, it was expressly to address the problem of the physical impossibility of Oswald’s having acted as a lone assassin that Arlen Spector, part of the staff of the Warren Commission, invented his magic bullet theory. Spector asserted that the same slug had caused seven wounds: an entry wound in Kennedy’s back, an exit wound at the base of his throat, then an entry wound in Connally’s back, an exit wound in Connally’s chest, an entry wound in Connally’s wrist, and exit wound from the other side of Connally’s wrist, and finally an entry wound in Connally’s leg. At the end of all this, the bullet was supposedly found in virtually pristine condition lying in a stretcher at Parkland Hospital after Kennedy had died. Even after these incredible contortions, requiring that the same bullet change course in mid-air at least twice, the problem of physical impossibility had not been solved, since there were still four or five shots on the audio tape which had recorded the sounds of the assassination through the open microphone of a Dallas police officer’s radio. It was this insuperable problem which led the House Assassinations Committee of 1978 to rule that Kennedy’s death was the result of a probable conspiracy, and not simply of the actions of a deranged lone assassin.
As Sanguinetti sums up, “the outrages that are accomplished directly by the intelligence agencies and secret services of the State are not usually claimed by anybody, but are each time imputed or attributed to some convenient ‘culprit,’ like Pinelli or Valpreda. Experience has proved that this is the weakest point of such terrorism, and that which determines the extreme fragility of it in the political usage that certain forces want to make of it. It is starting from the results of the same experience that the strategists of secret services of the State seek, from this point on, to lend a greater credibility, or at least a lesser inverisimilitude to their own work …by claiming them directly through such-and-such initials of a ghostly group….” (Sanguinetti 2)
