Things are seldom what they seem.
That’s the title of a song sung by Little Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore by Gilbert and Sullivan. Many people believe it. I am not one of them. Almost everything is exactly what it looks like. I spent years as a successful spymaster, something that would have been impossible were the saying true. The only way that spying can possibly succeed is that almost everything is genuinely normal, and the spy’s activities need to look exactly the same.
I don’t believe in most conspiracy theories, no matter who is behind them, or what phenomena are being linked to prove a point. There are few successful conspiracies. In my 73 years I’ve only learned of maybe three. The most successful was the Twenty Committee in Britain during World War II. The title arises from the organization’s orthography. The Double Cross Committee was written as “XX Committee.” Hence, its nickname. It was a counterintelligence and deception operation run by the UK’s MI5. They found and doubled every German agent sent to Britain and controlled their reporting of misinformation.
The next most successful was among Saddam Hussein and his agents of influence in France and Russia. This took place during the run-up to the Second Gulf War. Saddam was facing two incompatible imperatives: If Iran believed he had no Weapons of Mass Destruction it would invade and depose him; if the rest of the world believed he had WMD, it would impose harsh sanctions. His agents occupying senior positions in France and Russia assured him that the fool George W. Bush could be easily controlled by their countries and would never move militarily against Iraq. Oops. Saddam chose to fool Iran, which meant he had to fool everyone, because if anyone lets out the secret – The Emperor Has No New Clothes – the whole thing falls apart. Congratulations, you fooled all of the intelligence agencies except Russian and French. So instead of sanctions, you were deposed, tried and executed.
The third was a conspiracy of complementary interests. A combination of intelligence and security agencies despised Donald Trump for a variety of reasons. So did Big Tech. So did Legacy Media. So did Democrats, who only had two reasons: he was a Republican, and he had denied Hilary Clinton the coronation she was due. So, a presidential campaign was spied upon, a rumor started by Hilary Clinton’s campaign grew into two years of denying Trump the ability to govern, an impeachment was launched on shaky grounds at best, a second impeachment was launched after Trump had left office, so patently partisan that the Chief Justice refused to chair the impeachment. Along the way it was acceptable to threaten associates’ children with prosecution to force perjury by the parents, falsifying documents became the norm, perjured testimony before the FISA Court was cheered, and bald lies to congress were expected, all because Trump. The actual cabal to control the election outcome was revealed proudly by Time Magazine.
Thus, it is with caution that I shine light on what may be one of the more serious conspiracies ever undertaken. In October 2020, just before the presidential election, a shocking story rocked the nation. A group of right-wing violent extremists had tried to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. They were universally described in Legacy and Social Media as white supremacist Trump supporters, and no contradictory information was available. Evidently this was another genuine conspiracy. I searched for information about the conspiracy, and everything repeated everything else. All of the accounts were mutually supporting and detailed. Both of those adjectives gave me pause. That rarely happens in real-life investigations.
A total of 14 conspirators were arrested and charged. The videos of meetings and planning and recons and driving past places where explosives were to be placed were compelling. Nearly every aspect of the operation was on video. How does that happen, except in scripted movies? It doesn’t. Fourteen conspirators arrested and charged, and a minimum of twelve FBI informants or undercover officers were involved, including the number two man in the entire undertaking. Questions are being raised about whether the affair would have taken place at all without the FBI’s participation. That is called entrapment and, if proven, will bring into question the FBI’s involvement in the January 6, 2021, incident at the US Capitol.
We are already aware of reporting irregularities surrounding the incident. The capitol police officer who was reported bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher was still alive, unharmed, the evening of January 6, and medical reports are that his death was due to an allergy. The remaining four people who died included one unarmed protester climbing through a window, whose capitol police killer has never been officially identified, and three elderly protesters who died of age-related problems. The federal government has more than 14,000 hours of video tape it refuses to allow the public or press to see.
The conspirators were apparently targeted not because of criminality, but ideology. One of the informants was a small-government libertarian, which the FBI believed made him a violent anti-government militiaman. The two are nowhere near the same. Others who made social media posts disagreeing with the official line that mass lock downs were needed and everyone should remain indoors were targeted for surveillance. Those who claim to be liberal need to recognize that this targeting is illiberal in the extreme.
I suppose I take this news personally, because I was in the U.S. military for more than 20 years, in intelligence, and worked with the FBI over the years on very sensitive operations. I took pride in the U.S. military being the least racist organization I’d ever served in. The explanation is simple: survival. On the battlefield white and black are irrelevant. The most important color was green, the color of every soldier’s uniform. Another important color was red: we all bleed the same. From day one every member of the U.S. military learns to operate as part of a larger whole, each part depending on all the others. In a dangerous situation, one needs to be focused on accomplishing the mission, not on the color of one’s fellow soldiers’ skin. The other distinction of which I was proud regarding the military was the requirement that every soldier refuse to obey all illegal orders. That’s right, if the order is illegal, a soldier is not merely allowed to refuse to follow it, he or she is obligated to refuse to follow it. I did so twice in my career, and I knew many others who did as well. As for the FBI, I worked with their agents from at least thirty different field offices, and never detected a single political bias among any of them. I cannot imagine any of the FBI Agents with whom I worked using entrapment to cause a dangerous plot to be created and executed. That would be madness.
I’m looking forward to government disproving this conspiracy theory. I very much want it to be wrong. I’m going to remain agnostic on the subject awaiting further information. Now that the topic is in the public domain I am awaiting discussion.
Thank you for bringing this out..that targeting for ideology was the entrapment motivation. A long view like yours is needed or these look like discrete events not part of a long glide. It's more fun to get disgusted at Hunter's paintings and even that may have been set up to distract from this.I think Hunter's antics ae a distraction of attention.
Since I was aware of FH in Chicago I know that groups aren't safe. They are never safe. They've never been safe. Not here, not anywhere.
What is Podesta doing now?
It is the erosion of checks and balances within the political/media systems that threaten faith.