Via Strategic-Culture

Wayne Madsen
October 25, 2011

There is a historical “eight hundred pound gorilla” lurking in the background of almost every serious military and diplomatic incident involving Israel, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Greece, Armenia, the Kurds, the Assyrians, and some other players in the Middle East and southeastern Europe. It is a factor that is generally only whispered about at diplomatic receptions, news conferences, and think tank sessions due to the explosiveness and controversial nature of the subject. And it is the secretiveness attached to the subject that has been the reason for so much misunderstanding about the current breakdown in relations between Israel and Turkey, a growing warming of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and increasing enmity between Saudi Arabia and Iran…

Although known to historians and religious experts, the centuries-old political and economic influence of a group known in Turkish as the “Dönmeh” is only beginning to cross the lips of Turks, Arabs, and Israelis who have been reluctant to discuss the presence in Turkey and elsewhere of a sect of Turks descended from a group of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain during the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th and 17th centuries. These Jewish refugees from Spain were welcomed to settle in the Ottoman Empire and over the years they converted to a mystical sect of Islam that eventually mixed Jewish Kabbala and Islamic Sufi semi-mystical beliefs into a sect that eventually championed secularism in post-Ottoman Turkey. It is interesting that “Dönmeh” not only refers to the Jewish “untrustworthy converts” to Islam in Turkey but it is also a derogatory Turkish word for a transvestite, or someone who is claiming to be someone they are not.

The Donmeh sect of Judaism was founded in the 17th century by Rabbi Sabbatai Zevi, a Kabbalist who believed he was the Messiah but was forced to convert to Islam by Sultan Mehmet IV, the Ottoman ruler. Many of the rabbi’s followers, known as Sabbateans, but also “crypto-Jews,” publicly proclaimed their Islamic faith but secretly practiced their hybrid form of Judaism, which was unrecognized by mainstream Jewish rabbinical authorities. Because it was against their beliefs to marry outside their sect, the Dönmeh created a rather secretive sub-societal clan.

The Dönmeh rise to power in Turkey

Many Dönmeh, along with traditional Jews, became powerful political and business leaders in Salonica. It was this core group of Dönmeh, which organized the secret Young Turks, also known as the Committee of Union and Progress, the secularists who deposed Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II in the 1908 revolution, proclaimed the post-Ottoman Republic of Turkey after World War I, and who instituted a campaign that stripped Turkey of much of its Islamic identity after the fall of the Ottomans. Abdulhamid II was vilified by the Young Turks as a tyrant, but his only real crime appears to have been to refuse to meet Zionist leader Theodore Herzl during a visit to Constantinople in 1901 and reject Zionist and Dönmeh offers of money in return for the Zionists to be granted control of Jerusalem.

Like other leaders who have crossed the Zionists, Sultan Adulhamid II appears to have sealed his fate with the Dönmeh with this statement to his Ottoman court: “Advise Dr. Herzl not to take any further steps in his project. I cannot give away even a handful of the soil of this land for it is not my own, it belongs to the entire Islamic nation. The Islamic nation fought jihad for the sake of this land and had watered it with their blood. The Jews may keep their money and millions. If the Islamic Khalifate state is one day destroyed then they will be able to take Palestine without a price! But while I am alive, I would rather push a sword into my body than see the land of Palestine cut and given away from the Islamic state.” After his ouster by Ataturk’s Young Turk Dönmeh in 1908, Abdulhamid II was jailed in the Donmeh citadel of Salonica. He died in Constantinople in 1918, three years after Ibn Saud agreed to a Jewish homeland in Palestine and one year after Lord Balfour deeded Palestine away to the Zionists in his letter to Baron Rothschild.

One of the Young Turk leaders in Salonica was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey. When Greece achieved sovereignty over Salonica in 1913, many Dönmeh, unsuccessful at being re-classified Jewish, moved to Constantinople, later re-named Istanbul. Others moved to Izmir, Bursa, and Ataturk’s newly-proclaimed capital and future seat of Ergenekon power, Ankara.

Some texts suggest that the Dönmeh numbered no more than 150,000 and were mainly found in the army, government, and business. However, other experts suggest that the Dönmeh may have represented 1.5 million Turks and were even more powerful than believed by many and extended to every facet of Turkish life. One influential Donmeh, Tevfik Rustu Arak, was a close friend and adviser to Ataturk and served as Turkey’s Foreign Minister from 1925 to 1938.

Ataturk, who was reportedly himself a Dönmeh, ordered that Turks abandon their own Muslim-Arabic names. The name of the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine, was erased from the largest Turkish city, Constantinople. The city became Istanbul, after the Ataturk government in 1923 objected to the traditional name. There have been many questions about Ataturk’s own name, since “Mustapha Kemal Ataturk” was a pseudonym. Some historians have suggested that Ataturk adopted his name because he was a descendant of none other than Rabbi Zevi, the self-proclaimed Messiah of the Dönmeh! Ataturk also abolished Turkey’s use of the Arabic script and forced the country to adopt the western alphabet.

Modern Turkey: a secret Zionist state controlled by the Dönmeh

Ataturk’s suspected strong Jewish roots, information about which was suppressed for decades by a Turkish government that forbade anything critical of the founder of modern Turkey, began bubbling to the surface, first, mostly outside of Turkey and in publications written by Jewish authors. The 1973 book, The Secret Jews, by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, maintains that Ataturk and his finance minister, Djavid Bey, were both committed Dönmeh and that they were in good company because “too many of the Young Turks in the newly formed revolutionary Cabinet prayed to Allah, but had their real prophet [Sabbatai Zevi, the Messiah of Smyrna].” In The Forward of January 28, 1994, Hillel Halkin wrote in The New York Sun that Ataturk recited the Jewish Shema Yisrael (“Hear O Israel”), saying that it was “my prayer too.” The information is recounted from an autobiography by journalist Itamar Ben-Avi, who claims Ataturk, then a young Turkish army captain, revealed he was Jewish in a Jerusalem hotel bar one rainy night during the winter of 1911. In addition, Ataturk attended the Semsi Effendi grade school in Salonica, run by a Dönmeh named Simon Zevi. Halkin wrote in the New York Sun article about an email he received from a Turkish colleague: “I now know – know (and I haven’t a shred of doubt) – that Ataturk’s father’s family was indeed of Jewish stock.”

It was Ataturk’s and the Young Turks’ support for Zionism, the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, after World War I and during Nazi rule in Europe that endeared Turkey to Israel and vice versa. An article in The Forward of May 8, 2007, revealed that Dönmeh dominated Turkish leadership “from the president down, as well as key diplomats . . . and a great part of Turkey’s military, cultural, academic, economic, and professional elites” kept Turkey out of a World War II alliance with Germany, and deprived Hitler of a Turkish route to the Baku oilfields.” In his book, The Donme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries and Secular Turks, Professor Marc David Baer wrote that many advanced to exalted positions in the Sufi religious orders.

Israel has always been reluctant to describe the Turkish massacre of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915 as “genocide.” It has always been believed that the reason for Israel’s reticence was not to upset Israel’s close military and diplomatic ties with Turkey. However, more evidence is being uncovered that the Armenian genocide was largely the work of the Dönmeh leadership of the Young Turks. Historians like Ahmed Refik, who served as an intelligence officer in the Ottoman army, averred that it was the aim of the Young Turks to destroy the Armenians, who were mostly Christian. The Young Turks, under Ataturk’s direction, also expelled Greek Christians from Turkish cities and attempted to commit a smaller-scale genocide of the Assyrians, who were also mainly Christian.

One Young Turk from Salonica, Mehmet Talat, was the official who carried out the genocide of the Armenians and Assyrians. A Venezuelan mercenary who served in the Ottoman army, Rafael de Nogales Mendez, noted in his annals of the Armenian genocide that Talat was known as the “renegade Hebrew of Salonica.” Talat was assassinated in Germany in 1921 by an Armenian whose entire family was lost in the genocide ordered by the “renegade Hebrew.” It is believed by some historians of the Armenian genocide that the Armenians, known as good businessmen, were targeted by the business-savvy Dönmeh because they were considered to be commercial competitors.

It is not, therefore, the desire to protect the Israeli-Turkish alliance that has caused Israel to eschew any interest in pursuing the reasons behind the Armenian genocide, but Israel’s and the Dönmeh’s knowledge that it was the Dönmeh leadership of the Young Turks that not only murdered hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Assyrians but who also stamped out Turkey’s traditional Muslim customs and ways. Knowledge that it was Dönmeh, in a natural alliance with the Zionists of Europe, who were responsible for the deaths of Armenian and Assyrian Christians, expulsion from Turkey of Greek Orthodox Christians, and the cultural and religious eradication of Turkish Islamic traditions, would issue forth in the region a new reality. Rather than Greek and Turkish Cypriots living on a divided island, Armenians holding a vendetta against the Turks, and Greeks and Turks feuding over territory, all the peoples attacked by the Dönmeh would realize that they had a common foe that was their actual persecutor.

Challenging Dönmeh rule: Turkey’s battle against the Ergenekon

It is the purging of the Kemalist adherents of Ataturk and his secular Dönmeh regime that is behind the investigation of the Ergenekon conspiracy in Turkey. Ergenekon’s description matches up completely with the Dönmeh presence in Turkey’s diplomatic, military, judicial, religious, political, academic, business, and journalist hierarchy. Ergenekon attempted to stop the reforms instituted by successive non-Dönmeh Turkish leaders, including the re-introduction of traditional Turkish Islamic customs and rituals, by planning a series of coups, some successful like that which deposed Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan’s Refah (Welfare) Islamist government in 1996 and some unsuccessful, like OPERATION SLEDGEHEMMER, which was aimed at deposing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2003. Some Islamist-leaning reformists, including Turkish President Turgut Ozal and Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, died under suspicious circumstances. Deposed democratically-elected Prime Minister Adnan Menderes was hanged in 1961, following a military coup.

American politicians and journalists, whose knowledge of the history of countries like Turkey and the preceding Ottoman Empire, is often severely lacking, have painted the friction between Israel’s government and the Turkish government of Prime Minister Erdogan as based on Turkey’s drift to Islamism and the Arab world. Far from it, Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) seem to have finally seen a way to break free from the domination and cruelty of the Dönmeh, whether in the form of Kemalist followers of Ataturk or nationalist schemers and plotters in Ergenekon. But with Turkey’s “Independence Day” has come vitriol from the Dönmeh and their natural allies in Israel and the Israel Lobby in the United States and Europe. Turkey as a member of the European Union was fine for Europe as long as the Dönmeh remained in charge and permitted Turkey’s wealth to be looted by central bankers like has occurred in Greece.

When Israel launched its bloody attack on the Turkish Gaza aid vessel, the Mavi Marmara, on May 31, 2010, the reason was not so much the ship’s running of the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The brutality of the Israelis in shooting unarmed Turks and one Turkish-American, some at point blank range, according to a UN report, indicated that Israel was motivated by something else: vengeance and retaliation for the Turkish government’s crackdown on Ergenekon, the purging of the Turkish military and intelligence senior ranks of Dönmeh, and reversing the anti-Muslim religious and cultural policies set down by the Dönmeh’s favorite son, Ataturk, some ninety years before. In effect, the Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara was in retaliation for Turkey’s jailing of several top Turkish military officers, journalists, and academics, all accused of being part of the Ergenekon plot to overthrow the AKP government in 2003. Hidden in the Ergenekon coup plot is that the Dönmeh and Ergenekon are connected through their history of being Kemalists, ardent secularists, pro-Israeli, and pro-Zionist.

With tempers now flaring between Iran on one side and Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States on the other, as the result of a dubious claim by U.S. law enforcement that Iran was planning to carry out the assassination of the Saudi ambassador to the United States on American soil, the long-standing close, but secretive relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia is coming to the forefront. The Israeli-Saudi connection had flourished during OPERATION DESERT STORM, when both countries were on the receiving end of Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles.

Authored by Whitney Webb via MintPressNews.com,

Best Known Deep Fake Creator is Funded by Israeli Intelligence

While the media, and even Cybereason itself, have helped lay the foundation to blame specific state actors for 2020 election meddling well ahead of the fact, it is worth revisiting Cybereason’s “Operation Blackout” election simulation and the tactics used by the “bad actors” in that scenario.

That simulation, discussed in detail in the first installment of this series, saw the weaponization of specific technologies, namely deep fakes, hacks of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and hacks of vehicles, in order to target the 2020 U.S. election, resulting in the cancellation of the election and the imposition of martial law.

Given the current narrative regarding what state actors are likely to meddle in the 2020 election — namely Russia, China and Iran — and the tactics they will allegedly use, it is important to explore the sources of the technologies weaponized per that narrative as well as in “Operation Blackout.”

Indeed, if there is any clear overlap between the creators of those technologies and the state actors being blamed in advance for their imminent use, it would certainly lend credibility to the claims promoted by U.S. intelligence, the media and companies like Microsoft and Cybereason.

Yet, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the companies and state actors most involved in developing these technologies are the very ones claiming that Russia, China and Iran will use them to undermine the 2020 election.

Take for instance the use of deep fakes. Not only have numerous media reports focused on how deep fakes will be used to meddle in the 2020 elections, but Cybereason’s doomsday election simulation saw “bad actors” rely heavily on their use to spread disinformation and even make fake bomb threats. While much has been said of the coming election and deep fakes, remarkably few reports have bothered to look at the company best known for creating viral deep fakes.

Canny AI has garnered considerable media attention over the past few years for its persuasive deep fake videos that have frequently gone viral. In the last year alone, the tech firm’s viral deep fakes have included a controversial video of Mark Zuckerberg where the Facebook co-founder appears to be saying “Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures,” as well as a video showing Richard Nixon giving a speech he never actually gave. More recently, Canny AI was behind the viral videos immediately prior to the 2019 U.K. general election that appeared to show Jeremy Corbyn and his rival Boris Johnson endorsing each other and another video that showed world leaders singing John Lennon’s “Imagine”:

Oddly, many of the media reports that discuss these viral videos fail to mention the role of Canny AI in creating these viral deep fakes and instead only mention the organization or artists with whom Canny AI partnered to create them. For instance, the Corbyn-Johnson videos were reported to have been produced by the group Future Advocacy and artist Bill Posters, but it was actually Canny AI that created those videos for that group. Similarly, the Nixon Speech deep fake was reported by several outlets as having been solely created by MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality. However, the Boston Globe noted that “the [MIT] team worked with Canny AI, an Israeli company that does Video Dialogue Replacement, and Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup specializing in speech-to-speech synthetic voice production” to create the video.

The Zuckerberg deep fake that Canny AI created led to lots of positive press for the company, with several media reports dubbing them as the company using “deep fakes for good” and that uses the controversial technology “responsibly.” The Zuckerberg deep fake has been cited as one of the main drivers behind Facebook’s new “deep fake” policy, which only bans some deep fake videos and has been criticized by U.S. lawmakers as insufficient. Notably, neither Facebook nor Facebook-owned Instagram ever took down Canny AI’s deep fake of Zuckerburg.

Given the concern over deep fakes in relation to the coming election and Canny AI standing out as the main producer of deep fakes that have gone viral over the past year, it is important to point out that Canny AI has ties to a state actor with a history of election meddling: the state of Israel.

Indeed, Canny AI is 100 percent funded by an Israeli start-up accelerator called Xcelerator, a joint venture between Tel Aviv University and Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet (sometimes called Shabak). According to Start Up Nation Central, the Paul Singer-created organization that promotes Israeli technology start ups, Xcelerator-funded “start-ups participating in the program benefit from close mentoring from content and technology experts from the Shabak, experts from Tel Aviv University, and industry leaders. The connection to the Shabak also provides the entrepreneurs with ways to test the capabilities of their technologies and cooperation opportunities (emphasis added).”

In addition, Xcelerator is partnered not only with Israeli intelligence directly, but also with Cybereason, the very company that explored the use of deep fakes in the 2020 U.S. presidential election that saw the election cancelled and martial law declared as well as a company that itself has deep ties to Israeli intelligence. Other notable partners of Xcelerator include NEC Corp, which has intimate ties to top Cybereason investor Softbank; Check Point Technologies, which has ties to Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200; and the Israeli start-up accelerator Team8. In previous reports published by MintPress, Team8 was discussed in detail, particularly their recent hire of former director of the NSA and former head of U.S. Cyber Command Mike Rogers, and their close ties to Paul Singer’s Start Up Nation Central, which itself has deep ties to U.S. neoconservatives.

It is also worth noting that Xcelerator also backs an “anti-fake news” start-up called Cyabra, which has direct ties to Israel’s Mossad and offers its AI-driven “disinformation protection” to government agencies as well as politicians, particularly during election seasons. Two of Cyabra’s co-founders previously co-founded Psy-Group, which attempted to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election by weaponizing “fake news” and social media and later closed down its operations after U.S. government scrutiny into its activities began as part of the Mueller investigation.

Psy-Group also engaged in doxxing campaigns targeting Palesintian rights activists in the U.S. which were planned in conjunction with Ram Ben-Barak, the former deputy director of the Mossad who now advises Cyabra. Given that much of the concern ahead of the next election is related not only to deep fakes but also “fake news,” Cyabra’s rise and its clear ties to Mossad and the now defunct Psy-Group are important to note.

Furthermore, in examining the other technologies weaponized during Cybereason’s 2020 election simulation and cited in the aforementioned media narrative regarding 2020 meddling, a pattern similar to that of Canny AI emerges.

Indeed, the other technologies linked to these “bad actors” and foreign meddlers — namely hacking IoT devices and hacking vehicles — are also pioneered by companies with deep ties to Israeli military intelligence, specifically Unit 8200, and Israeli tech companies that have aggressively spied on U.S. government institutions in collusion with Israeli intelligence in the past, namely Comverse (now Verint) and Amdocs.

Hacking the Internet of Things

In Cybereason’s doomsday election simulation, another of the tactics used was the hacking of devices and appliances connected to the internet, often referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT) and which includes everything from smartphones to power grid infrastructure to city traffic lights.

While most reports on IoT hacks to date have focused on “lone wolf” or non-state-aligned actors, one company has stood out for its efforts to create a tool that would allow governments and intelligence agencies to hack these devices with ease. That company, called Toka, announced in 2018 that it planned to offer “a one-stop hacking shop for governments that require extra capability to fight terrorists and other threats to national security in the digital domain,” with “a special focus on [hacking] the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), covering tech like Amazon Echo, Nest connected home products, as well as connected fridges, thermostats and alarms.”

The Israel-based company, which raised $12.5 million within months of launching, has since been busy marketing its services to governments around the world, most recently France where it described its product portfolio as “empower[ing] governments, Intelligence, and law enforcement agencies to enhance Homeland Security with groundbreaking cyber-intelligence and operational capabilities” during an exposition in Paris last November.

Even though Toka openly markets the ability to hack private consumer devices to governments and law enforcement agencies around the world, the clear threat to privacy has gone ignored by media outlets as the company has garnered nearly no media attention since it launched nearly two years ago.

Yet, Toka is not only notable for what it offers but also for its founders and investors. Indeed, the co-founders of Toka have been described as an “all-star” team, largely because of the role of former Israeli Prime Minister and former head of Israeli military intelligence, Ehud Barak. Barak, in addition to co-founding the company, serves as its director and is also the chairman of the board of the controversial Israeli company Carbyne911, which markets software to emergency call centers in the United States. Interestingly, Cybereason’s 2020 doomsday election simulation also dealt with the hacking and weaponization of 911 call centers. Also of note is the fact that another of Carbyne911’s leadership team, former Unit 8200 commander Pinchas Buchris, is an adviser to Cybereason.

Toka’s top brass is a who’s who of former Israeli military and intelligence officials

In addition to Barak, Toka was co-founded by retired Brigadier General Yaron Rosen, former Chief of the IDF’s cyber staff, where he was “the lead architect of all [IDF] cyber activities” including those executed by Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200. Rosen, who now serves as Toka’s CEO, has stated that Toka’s technology will only be sold to countries allied with the U.S. and Israel, telling Forbes that “Russia, China and ‘other enemy countries’ would never be customers.”

Toka’s leadership and software architects are similarly tied into Israel’s national security state. Several — including the “architect” of its hacking software — previously worked for Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office and developed “offensive technologies” for Israel’s head of state and other top Toka employees and executives share numerous connections to Unit 8200, other divisions of Israeli military intelligence and Unit 8200-connected tech companies like Check Point Technologies.

Though Toka’s leadership team makes its ties to Israeli military intelligence abundantly clear, important connections also appear in examining Toka’s investors. One of the major investors in Toka is Dell technologies, one of the world’s largest technology companies that was founded by Michael Dell, a well-known pro-Israel partisan who has donated millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF and one of the top supporters of the so-called “anti-BDS” bills that prevent publicly employed individuals or public institutions from supporting non-violent boycotts of Israel, even on humanitarian grounds. It goes without saying that a major technology company investing in a company that markets the hacking of that very technology (computers, IoT, smartphones, etc.) should be a red flag.

With a major foot in the door through its connections to Dell, whose products are used by the private and public sectors around the world, other investors in Toka again reveal its ties to Israel’s military intelligence and the same controversial Israeli tech companies that have aggressively spied on the U.S. government in the past — Amdocs and Comverse. For instance, Entrèe Capital, a venture capital fund that is one of Toka’s main investors, is managed by Aviad Eyal and Ran Achituv. The latter, who manages Entrée’s investment in Toka and sits on Toka’s board of directors, is the founder of the IDF’s satellite-based signals intelligence unit and also a former senior Vice President at both Amdocs and Comverse Infosys (Verint).

Another notable investor in Toka is the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, which is advised by former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, a close friend of the infamous pedophile Jeffery Epstein, whose own ties to Israeli military intelligence have been discussed in several MintPress reports. Epstein was also a close friend of Ehud Barak, co-founder and director of Toka, and invested at least $1 million in another company with close ties to Barak, Carbyne911. The remaining investors in Toka are Launch Capital, which is deeply tied to the Pritzker family — one of the wealthiest families in the U.S. with close ties to the Clintons and Obamas as well as the U.S.’ pro-Israel lobby, and Ray Rothrock, a venture capitalist who spent nearly three decades at VenRock, the Rockefeller family venture capital fund.

Unit 8200 – From Hacking Cars to Protecting Them?

Arguably the most disturbing aspect of Cybereason’s “Operation Blackout” election simulation was the hacking of vehicles that were then rammed into civilians waiting in line to vote at polling stations. In the simulation, this led to scores of dead Americans and hundreds of injuries.

As was the case with other technologies used to undermine the 2020 election in the simulation, this technology — the hacking of vehicles — is the bread and butter of an Israeli cybersecurity firm called Upstream Security that specializes in automobiles and boasts deep ties to the country’s military intelligence service.

Though vehicle hacking seemed out of left field when the 2020 election simulation took place last November, media reports about the imminent dangers of “car hacking” began to emerge just a month after the exercise took place, most of which cited a December 2019 report created by Upstream. Some of those reports have warned that car hacking could be used to undermine the coming U.S. election.

One report titled “Car Hacking Hits the Streets,” cites only Upstream’s report to claim that “In 2020, the connected-car market will reach a tipping point, with the majority of vehicles already connected to the Internet when sold in the United States, representing a large base of potential targets for attacks.” Another report, titled “New study shows just how bad vehicle hacking has gotten,” uses Upstream’s report (i.e. study) to claim that hacks of regular vehicles have exploded since 2016 and that most of the cars on U.S. roads today are vulnerable to hackers and that over 80 percent of those hacks occur remotely.

Neither report noted Upstream’s ties to Israeli military intelligence. Equally notable is the fact that both reports that covered the Upstream-written study say that only manufacturers can address the problem by partnering with a company like Upstream.

A screenshot from an Upstream promotional video

Lucky for Upstream, they have already partnered with a slew of auto manufacturers, including Hyundai, Volvo, Renault and even U.S. auto insurance giants like Nationwide, who now number among Upstream’s most important investors. The company’s original investors are Charles River Ventures, one of Cybereason’s first investors, and Israeli venture capital firm Glilot Capital.

Glilot Capital’s interest in Upstream is telling given the firm’s deep ties to Israel’s Unit 8200. Glilot was founded by two former Israeli military intelligence officers and has “a heavy focus on the cyber sector and the entrepreneurs who emerge from the elite Unit 8200,” according to the Jerusalem Post. Even the name of the firm is an homage to Unit 8200, as the unit’s main base is located in Glilot, near Herzliya.

“It’s as if Americans called a VC Fort Meade Capital [the US Army base in Maryland where the National Security Agency and the United States Cyber Command are headquartered], some VC names are meant to be symbolic, as in our case. Glilot is the home of several of the best intelligence and technology units in the IDF, it’s where we came from and it is where we find our best entrepreneurs,” Glilot Capital co-founder Arik Kleinstein told the Jerusalem Post in 2016.

Upstream is certainly the type of company that Glilot Capital is used to investing in. It was founded by two Israelis who both served in the IDF, with one of them serving in an elite intelligence unit. Upstream’s co-founders, Yoav Levy and Yonathan Appel, met while working at Check Point Technologies, the Unit 8200 alumni-founded company with deep ties to Israel’s military intelligence and military-industrial complex as well as the IoT hacking company Toka. Notably, Upstream recently partnered with the Japanese company Fujitsu, a longtime partner with Softbank — Cybereason’s main investor.

Softbank has also invested heavily in another Unit 8200-founded vehicle security start-up called Argus Cyber Security, a firm known for its numerous demonstrations showing how easy it is to hack vehicles. Argus is also backed by Nadav Zafrir, the former Unit 8200 commander who now runs Team8. Argus’ CEO Ofer Ben-Noon, a former captain in Unit 8200, told Forbes in 2014 that “Everything will be hacked in every single [car] brand. It will take time, it might be weeks, months, or a couple of years, but eventually it will happen.”

Since then, Unit 8200 alumni from Argus, Upstream and other Israeli automobile cybersecurity firms have shown media outlets around the world how much easier hacking vehicles has become in the years since Ben-Noon first made the claim. One such report from VICE includes a vehicle hacking demonstration, courtesy of a Unit 8200 alumni, and notes that “most cars today are susceptible to hacker attacks.”

Of course, Unit 8200 isn’t the only intelligence agency known to be experts at hacking vehicles. Indeed, in 2017, WikiLeaks revealed that the CIA was capable of hacking vehicles and exploring their use in committing “undetectable assassinations.”

“Bring down nations to their knees”

At the Tel Aviv Cybertech Conference in 2017, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated the following:

Today warfare has changed dramatically…With a click of a button, you can bring down nations to their knees very rapidly if you so desire and if you’re willing to take the risks, because every system can be hacked. Our hospitals, our airplanes, our cars, our banks. The most important word here is our data banks, they can be hacked.”

Media reports and even members of the Israeli public and private sector have openly acknowledged that Israel’s intelligence apparatus — from Unit 8200 to the Mossad — remains directly linked to many of the private technology companies founded by its former members, especially in the field of cybersecurity. Though reports on the matter often praise this merging of Israel’s public and private spheres, they rarely acknowledge the documented corruption within Unit 8200, the unit’s dark past in recruiting felons and even pedophiles to join its ranks, or the danger posed by having companies directly linked to foreign intelligence being given access to the U.S. government’s most classified and sensitive systems and data.

The last omission is particularly troubling given that Israeli intelligence has not only been caught aggressively using private tech companies to spy on U.S. federal agencies and networks, but also intercepting the private communications of at least two U.S. presidents and using a notorious pedophile to sexually blackmail American politicians.

As was mentioned in the first installment of this series, Cybereason’s CEO Lior Div offers a clear example of this worrisome bridge between Israel’s public and private sector, as Div has openly stated that he views his work at Cybereason as a “continuation” of his service to Israeli military intelligence, where he led offensive cyberattacks against other nations.

Given Div’s past statements and his company’s clear ties to both Israeli and U.S. intelligence, Cybereason’s simulation of the 2020 U.S. election — which involved terrorist attacks and led to the election’s cancellation and the imposition of martial law — is highly concerning. This is particularly so considering that Cybereason’s investors have direct ties to individuals who would benefit from the election’s cancellation and also considering the clear narrative that has emerged in recent months regarding how the coming election will inevitably fall victim to tech-driven “chaos” in coming months.

The clear overlap between Cybereason’s simulation and the intelligence-driven media narrative is clear cause for concern, especially considering that the technologies that they highlight as ultimately upending the election are dominated by the very same intelligence agencies simulating and crafting that narrative.

The keyword that has been used to describe the end result of both Cybereason’s simulation and the prevailing media narrative regarding the 2020 election is “chaos,” chaos so imminent, widespread and unruly that it will shake American democracy to its core.

What has been left unsaid, however, is that a government’s solution to “chaos” is always the imposition of “order.” This means that — whatever “chaos” ultimately ensues prior to or on election day — will result in a government response that will do much more to crush freedom and undermine democracy than any act of foreign meddling has, be it real or imagined.

Author Joseph Atwill has steered away from the mainstream scholarly consensus that Jesus Christ did exist, suggesting that his biography was constructed, sometimes through unobvious parallels, on that of first-century Roman Emperor Titus Flavius.

Joseph Atwill, an American self-described Bible scholar, has claimed that Christianity emerged as a Roman conspiracy to quell the Jewish resistance, and that Jesus Christ was fabricated as a “psychological warfare” after conventional means proved ineffective.

“Jewish sects in Palestine at the time, who were waiting for a prophesied warrior Messiah, were a constant source of violent insurrection during the first century,” said Atwill, who authored a controversial book titled Caesar’s Messiah, which argues that the New Testament gospels were written as wartime propaganda by first-century Roman scholars.

He claimed that the goal was to conceive a peaceful Jewish sect in a bid to balance out strong pro-independence sentiment in the province of Roman Judea, which saw a series of revolts by Jewish people against Rome.

“When the Romans had exhausted conventional means of quashing rebellion, they switched to psychological warfare. They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system,” Atwill explained.

“That’s when the ‘peaceful’ Messiah story was invented. Instead of inspiring warfare, this Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and encouraged Jews to ‘give onto Caesar’ and pay their taxes to Rome.”

Atwill argued that Jesus Christ “may be the only fictional character in literature whose entire life story can be traced to other sources. Once those sources are all laid bare, there’s simply nothing left.”

He purported that the Romans fabricated the story of Jesus Christ sometime after the Jewish revolt of 66-73 A.D., which came to be the first of three major rebellions.

Atwill said he made the discovery when he was studying The Wars of the Jews by historian Flavius Josephus, the only known complete first-century account of the history of Judaism.

According to Atwill, the biography of Jesus, as detailed in the New Testament, was modelled on the biography of Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus, who destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple and soon suppressed the first revolt.

“I started to notice a sequence of parallels between the two texts,” Atwill recounted. “Although it’s been recognised by Christian scholars for centuries that the prophecies of Jesus appear to be fulfilled by what Josephus wrote about in the First Jewish-Roman war, I was seeing dozens more.”

“What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of Titus Flavius as described by Josephus. This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern,” he said, adding that the biography of Jesus was constructed “tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar.”

Atwill maintained that Romans left “a kind of puzzle literature… and the solution to that puzzle is ‘We invented Jesus Christ, and we’re proud of it.’”

He went on to describe Christianity as an “insidious form of mind control that has led to blind acceptance of serfdom, poverty, and war throughout history.”

“To this day, especially in the United States, it is used to create support for war in the Middle East,” he said.

The author acknowledged that his conclusions were not meant to “cause Christians any harm,” but raising awareness is important to tell “the truth about our past so we can understand how and why governments create false histories and false gods. They often do it to obtain a social order that is against the best interests of the common people.”

https://sputniknews.com/world/201907131076233501-romans-invented-jesus-us-scholar-claims/

…by Jonas E. Alexis

The idea that Jewish behavior is genetic is like a house full of smoke, which can suffocate and assault a serious thinking person. It is filled with contradictions and no apologist has ever bothered to explain those contradictions.

The New Jewish Encyclopedia (1962) by David Bridger and Samuel Wolk reinforces what the old Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) said about the history of the Khazarian people. It states that Hasdai Ibn Shaprut (915-975) was a

“Physician, diplomat and patron of Jewish learning in Spain. Hasdai served under two Cordova caliphs, and carried out important diplomatic missions. A famous scholar, he surrounded himself with learned Jews of his day and sponsored important literary works.

“With him, it is said, was inaugurated the Golden Era of Jewish literature in Spain…Hasdai’s name is particularly remembered in connection with his correspondence with Joseph, king of the Khazars, who embraced Judaism.”[1]

It also states that there is a story about “the Khazars and their king Bulan” converting to Judaim in 740.[2] Then we find this. The Khazars are

“A Mongolian people who embraced Judaism and flourished from the 8th through the 10th centuries on the territory extending between the Don and the Volga rivers, and the shores of the Blacks, Caspian and Azov Seas.

“The story of the existence of such converts to Judaism reached the Jewish statesman Hasdai ibn Shaprut of Cordova in the 10th century. As a result, Shaprut wrote a letter which was ultimately received by Joseph, king of the Khazars, with the help of Jewish tradesmen from Germany and Hungary.

“In his reply King Joseph gave a detailed account of the history of the kingdom of the Khazars and their conversion to Judaism. Bulan, the pagan ruler of the Khazars, in his desire to embrace the ‘true religion’ had summoned representatives of the Christian, Moslem and Jewish faiths to expound their views on the superiority of their respective religion.

“Bulan thus became convinced of the truth of the Jewish faith, and he, as well as many of his noblemen, embraced Judaism, which later spread widely among the common people of the Khazar kingdom…

“The story of the mass conversion of the Khazars to Judaism was used by Judah Halevi as background for his philosophic work the Kuzari, designed as a defense of the Jewish faith.”[3]

The New Jewish Encyclopedia moves on to say that Khazarian “Jews” spread across Europe, and some moved to places like Poland.[4] “During that early period Jews seemed to have enjoyed a privileged status, evidenced from current tales about a Jewish king in Poland, and from the fact that some polish coins had Hebrew inscriptions.”[5]

Those people, we are told, also had a powerful influence in places like Romania and Russia in the 8th century and beyond. “Jews came to Russia as early as the 9thcentury from the kingdom of the Khazars, and later from Crimea, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Galicia, and Bessarabia, which had at different periods been under Russian rule.”[6]

Sad to say, much of the modern Jewish literature, with a few exceptions, do not cite standard reference work or primary sources when it comes to dealing with this very specific issue. A classic representative of this would be Steven T. Katz.

Instead of looking at works such as the Jewish Encyclopedia and interacting with the serious argument, Katz argues that the Khazar theory “has been an influential theme among American anti-Semites since the immigration restrictionists of the 1920s…”[7]

Katz—who believes that “the word ‘genocide,’ if correctly understood, could be applied only to the travail of European Jewry in World War I”[8]—briefly mentioned Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe.

Yet Katz never pointed out that the Jewish Encyclopedia was published one year after Koestler was born, which is to say that Katz should have dealt with the arguments presented in that reference work first. Sadly, he never did. Therefore it is a categorical and historical mistake to postulate that Koestler was the progenitor of the Khazarian theory. He just popularized it.

In the old Jewish Encyclopedia, which provides a lengthy bibliography, we read in part:

“According to A. Harkavy (‘Meassef Niddaḥim,’ i.), the conversion took place in 620; according to others, in 740. King Joeph, in his letter to Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut (about 960), gives the following account of the conversion:

“Some centuries ago King Bulan reigned over the Chazars. To him God appeared in a dream and promised him might and glory. Encouraged by this dream, Bulan went by the road of Darlan to the country of Ardebil, where he gained great victories [over the Arabs].

“‘The Byzantine emperor and the calif of the Ishmaelites sent to him envoys with presents, and sages to convert him to their respective religions. Bulan invited also wise men of Israel, and proceeded to examine them all.’

“‘As each of the champions believed his religion to be the best, Bulan separately questioned the Mohammedans and the Christians as to which of the other two religions they considered the better. When both gave preference to that of the Jews, that king perceived that it must be the true religion. He therefore adopted it.’

“This account of the conversion was considered to be of a legendary nature. Harkavy, however (in ‘Bilbasov’ and ‘Yevreiskaya Biblioteka’), proved from Arabic and Slavonian sources that the religious disputation at the Chazarian court is a historical fact.

“Even the name of Sangari has been found in a liturgy of Constantine the Philosopher (Cyrill). It was one of the successors of Bulan, named Obadiah, who regenerated the kingdom and strengthened the Jewish religion.

“On the whole, King Joseph’s account agrees generally with the evidence given by the Arabic writers of the tenth century, but in detail it contains a few discrepancies.”

You can dismiss all this evidence as sheer nonsense, but let us be clear: an avalanche of historical scholarship has pointed to that conclusion in one way or another.[9]

“The Khazars underscored their allegiance to the Jewish faith by adopting the Hebrew script and Hebrew personal names,” says historian Kevin Alan Brook, “even to the extent of naming some of their children after Jewish holidays such as Pesach and Hanukkha.”[10]

More recently, historian Jim Wald wrote in the Times of Israel:

“It is well known that, sometime in the eighth to ninth centuries, the Khazars, a warlike Turkic people, converted to Judaism and ruled over a vast domain in what became southern Russia and Ukraine.

“What happened to them after the Russians destroyed that empire around the eleventh century has been a mystery. Many have speculated that the Khazars became the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews…

“Until now. In 2012, Israeli researcher Eran Elhaik published a study claiming to prove that Khazar ancestry is the single largest element in the Ashkenazi gene pool. Sand declared himself vindicated, and progressive organs such as Haaretz and The Forward trumpeted the results…

“Israel seems finally to have thrown in the towel. A blue-ribbon team of scholars from leading research institutions and museums has just issued a secret report to the government, acknowledging that European Jews are in fact Khazars. (Whether this would result in yet another proposal to revise the words to “Hatikvah” remains to be seen.).”

“Having heard of the report, Netanyahu said off the record:

“We first thought that admitting we are really Khazars was one way to get around Abbas’s insistence that no Jew can remain in a Palestinian state. Maybe we were grasping at straws. But when he refused to accept that, it forced us to think about more creative solutions.

“The Ukrainian invitation for the Jews to return was a godsend. Relocating all the settlers within Israel in a short time would be difficult for reasons of logistics and economics. We certainly don’t want another fashlan like the expulsion of the settlers in the Gaza Hitnatkut[disengagement].”[11]

Some have dismissed all this research by saying that DNA evidence shows that the Khazarian theory is false. What those people will never have the courage to say is that a large section of the so-called DNA evidence has been shown to be false[12]and that other extrapolations which are built on the same hypothesis are simply functions of the Talmudic literature, which rabbis have propounded for years. This is why rabbis can say things like,

“The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle”—Rabbi Kook the Elder[13]

“the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of (members) of all nations of the world…A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity.”—Rabbi Menachem Mandel[14]

“The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world…The Jewish body ‘looks as if it were in substance similar to bodies of non-Jews,’ but the meaning…is that the bodies only seem to be similar in material substance, outward look and superficial quality.

“The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews] ‘and their bodies are in vain…’”—Rabbi Schneerson[15]

The laughable thing about this whole issue is that the people who believe that Jewish behavior is genetic argue that those Rabbis and Talmudic literature are liars and racists! Which is it?

I pointed out a few months ago to a proponent of the genetic theory that if Jewish behavior is primarily about DNA—which by the way is what the rabbinic literature propounds—then one must go all the way. That is, on what rational basis can we say that the same rabbinic literature is wrong when it postulates that the Goyim are just beasts? Are we not playing dice with the enemy when we are adopting their fraudulent and unnecessary theories?

I also pointed out that the rabbinic literature makes a diabolical case for killing the Palestinians, since they argue that “Jews” were in Palestine in the first place.

The same proponent quickly pointed out that the Old Testament claims that other people were there before the Hebrews came along. Now get this: this proponent did not even believe in the stories of the Old Testament but he was building his case using the Old Testament!

I asked him to explain this inevitable contradiction to me, but he never could. I also asked him to explain how people like Gilad Atzmon, Brother Nathanael Kappner, among others, got rid of their bad DNA. He did not have an answer, either.

Why?

Because the idea that Jewish behavior is genetic is like a house full of smoke, which can suffocate and assault a serious thinking person. It is filled with contradictions and no apologist has ever bothered to explain those contradictions.

This article was first published in 2015.

By
VT Editors –

September 28, 2019
Introduction
–
The Library of Congress has now digitized American newspapers from the late 19th through late 20th century. You can search births and deaths, bankruptcies, news analysis, shopping, anything.
–
This was a vast undertaking and quite revealing, let me tell you why.
–
America was founded by largely slave owning farmers who took advantage of cheap labor and free land. However, within half a century, trade and industrialization had transferred most financial and governmental functions of the US to the same group in Europe that controlled Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, in fact all of Europe.
–
You see, as the Founding Fathers fell to the wayside, new “familes” emerged, American sounding names, Astor (Astorga-Sephardic), Cabot (Cabota-Sephardic) or Rockefeller, Bush and even Drumpf.
–
For fake German families like the Drumpf’s, minor functionaries for the Rothschilds, running whores for the gold fields of California or the Yukon led them to controlling gold claims, and later establishing themselves in the world’s largest trafficking industry, the immigration boom of the 19th century, whores, Irish to fight the civil war, more whores, and the slaves that filled the immigrant neighborhoods of New York, Boston and a dozen other cities that organized crime, not Irish, not Italian but RKM, lived off then and still lives off today.
–
When you hunt for births, deaths, land purchases, family relations, all the things millions of Americans have mentioned in news snips now in the Library of Congress, these families won’t exist.
–
Their history will be a fiction.
–
More often than not, when looking at the Skull and Bones families or the Robber Barons, one finds wealth originating from New York banking houses that were 100% “European” owned, meaning formerly Sephardic Spain, then Venice or Genoa, then to Frankfurt or Amsterdam and on to London, all owned by the same people who now control the Federal Reserve, the RKM and the State of Israel.
–
We see a pattern. The “West” was developed through St. Louis where Kuhn and Loeb, of the Rothschilds, outfitted wagon trains, later took over rail roads, then the cattle business, then the oil business and of course the grain business and then the exchanges, commodities and stock markets.
–
They were aided by Jacob Schiff, who ran America’s banking, JP Morgan was a front so was Harriman. Behind them the mysterious Bush family, who some claim to be of the “Scherf” Nazi clan but others who use more recent sources now see as of the family of Schiff, the original family of Zionism, the Jakob Schiff who maneuvered Russia and China into war in 1905, brought the US into the “Fed” and World War I and II and, later on, through “agents,” came 9/11 and the War on Terror.
–
William of Orange – Jewish donkey and homosexual​

–
William of Orange, known to his bum buddies as Billy the Pink, was a Dutch nobody who was picked up by the Amsterdam Jews with a very particular purpose in mind. The Jews had been run out of England by King Edward I in 1290 for their usury and several of their members being convicted of holding human sacrifices with Christian children as their victims.

The Jews had found England a very profitable place indeed, and made many attempts to regain entry – including funding Oliver Cromwell, who toyed with the idea of giving Ireland to the Jews as a New Zion – once he had completed the extermination of the Irish people. In the end, Cromwell never did allow the Jews back into England – though he had taken their money.

The Jews had been the backroom boys of the Roman empire. They followed the Legions around Europe, buying conquered peoples as slaves – particularly blond haired Celtic and Germanic girls who fetched a high price in Southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. They had also amassed a fortune by lending at interest to the Roman officers and soldiers – knowing that the Romans would simply rob what they needed to pay back the loans.

The main reason that Julius Caesar conquered Gaul was because he was up to his neck in debt and his family was in danger of being declared bankrupt and their estates foreclosed. Caesar boasted that he murdered a million Gauls and enslaved another million – that’s a million Celtic people sold to the Jews as slaves. That was the worst Holocaust in European history – and all because one man was up to his neck in debt.

Following the collapse of the Roman empire, the Jews fell on hard times. Both Christianity and Islam tried to stop the Holocaust that usury had created, and for a few centuries the people of Europe had a little bit of peace and comfort. But, the discovery of the Americas by the Spanish gave the Jews a golden opportunity to get back to their old business.

They funded the ships – there were even a large number of Jews on Colombus’ first voyage – Conversos, Jews who had pretended to convert to Christianity for the purpose of business. By the time Cortez reached South America, he was up to his eye balls in debt. And even though he looted untold billions worth of gold and silver in today’s money – he died a poor man in debt.

As in the old days of the Roman empire, the Jews made sure the Spanish soldiers were nothing but their donkeys. And the more these donkeys fell into debt, the more vicious and genocidal was their behaviour towards the native people, as they desperately tried to rob enough gold to get ahead of their debts.

The Spanish conquest of South America left Spain with crippling debts – and the Jews with unimaginable wealth. As often happened over the course of history, the Spanish became very hostile to the Jews who had tricked them out of a vast fortune. So, the Jews moved their money to Amsterdam, where already a Liberal mindset ruled.

The Jews got back to work and soon the Dutch empire overshadowed the Spanish empire, and Jewish profit soared. But, Amsterdam was always under the the influence of the Spanish king – and sometimes under direct Spanish occupation.

It wasn’t an ideal situation. But, there was one place that was well out of Spanish control, had turned its back on Rome, and, most importantly, was protected by the sea. England was like a massive aircraft carrier off the coast of Europe. Near enough for business purposes – but far enough so that the Pope and the King of Spain couldn’t dominate it. But, there was one very big problem – the Jews were banned from England.

Enter William of Orange. The Catholic King James had irritated the English Protestants, and they were looking for someone to overthrow him. But they didn’t have the resources or the organisation to do anything about it. The Jews had both.

But they wanted their man on the throne of England – not just any Protestant. After all, they had funded Cromwell’s wars only to end up with nothing. Well, the rest is history. What’s interesting from the point of view of this topic is the price the Jews extracted for their support of William’s invasion of England, Scotland and Ireland.

The ban on the Jews entering England was immediately lifted. But, even that was not the big prize. The big prize was the founding of the Bank of England. The Jews had founded the Bank of Amsterdam in 1609. It was the world’s first real Central Bank. In 1694 William granted the Bank of England its charter.

It was a private bank. It’s shareholders were full of Jews with Spanish sounding names – Da Costa, A Fonseca, A Mendes, A Nunes, A Henriquez, Rodrigues, A Salvador, De Mattos, De Medina. But although it was a private bank, it immediately acted as if it were the government. Because it had huge capital compared to native English banks, it could put any English bank out of business instantly.

It could do this by simply calling in all the paper notes of any English bank that displeased it. Since at that time notes had to be backed up by gold, the Bank of England would simply buy up all the notes of a rebellious bank – and then present them all at once demanding gold in return. When the victim bank couldn’t hand over so much gold – it would be declared bankrupt and closed down.

And once the Bank of England made that point clear to everybody, it made a rule that any other bank that wanted to stay in business had to deposit a certain amount of gold in the Bank of England – or be closed down. The Jews had English banking by the balls. From now on, the banking and financial system of England and the British empire was, in fact, the banking and financial system of the Jews.

By STEVE SAILER

From blog of a genetic testing company called My Heritage DNA:

Hungary’s Secret: New Study by MyHeritage Reveals that Hungary Has the World’s Second Largest Percentage of Population with Jewish Ancestry
By Esther ·
August 14, 2019

A new study that we’ve conducted in conjunction with expert statistician and demographer Dr. Daniel Staetsky has uncovered that there are surprising numbers of people descended from Jewish ancestors in Hungary — far higher than previously estimated by demographers.

Our analysis of a huge cohort of 1.8 million anonymized DNA tests — the first of its kind in Jewish demography research — has revealed that the country with the highest proportion of Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity after Israel is Hungary, and not the United States as was previously believed. After Israel, the top countries in terms of significant Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity were Hungary and Russia, followed by Argentina, South Africa, Ukraine, and then the USA.

So I imagine that they are counting people who are, say, 1/4th Jewish as Jewish in this. In the U.S., there aren’t yet a lot of people who are 1/4th Jewish, although there will be. When I look at list of old guys, like the Forbes 400 or the top political donors, most are either Jewish or gentile but not both. But, apparently, things are different in Hungary.

Update: They explain exactly what they are doing in terms of cut-offs below.

This shows that there is a significant number of people in Hungary who have a Jewish heritage background that they do not acknowledge, are not aware of, or that their ancestors intentionally repressed.

MyHeritage collaborated with Dr. Daniel Staetsky, Director of the European Jewish Demography Unit at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, who conceived the study….

Among the 100 countries included in the research, the country that stood out with the highest percentage of Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity outside of Israel was Hungary. 7.6% of the 4,981 people living in Hungary who took the MyHeritage DNA test were found to have 25% or more Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity (equivalent to having at least one grandparent who is fully Ashkenazi Jewish). This is a significantly higher percentage than the 3.5% observed in DNA test-takers living in the USA and the 3.0% in Canada.

Keep in mind that people who are part Jewish might be more inclined to pay for a DNA test to find out than a random person.

Hungary’s lead grows further at lower thresholds for Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity. 12.5% of the people tested in Hungary have 10% or more Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity, compared to only 4.7% of people in the USA and 4.0% in Canada. Meanwhile, 4.2% of people tested in Hungary have 50% or more Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity (equivalent to having at least one parent who is fully Jewish), compared to 2.3% in the USA.

… Dr. Staetsky suggests accounting for a degree of selectivity of MyHeritage users. Since commercial genetic testing is an activity where the most educated and well-to-do classes of a society will be over-represented, he accounted for such selectivity, estimating the number of people with 50% or more Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity in Hungary as 130,000.

This is significantly higher than some recent estimates. Official statistics set the number of Jews in Hungary at only 10,965, according to the 2013 national census. Alternative estimates, such as the estimate produced by Professor Sergio DellaPergola, show that the number of people in Hungary who self-identify as Jews — for example, when asked in a survey — comes to 47,500 people or 0.49% of the population.

Larger estimates of the population with Jewish ancestry in Hungary, produced by Professor Andras Kovacs, give a range of 73,000 to 138,000 people with at least one Jewish parent. Thus, the estimate based on MyHeritage data aligns well with the high end of some demographic estimates, lending credibility to both the traditional demographic methods and to the novel estimates based on genetic testing.

Ashkenazi Jews throughout the past centuries have lived in isolated communities that developed unique genetic signatures. … Previous studies have found Ashkenazi Jews to be a clear, homogeneous genetic group. …

Jews have a long history in Hungary, with Jewish officials having served the king during the early 13th-century reign of Andrew II. By the early 20th century, the Jewish community constituted 5% of Hungary’s total population (comparable to MyHeritage’s findings) and Jews comprised 23% of the population of the capital, Budapest. Seven of the thirteen Nobel prize winners born in Hungary are Jewish. However, by 1941, over 17% of Budapest’s Jews were Roman Catholic converts, following coordinated pressure across Europe that began with the Spanish Inquisition in the late 15th century. Like many ethnic minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary’s Jews had rapidly assimilated in the decades preceding the Holocaust. In the Holocaust, about 560,000 of Hungary’s Jews were murdered. The trauma of the Holocaust and the subsequent communist rule led to portions of the Jewish community either being completely unaware of their Jewish identity or discouraged from divulging it. …

In Russia, the study revealed results similar to those in Hungary, with many more people having Jewish ethnicity than expected by demographers. 7.5% of the 5,266 DNA test-takers living in Russia had Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity of 25% or more, making it the country with the third-largest percentage of Jewish ethnicity in the world, after Israel and Hungary.

… When setting the threshold of Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity at 50% or more, the percentage in Russia drops to 3.1%, compared to 4.2% in Hungary. This indicates that in Russia, people who were ethnically Jewish tended to marry non-Jewish people at a greater frequency than in Hungary, which means that Jewish ethnicity in Russia is dissolving at a higher rate than in Hungary.

Here in the San Fernando Valley, there are now a whole bunch of people who are kind of Russian and kind of Jewish. Maybe they were born in the Soviet Union, qualified as Jewish enough to move to Israel, then bounced to L.A.

You don’t hear about them a lot, even though they congregate at the heart of the entertainment industry in places like West Hollywood and The Valley. One reason is because conventional American-born Jews are lately heavily into Russophobia, seeing Putin as the neo-Czar, so the existence of a lot of kind of Jewish Russians and kind of Russian Jews is disconcerting for the predominant worldview in which Russians are seen as dangerous anti-Semites.

Razib Khan points to intermarriage as early as 1780 for the diffusion of Jewish genes in Hungary:

A massive wave of demographic expansion occurred among Ashkenazi Jews after 1500. In the 18th-century Jewish fertility was far greater than gentile fertility in Poland. This resulted in an increase in the Jewish proportion over time, but likely also assimilation of some Jews into Christian society. The “Jewish Enlightenment”, spanning the 100 years between 1780 and 1880, was also a period when massive defections occurred from the more integrated elements of the Central European Jewry. Moses Mendelssohn’s last male descendant to practice Judaism died in 1871, after one century of assimilation and conversion.

Budapest was famous for smart Jews (e.g., John von Neumann), which I suspect correlates with early openness to intermarriage.

Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com

This month in London marks the 100th anniversary of the first “London Gold Fixing”, the infamous daily meeting of a secretive cartel of bullion banks which has met since 1919 to set benchmark gold prices used throughout the international gold market, a meeting which continues to this day through its thinly disguised successor, the LBMA Gold Price auction.

London gold price benchmarks are critically important to the global gold market because they are used as a valuation source for everything from ISDA gold interest rate swap contracts to gold-backed Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), and everything from OTC gold contracts to transaction reference prices used by physical bullion dealers when purchasing gold bars and gold coins from refineries and suppliers.

Since 2015, the London Gold Fixing has been known as the LBMA Gold Price following a rush by the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) bullion banks to patch over the then scandalized ‘Fixing’ in a smoke and mirrors and circle the wagons relaunch and renaming exercise. The collusive Gold Fixing first formally came into existence on 12 September 1919 when the Bank of England tapped its favorite bankers N.M. Rothschild & Sons to be the daily Fixing’s permanent chairman. Rothschild and the Bank of England had been joined at the hip since the early 1800s and would continue to be so in the Gold Fixing throughout the next century.

The 1919 launch of the Gold Fixing by the Bank of England and Rothschild succeeded a more informal version of a gold fixing that had existed up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, which consisted of a meeting of four London gold brokers Mocatta & Goldsmid, Samuel Montagu, Sharps & Wilkins, and Pixley & Abell who between them set a daily gold price at the offices of Sharps & Wilkins.

For the next 85 years from its inception in September 1919, the Gold Fixing occurred daily at Rothschild’s headquarters in New Court, St. Swithins Lane, across the road from the Bank of England, with five men from five bullion banks religiously meeting at 10:30 am each morning. After the collapse of the London Gold Pool in 1968, the Gold Fixing moved to a twice per day pricing with an extra 3:00 pm meeting added by the fixers to ‘watch over’ the US morning hours gold market.

Rothschild would remain as the Gold Fixing’s permanent chairman until May 2004 at which point the fabled investment bank mysteriously departed the gold fixing and stepped back into the shadows after 200 years in the London Gold Market. Until now that is, for in one of its rare re-appearances, the LBMA’s seminar and cocktail reception to celebrate the Gold Fixing’s centenary took place this week at, you guessed it, NM Rothschilds’ headquarters in St Swithins Lane. In the words of the LBMA, the ‘momentous occasion’ of the centenary celebrations is being:

“held on the centenary of the first gold price, and held in the current Rothschild building which was built on the site of (the second) New Court, St Swithin’s Lane, where the first gold price was set. We are grateful to Rothschild & Co for their support in co-hosting this event with LBMA.”

N.M. Rothschild’s London headquarters at New Court in St Swithin’s Lane, City of London

So is the centenary of the Gold Fixing the ‘momentous occasion’ that the LBMA pitches it as, or is a more realistic perspective needed to counterbalance the cheerleading hullabaloo from the LBMA camp?

Let’s take a look, drawing on some of the many articles on this website and elsewhere that have covered aspects of the infamous gold fixing over the course of its existence, including articles that have looked at more recent LBMA Gold Price. After all, the LBMA Gold Price is just another name for the Gold Fixing, and was conceded as such by the LBMA press office this month when they threw pretense out of the window, saying that: “12 September 2019 marks the centenary of the first London gold price, or what is now known as the LBMA Gold Price.”

The very definition of the centenary as covering 1919 – 2019 underscores the continuity of the “London Gold Fixing – LBMA Gold Price” as one and the same thing, with the LBMA Gold Price just a disguised and more palatable version of the Gold Fixing, a classic case of same old wine in a new bottle, and a pricing process still controlled by the Bank of England and the bullion banks.

Permanent Fixtures – Rothschild and Bank of England

So how did the old five gold fixers of Mocatta & Goldsmid, Samuel Montagu, Sharps & Wilkins, Pixley & Abell and of course NM Rothschild end up being the modern day five gold fixers of HSBC, Deustsche Bank, Barclays, Scotia, and SocGen, five banks which were exclusively running the Fixing until the 2014-2015 timeframe? To give a quick recap it was as follows.

The five former gold fixers in the offices of Rothschild in London where the fixings took place until 2004.

In 1957, Sharps & Wilkins merged with Pixley & Abell to become Sharps Pixley. In 1966, at the ‘behest of the Bank of England’, the Kleinwort Benson investment bank bought Sharps Pixley. In 1993, Deutsche Bank took over Kleinwort Benson, and in doing so acquired one of the seats at the Gold Fixing.

In 1957, Mocatta & Goldsmid was acquired by Hambros Bank, who then sold Mocatta to Standard Chartered Bank in 1973. In 1997, Scotiabank bought Mocatta Bullion from Standard Chartered to form ScotiaMocatta. That explains gold fixing seat number two.

In 1967, Midland Bank took control of Samuel Montagu, and made it a fully owned subsidiary by 1974. In 1992, Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) fully acquired Midland Bank, and thus acquired the third of the five seats at the Gold Fixing.

As a major gold refiner, Johnson Matthey (JM) had been involved in the gold fixing from the 1920s but in the early 1960s JM formed Johnson Matthey Bankers Ltd (JMB) which took on one of the seats in the fixing. In 1984, JMB collapsed in one of London’s most memorable financial and gold market scandals and the Bank of England bought JMB, selling it on to Mase Westpac, the gold trading division of Australian bank Westpac. In 1993, Republic National Bank of New York bought Mase Westpac’s fixing seat.

In 2000, HSBC also acquired Republic National Bank of New York. Since HSBC already had one of the five seats on the Gold Fixing, and Republic also had a seat (from its Mase Westpac purchase), HSBC then had two seats on the fixing, so sold one of these seats to Credit Suisse. In 2002, Credit Suisse sold on this seat to Societe Generale (SocGen). This explains Gold Fixing seat number four.

And of N.M. Rothschild? Well, in all of this you can see that the only thing permanent about the Gold Fixing throughout most of its history was the most powerful of all investment banks, NM Rothschild, as well as its old friend, the Bank of England operating behind the curtain. However in 2004, Rothschild mysteriously withdrew from the Gold Fixing. Was it a reprimand from the Bank of England for forcing the Bank to “stare into the abyss’ and sell British gold reserves to bail out a market short of physical gold, or was it the characteristic Rothschild habit of retreating into the shadows? Whatever the reason, in 2004 the Bank of England organised for the more pliable Barclays Bank to buy Rothschild’s gold fixing seat.

Notably, the Rothschild influence lived on with Barclay’s in the Gold Fixing because from 2006 to 2012, if you can believe this and its true, the chairman of Barclays was one Marcus Agius, who is son-in-law of former NM Rothschild chairman, Edmund de Rothschild.

For Rothschild, acquainted with the number five in the form of the five houses of Rothschild and its five arrows symbolism, the fact that there were only ever five seats on the Gold Fixing, is, to say the least coincidental, and maybe even symbolic. But as to which was the real puppet master in the London Gold Market, Rothschild or the Bank of England, that has always been the question.

The Bank of England’s not so hidden hand

The one constant in the Gold Fixing from its inception, apart from NM Rothschild, is of course the Bank of England, the central bank which controls and has always controlled the London Gold Market.

For example, the 1954 – 1968 period saw countless brazen attempts by the Bank of England and fellow central banks to cap the market price of gold at $35 per ounce, culminating in the infamous London Gold Pool, an experiment in gold price intervention from 1961 to 1968 which famously collapsed in March 1968 when the US Treasury ran out of Good Delivery gold bars despite the Bank of England as the Pool’s agent selling thousands of tonnes of gold into the Gold Fixings in late 1967 and early 1968.

But the the Bank of England had been regularly intervening into the Gold Fixing even before the London Gold Pool, to exercise what it aloofly called a ‘moderating influence’ on the gold price. This is starkly illustrated in the following passage from a Bank of England’s Quarterly Bulletin in 1964 in which it wrote (page 16):

“The Bank of England are not physically represented at the fixing. But they are able, like any other operator, effectively to participate in the fixing by passing orders by telephone through their bullion broker and at the fixing they use exclusively the services of the chairman of the market, namely, Rothschilds.

…, the Bank aim, as in the case of the foreign exchange and gilt-edged markets, to exercise, so far as they are able, a moderating influence on the market, in order to avoid violent and unnecessary movements in the price and thus to assist the market in the carrying on of its business.”

After the London Gold Pool collapsed in March 1968, the gold market reopened after two weeks using a two tier approach of an official gold price pegged at $35 per ounce for central banks, and a supposedly ‘free market’ gold price for everyone else. Notably, upon reopening, the daily Gold Fixing of Rothschild and friends switched to being priced in US dollars, and an afternoon fixing meeting was added 3:00 pm so as to allow the Bank of England and the five fixers to exert more control over morning trading hours in New York.

But if you think that the Bank of England bowed out of thinking about ways to manipulate the gold price in 1968, then you would be mistaken. On the contrary, it continued to scheme behind closed doors and in secretive ways right up to the modern era, including discussions with other G10 central bank governors at the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland in 1979 and 1980 about forming a new interventionist gold pool to “break the psychology of the market“ and hold the gold price “at a critical time holding it within a target area“ (see “New Gold Pool at the BIS Basle, Switzerland: Part 1” and “New Gold Pool at the BIS Basle: Part 2 – Pool vs Gold for Oil”).

The Bank of England also devised the London gold lending market, a top secretive and opaque market that emerged on the 1980s in which central banks lend out their gold via LBMA bullion banks, the lent gold positions of which are sold into the market and have a subduing effect on the price. Ask the LBMA and Bank of England for data on outstanding gold loans or the size of the lending market and you will not get an answer. The Bank of England also allowed the development unallocated gold position trading in London, a vast ponzi of paper gold positions (mere credit in the form of bullion bank promises) that have little or no backing of real gold, but whose trading still perversely is hugely influential in gold price discovery.

And the Bank of England’s “moderating influence” on the Gold Fixings also continued. This is illustrated by the astounding case of the head of the Bank of England’s foreign exchange and gold Terry Smeeton intervening into the Gold Fixing during the 1980s: “Terry’s gold activities, often partly aimed at helping the London Market’s daily gold fixes, produced an overall profit. To see exactly what this refers to, please see “The Bank of England and the London Gold Fixings in the 1980s”.

For anyone with doubts about how the London Gold Fixings have suppressed gold prices over time, take a look at the following chart from Nick Laird’s www.goldchartsrus.com website which shows three price lines of gold prices from 1970 when the price was $35 per troy ounce to 2019. In red is the actual US dollar gold price, in blue is the theoretical gold price if you bought at the afternoon London gold fix and held overnight and sold at the next day’s morning gold fix, in black is a theoretical gold price if you bought at the morning gold fix and sold same day at the afternoon gold fix.

The Fix is In – Subduing effects of the London Gold Fixings on gold prices over nearly 50 years. Source: www.goldchartsrus.com

Starting in 1970 when the price of gold was $35 per ounce, if every day you bought at the price of the afternoon Gold Fixing and sold 19.5 hours later at the price of the next day’s morning Gold Fixing price, your $35 would now be worth $15,843. That’s the cumulative value of the Overnight strategy. On the other hand if every trading day since 1970 you bought at the morning Gold Fixing price and sold 4.5 hours later at the afternoon Gold Fixing price, your $35 would now be worth, wait for it, just $3.33. That’s the cumulative value of the Intraday strategy. The key point is the the London Gold Fixings suppress the gold price intraday and that the current gold price of around $1500 is far lower than it should be because of the prices in these Gold Fixes. None of which is mentioned by the LBMA in its commentaries of the 100th anniversary of the Gold Fixing this month in London.

The London Gold Market Fixing Limited

Also not mentioned by the LBMA in its centenary celebrations this month is the fact that the incredibly named The London Gold Market Fixing Limited (LGMFL), a private company comprising the five member banks of the Gold Fixing (Barclays bank Plc, HSBC Bank USA, The Bank of Nova Scotia, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale), is still an active company on the UK Companies House register. And it does exactly what it says on the tin. Incorporated in January 1994, the company’s accounts are still prepared on a going concern basis because the company can’t be wound up as it is currently being sued in New York courts by class actions suits accusing LGMFL of involvement in gold price manipulation.

For example, the latest activity on the company register, just filed on 4 September 2019, shows the recent appointment of SocGen’s Francois Combes as a LGMFL director on 30 August 2019 , the termination of SocGen’s Vincent Domien, as a LGMFL director on the same date, and the termination of Scotia’s Steven Lowe in August 2018.

In addition to SocGen’s Francois Combes, other current directors of LGMFL are Simon Weeks of Scotia, Xavier Lannegrace of SocGen, Paul Voller of HSBC, and Jerzy Burmicz of Barclays. Deutsche Bank has successfully extracted itself from the LGMFL at this time. Recent filings also show the latest annual accounts for The London Gold Market Fixing Limited to December 2018, with a critical commentary that:

“The London Gold Market Fixing Limited four member banks have been named as defendants in class action lawsuits pending in the United States Federal Court for the Southern District of New York, the first of which was filed on 3 March 2014 in connection with their roles in setting the London benchmark gold price. The complaints allege among other things that The London Gold Market Fixing Limited and its member banks collectively violated provisions of the Sherman Act, the Commodity Exchange Act, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rule 180.1 (a) and various state laws by manipulating the London benchmark gold price.”

The US class actions being referred to by the London Gold Market Fixing Limited above were covered in posts on the BullionStar website such as ”Spoofing Futures and Banging Fixes: Same Banks, Same Trading Desks” and in the detailed and ground-breaking analysis of the class action court papers by Allan Flynn on his blog site here.

And its not only in New York where investors think they have been the victims of gold market fraud. Investor groups are also using Canadian courts to pursue class actions against The London Gold Market Fixing Limited and the five gold fixing banks using the Ontario Superior Court. The above LGMFL accounts state that the Canadian class actions say that:

“London Gold Market Fixing Limited and the member banks conspired, agreed and / or arranged with each other to manipulate the London benchmark gold price, and seek damages of Can$ 1 billion under the Competition Act and for civil conspiracy, unjust enrichment and waiver of tort.”

See here and here for more details. Missing from the LBMA’s momentous occasion centenary update on 12 September were any references to The London Gold Market Fixing Limited still being a very much live and active company, or the fact that London Gold Market Fixing Limited and four of the five fixers are currently defendants in class action suits in New York and Canada.

Its also interesting that a majority of the five gold price fixers of London Gold Market Fixing Limited have now exited the entire precious metals markets in London. This includes Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and more recently SocGen. Another member of the cartel, Scotia Mocatta, tried but failed to sell its precious metals business but did execute a reorganization of that business. That just leaves HSBC still fully active in the London Gold Market As explained in “Curse of the London Gold Fix strikes again as SocGen abandons ship“:

“The casualties of the still active London Gold Market Fixing Limited are now looking so severe that the entire former gold fixing cesspit looks cursed. So is it just a matter of time before the fifth member of the infamous syndicate, HSBC, runs into some type of trouble?”

Bank of England, a ‘moderating influence’ on the gold price

‘The best thing to do was to Pull it’

But what lead to the Gold Fixing being pulled in 2015 (while being replaced with practically the same thing under a new name)? The unraveling of the London Gold Fixing arguably began in late 2013 in the wake of the LIBOR scandal when financial regulatory authorities such as the UK FCA and Germany’s BaFin began investigating the Gold Fixing and scrutinizing the five gold fixing banks. Germany’s financial regulator BaFin appeared particularly efficient in its investigation into Deutsche Bank’s gold fixing activities, and whatever was in the documents that Bafin demanded from Deutsche in late 2013 caused Deutsche Bank to run for the exits of the London gold and silver market in January 2014 and abandon both its Gold Fixing and Silver Fixing seats.

Unable to sell either its Gold Fixing or Silver Fixing seat, as no other banks would touch the fixings given the regulatory investigations, Deutsche Bank gave just two weeks notice and walked away on 13 May 2014, leaving four banks on the Gold Fixing (Barclays, Scotia, HSBC and SocGen), and only two banks on the Silver Fixing (Scotia and HSBC).

This then opened the flood gates for the rest of the fixers to abandon ship, but not before all 10 directors of the London Gold Market Fixing Company at that time were profiled on 15 May 2014 in ZeroHedge’s excellent article “From Rothschild To Koch Industries: Meet The People Who “Fix” The Price Of Gold”, The names of these directors were Matthew Keen and James Vorley of Deutsche Bank, Simon Weeks and Steven Lowe or Scotia, Jonathan Spall and Martyn Whitehead of Barclays, Peter Drabwell and David Rose of HSBC, and Vincent Domien and Xavier Lannegrace of SocGen.

Less than a week later on 20 May 2014, Baclays then announced that its Head Of Gold Trading Marc Booker was leaving the bank. Then three days later on 23 May 2014, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s financial regulator, announced that Daniel Plunkett, a director on the Barclays precious metals desk in London and a colleague of Booker, Spall and Whitehead on the trading floor in Canary Wharf, had been charged with manipulating gold prices of the afternoon Gold Fixing, and was being levied with a financial penalty and prohibition from trading. This is the same Daniel Plunkett who became infamous for his “I Am Hoping For A Mini Puke” statement, the mini puke being a lower gold price.

At the same time the FCA fined Barclays Bank Plc (Barclays) £26,033,500 for

“failing to adequately manage conflicts of interest between itself and its customers as well as systems and controls failings, in relation to the Gold Fixing. These failures continued from 2004 to 2013.”

Yes, you have read that correctly. Barclays was fined for manipulating the price of gold for a decade from 2004 to 2013, i.e. the entire time that Barclays was in on the fixing. The year 2004 is also interesting because from 2004 onwards the five fixers were no longer meeting face to face each day but meeting remotely using a web based application and electronic chat apps. See the article “The pre-2015 London Gold Fixings – More technologically advanced than reported” for details. These networked and chat apps would make collusion a lot easier but would also leave a trail of evidence.

Conclusion

As the great and the good of the London Gold Market raise a toast to the centenary of the Gold Fixing this September, while lauding the ‘new’ LBMA Gold Price, it would be well to keep in mind the old phrase ‘you can put lipstick on a pig, but its still a pig’.

The LBMA recently asserted that “it took 89 years for the gold price to break through the $1,000 barrier, reaching a new all-time high of $1,023.50 on 17 March 2008“. To which we might well ask, what would the gold price be now in the absence of the infamous London Gold Fixings?

This article is an abridged version of an article which was originally published on the BullionStar.com website under the same title “Rothschild emerges from the shadows for the Centenary of the London Gold Fixing“.

By M. Raphael Johnson, PH.D.

July 11, 2017 Anno Domini
(Barnes Review May/June 2006)

On April 28, 2002, a military helicopter went down in the southern part of the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia. On board was a major Russian dignitary, Gen. Alexander Lebed, governor of the region. Lebed was pronounced dead at the scene.

Almost immediately, the international press blamed “heavy fog” for the incident. However, at the time, every member of the Russian military was convinced the death of Lebed was no accident, but rather another hit by the international Jewish mafia, an organization that had long since taken control over much of Russia’s economy. Lebed, likely the most popular man in Russia at the time, was going to build a national socialist empire—possibly with Chinese assistance—based on the massive oil and mineral wealth of the region.

Had he succeeded, world history could have changed, and the 21st century would look very different. Prior to that, dozens of anti-Zionists in Russia had been murdered by car bombs or other devices, while none of the cases was ever solved. Only a handful was even investigated.

The very fact that the Jewish mafia (often misnamed the “Russian” mafia) was capable of completely covering its tracks, being completely left out of all news reports surrounding the incident, while the common people (in Russia) were utterly convinced of their complicity, proves the immense strength of this rather new movement of organized crime. The Jewish mafia is nothing like their Irish or Italian predecessors in its American or European operations. They are richer, more international in scope and far more violent and ruthless. They kill children. They kill policemen and their families. They kill whomever they like. There has been nothing like it before in the history of the globe. And they are just getting started.

The major figure in uncovering the web of secrecy that surrounds the Jewish mafia was a journalist named Robert I. Friedman, who died at an early age from a “tropical disease.” He has interviewed the major figures in this underground and has uncovered their hiding spots and plans. After his book on the subject was published, major mafia leaders put a bounty on his head. The “Russian” mafia knows that it can kill with impunity, and, given their cozy relationship with European and American intelligence agencies, their immunity from real prosecution will only get more pronounced.

Friedman’s work is breathtaking in scope, and this essay will cite him extensively, especially his book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. Friedman is not afraid to state the obvious, namely, that the entire “Russian” mafia is Jewish, without exception, and that they have used this as a shield to deflect criticism. This shield has permitted them to grow and prosper. Further, Friedman is also not afraid to admit that Jewish organizations throughout the world, led by the Anti-Defamation League, are the beneficiaries of largesse coming from organized crime, and that the organizations in question are aware of it. In other words, Jewish organized crime is considered an acceptable part of Jewish life, and that Jewish organizations have actually lobbied law enforcement to stop investigations into this phenomenon, almost always with success. The confirmation of Zionist Michael Chertoff to the post as chief of Homeland Security guarantees that Jewish organized crime in America will not be at the receiving end of the many stings that have targeted the Italian Mafia.
The roots of Jewish organized crime, it is said, go far back into tsarist times. Organized crime syndicates assisted Lenin’s gangs in bank robberies and the creation of general mayhem. During the so-called revolution, it was difficult, sometimes impossible, to distinguish between Bolshevik ideologues and Jewish organized crime syndicates. They acted in nearly an identical manner.

However, in more modern times, they seem to have had their roots in the waning days of the stagnant USSR under Leonid Brezhnev. By the late 1970s, the Russian economy was driven by the black market, and the early stages of the Jewish mafia were involved in this black underground. In fact, the Russian socialist economy would have collapsed much sooner if it had not been propped up by the extensive black economy. Soon, the rulers of the black market became so powerful they were able to form their own “people’s courts,” which dispensed “justice” completely apart from the Soviet state, and away from its control. Many of these black marketeers had been recently released from the gulag system of prison camps in an earlier era for their black market activities, and the toughness that was required to survive these dungeons served this new criminal elite very well (Friedman, 9).

The black market acted as a safety valve for the Soviet state for decades, making all estimations of the strength of the Soviet economy subject to speculation. The black market provided many goods and services the overextended Soviet system could not provide. In the gulag, they had formed brotherhoods, much like blacks and Hispanics currently do today in prison. They formed Jewish bunds that, upon release, served to create deep bonds that exist today, maintaining a highly secretive organization almost impossible to deal with or penetrate.

Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s famous bill, the Jackson-Vanick law, linked Soviet trade privileges to the treatment of Soviet Jews. It was a bill lobbied heavily for by American Jewish organizations. And while non-Jews could not emigrate from Russia, Jews could. Quickly, the KGB took this opportunity to dump its hardcore criminals into the United States, many who were Jewish, as conservatives cheered, believing, naively as usual, to have scored a major victory against the USSR. Much of the Jewish mafia’s penetration into the United States came as a result of these Soviet “boatlifts,” which were partially financed by groups such as the ADL or the Hebrew Aid Society. Given the substantial nature of the black market and the Soviet criminal underground, and its exclusively Jewish character, it is difficult to believe that the Jewish groups who were financing the immigration of Russian Jews to America were unaware of the connections of many of the new arrivals. Regardless, much of the money earmarked for immigration to Israel was pocketed by the mafia and redirected to settling Jews in New York—the New Promised Land.

Marat Balagula was one of these. A major Jewish crime figure, he bought a restaurant in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, named it the Odessa (a major port city in Ukraine), and quickly converted it into a central recruiting base for mobsters. It was also closely linked with Zionist agencies in the area, including the women’s group Hadassah, who used the establishment for meetings and fund raising dinners (Friedman, 17). This restaurant also became the seat of real political power in Brooklyn, for in the upstairs part of the establishment, Balagula and other Jewish mobsters would convene the “People’s Courts,” and their word was (and is) law. Ordinary courts in the area could not hope to compete with the mobsters, well protected by powerful Jewish groups within the city and the municipal government itself.

These courts, controlled by the Jewish mob, were more powerful and acted more quickly than the regular municipal courts of New York City. Balagula had created a state within a state. The Italian gangs in New York didn’t know what hit them. Public executions and torturings were common in Brooklyn, and in broad daylight. Often, public murders would happen for the tiniest offenses, or to prove one’s toughness. While the Italians were very cautious and deliberate, the Jewish mob was flamboyant and gratuitously violent.

Yuri Brokhin, another Jewish mobster who had already made a name for himself in America, and Balagula were heavily into stealing diamonds from jewelry stores and replacing them with cheap fakes. At one incident, narrated by Friedman, the pair pulled such a scam in Chicago, and was caught at the airport with $175,000. As it turns out, the duo was seen by a Jewish security guard in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport wearing their phony Hassidic garb on the eve of Yom Kippur, when Jews are strictly forbidden to travel. This sloppiness got them caught. The duo was convicted, but as proof of the power of the Jewish mafia, they both got off without a jail sentence, having committed major grand larceny, among other crimes. Of course, Friedman does not speculate as to why this would be, since a major felony such as this often carried sentences over 20 years. Both Brokhin and Balagula were criminals in the USSR, and were able to transfer their wealth to America via Zionist and “charitable” organizations of Jewry.

A major connection between the halls of American political power and the Jewish mafia is the rabbi Ronald Greenwald. He knowingly did business with con artists and mafia figures, and used his major political connections to shield them. Greenwald was a major player in CREEP, the re-election campaign for Richard Nixon in 1972. Greenwald was used heavily by Nixon and other Republicans to gain the Jewish vote, which he doubled for Nixon during that election (Friedman, 31) in the state of New York. Soon, the rabbi was given a post as an “advisor” to Nixon on “Jewish poverty programs,” a post which certainly made some snicker at the time, though it was clear that Nixon owed Greenwald, and the rabbi made quick use of his new-found powers. He used his power to protect the mafia’s bilking of Medicaid programs and other crimes that were never investigated by the authorities.

His post as head of the “Jewish poverty” initiative permitted him to shield those involved with such financial scams, as well as call off any and all FBI investigations of his friends. Part of the rise of Jewish mafia groups was the protection afforded it by Greenwald’s political connections.

Greenwald was also instrumental in protecting Marc Rich, a billionaire Jewish investor with mob ties. Rich, a major player in the Clinton administration, swindled investors out of billions. Nothing was done, again, though negative media treatment against Rich was permitted largely because he did do business with Iran, and thus was considered a traitor by his fellow Jews. Eventually, Clinton pardoned Rich in a much-publicized case, and Rich is now free.

Jewish mafia investors all but took over Las Vegas, also with the political protection and patronage of Greenwald. Some years back, a movie was released called Casino, starring Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci. Concerning itself with the takeover of Las Vegas, the film depicted Mr. Rothstein (played by the Jewish DeNiro) as the suave and successful entrepreneur, and Pesci as the typical Italian wiseguy, brash and insolent. Of course, the purpose of the movie was to absolve Jewish organized crime and transfer all blame to Italian mobsters. The opposite was true.

Balagula, before taking over Jewish mafia interests in the United States, acted as a mob functionary for the KGB. In his very own words, Balagula said that the “KGB gave him visas, no problem” (Friedman, 44) and was instrumental in sending him stolen art and jewels, which he sold to foreign tourists. The KGB also set him up as head of the largest food co-op in Ukraine, a position he quickly turned into a major black market operation with the blessings of the KGB. Near the end of the Cold War, members of the KGB viewed the Jewish crime syndicate as a source of possible new jobs for them after the old system was destroyed. So, not only did they have the patronage of the American political establishment under Greenwald, but also the decaying intelligence apparatus of the USSR as well.

BOOTLEGGING
What needs to be kept in mind about the bootlegging operation is that it was never small time. Nothing the Jewish mob did was ever small. This operation was multinational in scope. They had a fleet of massive oil tankers, tanker trucks and hundreds of gasoline stations and distributorships, all owned by Jews loyal to the mob. Balagula had created a massive mafia empire leading from North Africa to Saudi Arabia to Venezuela to Brooklyn. The Jewish mobsters developed an infrastructure within the oil trade that made them invincible. Mafia influence is substantial in the price of oil, as well as acting as the occasional go-between between the Mossad and Arab oil-producing sheikdoms. No one of substance was ever brought to justice.

With all the power that the Jewish mob has amassed, they are merely a pimple on the back of the master of them all, and a man who truly controls much of the globe. There is no one on Earth more powerful than he, and, as per usual, he remains unknown, left out of all press and television reports on the subject. The CIA considers him a “grave threat” to global security and the “world’s most dangerous man” (Friedman). The fact that he remains almost unknown shows the power of the Zionist-controlled media and their relentless drive to suppress all investigation into Jewish crime. He has created a massive, global communications network and employs hundreds of Ph.D.s in computer science, physics and economics to run his massive financial empire. He has penetrated every stock exchange in the world and controls much of the trading therein.

He was also the mastermind of the largest money-laundering scheme in U.S. history, “washing” $7 billion through the Bank of New York, which is a major branch of the Federal Reserve and his bank of choice. His name is Semion Mogilevich, born in 1946.

Basing his first operations in Israel, where he fleeced Jewish refugees from Russia, Mogilevich acquired Hungarian citizenship after making the comment that the biggest problem with Israel is that there are “too many Jews there.” However, he single-handedly controls the brothels in Israel, where Ukrainian and Russian girls are forced into sexual slavery. This is legal in Israel if the girls are non-Jews. The name of Mogilevich has been left out of every report on the phenomenon in Israel, Ukraine or the United States. Mogilevich also controls the vodka trade in Russia and Central Europe.

Most ominously, Mogilevich has bought Hungary’s armaments industry. In other words, he controls the military equipment being manufactured in Hungary. He has his own army, artillery, mechanized infantry, antiaircraft guns and missiles of all types. NATO has said that he is a “threat to the stability of Europe,” though his name remains little known. This mobster is militarily more powerful than many European countries. He has nuclear weapons from the former Warsaw Pact countries and is presently trading with various governments and providing them with nuclear technology. He has agents in the intelligence agencies of all European countries, which means that he may never be prosecuted, for he is made aware of any pending investigation into his activities, which quickly gets quashed.

German television reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, had entered into secret negotiations with Mogilevich whereby the latter would supply information on his rivals in Russia. He has a similar arrangement with French intelligence. He has close connections to the Mossad, which destroyed his criminal file (Friedman, 245-247). Therefore he is immune to prosecution and travels freely. He controls the black market from Central Europe to Russia. He has a Rockefeller connection as well, as his main economics advisor, Igor Fisherman was a consultant to Chase Manhattan Bank. Friedman writes, concerning the Fed and its relations to Mogilevich: “While the bank has not been charged with any wrongdoing, some investigators believe that the money laundering could not have taken place unless senior bank officials were bought off or otherwise involved” (259). When the Justice Department began a criminal investigation into Mogilevich (which went nowhere), he accused the Department of an “anti-Semitic conspiracy.”

George W. Bush’s professed mentor, Natan Sharansky, has long and deep ties to organized crime. The Congress, State Department and the CIA all have lengthy dossiers on Sharansky, who acted as a bridge between the Republican Party and Jewish thugs in a similar manner to Rabbi Greenwald. Sharansky, knowing his power, simply refused to sever his ties with organized crime, infusing the Jewish mafia into the highest echelons of the Bush administration. A pattern emerges in relation to the Republican Party: Russian Jews usually pose as “anti-Communists.” They did this partially because they had been arrested by security services for their black market activities, but also because this posture would make them valuable to Republican operatives and the Beltway “conservative movement.” Their reputations as “dissidents” protected them almost as much as their religion.

Because of this, George W.’s father also refused to cooperate with several investigations into Russian mob activities in Switzerland. The CIA has commented that there is no “major Russian mob figure that does not carry an Israeli passport,” but the Israeli state refuses to take any action against the gangsters. Yitzhak Rabin was the one exception, and met with Mossad figures, as well as Shin Bet and Israel’s FBI, to combat organized crime, believing that it could destabilize Israel. Within a few days, he was murdered. His successor, Shimon Peres, shelved the recommendations formulated under Rabin, where they collect dust to this day.

CAUSES
It might be worthwhile to delve into some of the causes of this phenomenon. Why the Jews? It is true that many culture groups have engaged in ethnic based organized crime, but it seems only the Italians get frequently mentioned. Today, Chechen, Hispanic and Albanian gangs are growing in power, but none has come close to being even a footnote to the Jewish clans. Few people in the FBI, CIA or DEA speak Hebrew or Yiddish. Some Jewish mobsters go back and forth between languages, including Russian, so as to make themselves more indecipherable.

The power of the Jewish gangs is wielded more ruthlessly than any other criminal gang. Jewish mobsters enjoy inflicting pain, they murder children as well as unarmed men and women. The old code of honor among Irish and Italian gangsters is nonexistent. These old-time mobsters would only kill another mobster. The Jewish gangs have no regard for these rules, and thus are more feared. The sheer arrogance of the Jewish gangsters and their outrageous self-assurance have allowed their “competition” among the Italian gangs to take a very cautious stance toward their Jewish counterparts.

The state of Israel is a major factor in the rise and power of the Jewish mafia. Jewish drug dealers, child porn pushers, and slave traders are free from prosecution in Israel. Israel does not consider these to be crimes, again, so long as the victims are non-Jews. The mafia proved its power in the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. The Israeli state will not extradite its citizens to non-Jewish countries, and, therefore, Jewish murderers can quite easily escape punishment in Israel.

The unique situation in the former USSR, and the fact that Jews predominated in the Soviet bureaucracy, provides another link in the rise of the mafia. Jews predominated in the earlier and more primitive black market in Russia, and thus these groups were physically more ready to take advantage of the crisis in Russia beginning in the mid-1980s.

Jewish organized crime, connected to both the KGB and Mossad, automatically had the skids greased to remain off the radar screen for allied intelligence agencies.

Likely the most important factor is the complete control of the media by Jewish families and the power of the ADL in American culture. The power of the Jews in America is so great that any serious investigation into Jewish crime will see shrill attacks from every major media outlet in America. In terms of public relations, it is just not worth it. Therefore, one will see a television program like The Sopranos about Italian mobsters, but one will never see the same program featuring Jewish mobsters.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?
There is very little that can be done at this time. There is every reason to believe that soon, nationalists and Revisionists will be targeted by Jewish criminals with strong ties to the Mossad. The fate of the West is being decided in Moscow, not in Washington, D.C. or New York. Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to continue to centralize power in his own person. His elimination of provincial governors was meant primarily as a crime fighting campaign, as local governors were making peace with the crime bosses. Putin also needs to continue to reform the military and security services, making them more and more loyal to the new Russian order. Putin should begin publicly drawing attention to the global power of the bosses and the connivance of western powers in their rise and present prosperity.

The ruble should be made non-convertible (so as to prevent its manipulation by crime bosses in the currency markets), and a strong Sino-Slavic trading bloc needs to be solidified. Police work in Russia is now a rough business. Poorly paid policemen need to be supplemented by local militias to begin direct and militant confrontations with organized crime and corruption wherever it might arise. Putin has the popularity and the power to create a major security bloc against organized crime, as well as capitalist imperialism. Russian banks need to come under state control, and be purged of all criminal elements. Furthermore, the church, currently the second most popular institution in Russia after Putin, needs to place its powerful seal on the development of a mob-free Russia, and call on all Russians to repent and begin building a nationalist and communitarian system. Agriculture and the village commune should receive government support to repopulate the countryside, making Russia self-sufficient in food.

And, of course, Russia’s extremely important and strategic oil and natural gas reserves need to be protected by interior ministry troops and placed under government control if need be. Putin, the nationalists and the church have tremendous popularity and influence. This capital should be spent on developing a nationalist system dedicated to purging Russia of Jewish-inspired crime, imperialism, depopulation, and liberalism. He is already moving in this direction, and Russian economic growth and a low inflation and unemployment rate are its fruits.

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case

Epstein is only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive and sophisticated operation that offers a frightening window into how deeply tied the U.S. government is to the modern-day equivalents of organized crime.

Despite his “sweetheart” deal and having seemingly evaded justice, billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested earlier this month on federal charges for sex trafficking minors. Epstein’s arrest has again brought increased media attention to many of his famous friends, the current president among them.

Many questions have since been asked about how much Epstein’s famous friends knew of his activities and exactly what Epstein was up to. The latter arguably received the most attention after it was reported that Alex Acosta — who arranged Epstein’s “sweetheart” deal in 2008 and who recently resigned as Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary following Epstein’s arrest — claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for “intelligence.”

Other investigations have made it increasingly clear that Epstein was running a blackmail operation, as he had bugged the venues — whether at his New York mansion or Caribbean island getaway — with microphones and cameras to record the salacious interactions that transpired between his guests and the underage girls that Epstein exploited. Epstein appeared to have stored much of that blackmail in a safe on his private island.

Claims of Epstein’s links and his involvement in a sophisticated, well-funded sexual blackmail operation have, surprisingly, spurred few media outlets to examine the history of intelligence agencies both in the U.S. and abroad conducting similar sexual blackmail operations, many of which also involved underage prostitutes.

In the U.S. alone, the CIA operated numerous sexual blackmail operations throughout the country, employing prostitutes to target foreign diplomats in what the Washington Post once nicknamed the CIA’s “love traps.” If one goes even farther back into the U.S. historical record it becomes apparent that these tactics and their use against powerful political and influential figures significantly predate the CIA and even its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In fact, they were pioneered years earlier by none other than the American Mafia.

In the course of this investigation, MintPress discovered that a handful of figures who were influential in American organized crime during and after Prohibition were directly engaged in sexual blackmail operations that they used for their own, often dark, purposes.

In Part I of this exclusive investigation, MintPress will examine how a mob-linked businessman with deep ties to notorious gangster Meyer Lansky developed close ties with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) while also running a sexual blackmail operation for decades, which later became a covert part of the anti-communist crusade of the 1950s led by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), himself known throughout Washington for having a habit of drunkenly groping underage teenaged girls.

Yet, it would be one of McCarthy’s closest aides who would take over the ring in later years, trafficking minors and expanding this sexual blackmail operation at the same time he expanded his own political influence, putting him in close contact with prominent figures including former President Ronald Reagan and a man who would later become president, Donald Trump.

As will be revealed in Part II, after this figure’s death, the blackmail operation continued under various successors in different cities and there is strong evidence that Jeffrey Epstein became one of them.

Samuel Bronfman and the Mob

The Prohibition Era in the United States is often used as an example of how banning recreational substances not only increases their popularity but also causes a boom in criminal activity. Indeed, it was Prohibition that greatly increased the strength of the American Mafia, as the top crime lords of the day grew rich through the clandestine trade and sale of alcohol in addition to gambling and other activities.

It is through the bootlegging trade of the 1920s and the early 1930s that this story begins, as it brought together key figures whose successors and affiliates would eventually create a series of blackmail and sex trafficking rings that would give rise to the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, the “Lolita Express” and “Orgy Island.”

Samuel Bronfman never planned to become a major producer of liquor but true to his family’s last name, which means “brandy man” in Yiddish, he eventually began distributing alcohol as an extension of his family’s hotel business. During Canada’s Prohibition period, which was briefer than and preceded that of its southern neighbor, the Bronfman family business used loopholes to skirt the law and find technically legal ways to sell alcohol in the hotels and stores the family owned. The family relied on its connections with members of the American Mafia to illegally smuggle alcohol from the United States.

Soon after Prohibition ended in Canada, it began in the United States and, by the time the flow of illegal alcohol had turned the other way, the Bronfmans – whose business ventures were then being led by Sam Bronfman and his brothers — were relatively late to an already flourishing bootlegging trade.

“We were late starters in the two most lucrative markets – on the high seas and across the Detroit River. What came out of the border trade in Saskatchewan was insignificant by comparison,” Bronfman once told Canadian journalist Terence Robertson, who was then writing a biography of Bronfman. Nonetheless, “this was when we started to make our real money,” Bronfman recounted. Robertson’s biography on Bronfman was never published, as he died under mysterious circumstances soon after warning his colleagues that he had uncovered unsavory information about the Bronfman family.

Samuel Bronfman pictured in 1937 with his sons Edgar and Charles

Key to Bronfman’s success during American Prohibition were the ties his family had cultivated with organized crime during Canada’s Prohibition, ties that led many prominent members of the mob in the United States to favor Bronfman as a business partner. Bronfman liquor was purchased in massive quantities by many crime lords who still live on in American legend, including Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Moe Dalitz, Abner “Longy” Zwillman and Meyer Lansky.

Most of Bronfman’s mob associates during Prohibition were members of what became known as the National Crime Syndicate, which a 1950s Senate investigative body known as the Kefauver Committee described as a confederation dominated by Italian-American and Jewish-American mobs. During that investigation, some of the biggest names in the American Mafianamed Bronfman as a central figure in their bootlegging operations. The widow of notorious American mob boss Meyer Lansky even recounted how Bronfman had thrown lavish dinner parties for her husband.

Years later, Samuel Bronfman’s children and grandchildren, their family’s ties to the criminal underworld intact, would go on to associate closely with Leslie Wexner, allegedly the source of much of Epstein’s mysterious wealth, and other mob-linked “philanthropists,” and some would even manage their own sexual blackmail operations, including the recently busted blackmail-based “sex cult” NXIVM. The later generations of the Bronfman family, particularly Samuel Bronfman’s sons Edgar and Charles, will be discussed in greater detail in Part II of this report.

Lewis Rosenstiel’s dark secret

Crucial to Bronfman’s Prohibition-era bootlegging operations were two middlemen, one of whom was Lewis “Lew” Rosenstiel. Rosenstiel got his start working at his uncle’s distillery in Kentucky before Prohibition. Once the law banning alcohol was in force, Rosenstiel created the Schenley Products Company, which would later become one of the largest liquor companies in North America.

Though he was a high school drop-out and not particularly well-connected socially at the time, Rosenstiel happened to have a “chance” meeting with Winston Churchill in 1922 while on vacation in the French Riviera. According to the New York Times, Churchill “advised him [Rosenstiel] to prepare for the return of liquor sales in the United States.” Rosenstiel somehow managed to secure the funding of the elite and respected Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers to finance his purchase of shuttered distilleries.

Officially, Rosenstiel is said to have built his company and wealth after Prohibition, by following Churchill’s advice to prepare for Repeal. However, he was clearly involved in bootlegging operations and was even indicted for bootlegging in 1929, though he evaded conviction. Like Bronfman, Rosenstiel was close to organized crime, particularly members of the mostly Jewish-American and Italian-American mob alliance known as the National Crime Syndicate.

Subsequent New York state legislative investigations would allege that Rosenstiel “was part of a ‘consortium’ with underworld figures that bought liquor in Canada [from Samuel Bronfman]”, whose other members were “Meyer Lansky, the reputed organized crime leader; Joseph Fusco, an associate of late Chicago gangster Al Capone and Joseph Linsey, a Boston man Mr. Kelly [the congressional investigator testifying] identified as a convicted bootlegger.” Rosenstiel’s relationship with these men, particularly Lansky, would continue long after Prohibition and Samuel Bronfman, for his part, would also maintain his mob ties.

In addition to his friends in the mob, Rosenstiel also cultivated close ties with the FBI, developing a close relationship with longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and making Hoover’s right-hand man and longtime assistant at the FBI, Louis Nichols, the Vice President of his Schenley empire in 1957.

Despite their similar backgrounds as bootlegger barons turned “respectable” businessmen, Bronfman’s and Rosenstiel’s personalities were drastically different and their relationship was complicated, at best. One example of the dissimilarities between North America’s top liquor barons was how they treated their staff. Bronfman was not necessarily known for being a cruel boss, whereas Rosenstiel was known for his erratic and “monstrous” behavior towards employees as well as his unusual practice of bugging his offices in order to hear what employees said about him when he wasn’t present.

Rosenstiel was connected to both the FBI and to organized crime

Such differences between Bronfman and Rosenstiel were also reflected in their personal lives. While Bronfman married only once and was loyal to his wife, Rosenstiel was married five times and was known for his relatively closeted bisexual antics, a part of his life that was well-knownto many of his close associates and employees.

Though for years there were only hints to this other side of the controversial businessman, details emerged years later during a divorce proceeding brought by Rosenstiel’s fourth wife, Susan Kaufman, that would back the claims. Kaufman alleged that Rosenstiel hosted extravagant parties that included “boy prostitutes” that her husband had hired “for the enjoyment” of certain guests, which included important government officials and prominent figures in America’s criminal underworld. Kaufman would later make the same claims under oath during the hearing of the New York’s State Joint Legislative Committee on Crime in the early 1970s.

Not only did Rosenstiel organize these parties, but he also made sure that their venues were bugged with microphones that recorded the antics of his high-profile guests. Those audio recordings, Kaufman alleged, were then kept for the purpose of blackmail. Though Kaufman’s claims are shocking, her testimony was deemed credible and held in high regard by the former chief counsel of the Crime Committee, New York Judge Edward McLaughlin, and committee investigator William Gallinaro and aspects of her testimony were later corroborated by two separate witnesses who were unknown to Kaufman.

These “blackmail parties” offer a window into an operation that would later become more sophisticated and grow dramatically in the 1950s under Rosenstiel’s “field commander” (a nickname given by Rosenstiel to an individual to be named shortly in this report). Many of the people connected to Rosenstiel’s “field commander” during the 70s and 80s have again found their names in the press following the recent arrest of Jeffrey Epstein.

The “Untouchable” Mobster

Bronfman and Rosenstiel became legendary in the North American liquor business, in part due to their fight for supremacy in the industry, which the New York Times described as often erupting “into bitter personal and corporate battles.” Despite their dueling in the corporate world, the one thing that united the two businessmen more than anything else was their close connection to American organized crime, particularly renowned mobster Meyer Lansky.

Lansky is one of the most notorious gangsters in the history of American organized crime and is notable for being the only famous mobster rising to notoriety in the 1920s who managed to die an old man and never serve a day in jail.

Lansky’s long life and ability to avoid prison time was largely the result of his close relationships to powerful businessmen like Bronfman and Rosenstiel (among many others), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. intelligence community, as well as his role in establishing several blackmail and extortion rings that helped him keep the law at arm’s length. Indeed, when Lansky was finally charged with a crime in the 1970s, it was the Internal Revenue Service that brought the charges, not the FBI, and he was charged with and acquitted of tax evasion.

Lansky was remarkably close to both Bronfman and Rosenstiel. Bronfman regularly threw“lavish dinner parties” in Lansky’s honor both during and after Prohibition. These parties were remembered fondly by Lansky’s wife, and Lansky in turn did favors for Bronfman, ranging from exclusive protection of his shipments during Prohibition to getting him tickets to coveted “fight of the century” boxing matches.

Rosenstiel also threw regular dinner parties honoring Lansky. Susan Kaufman, Rosenstiel’s ex-wife, claimed to have taken numerous pictures of her ex-husband and Lansky socializing and partying together, photos that were also seen by Mary Nichols of The Philadelphia Inquirer. In addition, Lansky, per Kaufman’s recollection, was one of the individuals that Rosenstiel sought to protect from legal scrutiny as part of his child prostitution and blackmail ring targeting high-ranking officials, and he was overheard saying that if the government “ever brings pressure against Lansky or any of us, we’ll use this [a specific recording taken at one of the ‘parties’] as blackmail.”

Lansky was known to address Rosenstiel as “Supreme Commander,” a title that would later be used to refer to Rosenstiel by another individual deeply connected to the mob and sexual blackmail operations, previously referred to in this report as Rosenstiel’s “Field Commander.”

Lansky also had close ties to the CIA and U.S. military intelligence. During World War II, Lansky — along with his associate Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel — worked with Naval intelligence in what was codenamed “Operation Underworld,” an operation the existence of which the government denied for over 40 years.

Journalist and noted chronicler of CIA covert activities, Douglas Valentine, noted in his book The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World that the government’s cooperation with the Mafia during World War II led to its expansion after the war and set the stage for its future collaboration with U.S. intelligence.

According to Valentine:

Top government officials were also aware that the government’s Faustian pact with the Mafia during World War II had allowed the hoods to insinuate themselves into mainstream America. In return for services rendered during the war, Mafia bosses were protected from prosecution for dozens of unsolved murders. […]

The Mafia was a huge problem in 1951 [when the Kefauver Committee was convened], equivalent to terrorism today. But it was also a protected branch of the CIA, which was co-opting criminal organizations around the world and using them in its secret war against the Soviets and Red Chinese. The Mafia had collaborated with Uncle Sam and had emerged from World War II energized and empowered. They controlled cities across the country.”

Indeed, not long after its creation, the CIA forged ties with Lansky at the behest of CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton. The CIA would later turn to the Lansky-linked mobin the early 1960s as part of its consistently fruitless quest to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, showing that the CIA maintained its contacts with Lansky-controlled elements of the Mafia long after the initial meeting with Lansky took place.

The CIA also had close connections to associates of Lansky, such as Edward Moss, who did public relations work for Lansky and was said to be of “interest” to the CIA by the agency’s then-inspector general J.S. Earman. Harry “Happy” Meltzer was also another Lansky associate that was a CIA asset and the CIA asked Meltzer to join an assassination team in December 1960.

In addition to the CIA, Lansky was also connected to a foreign intelligence agency through Tibor Rosenbaum, an arms procurer and high-ranking official in Israel’s Mossad, whose bank – the International Credit Bank of Geneva – laundered much of Lansky’s ill-gotten gains and recycled them into legitimate American businesses.

Lansky outside the High Court of Israel where he sought permission to emigrate in 1972. Photo | AP

Journalist Ed Reid, author of the Virginia Hill biography The Mistress and the Mafia, wrote that Lansky was attempting to entrap powerful people through sexual blackmail as far back as 1939. Reid contends that Lansky sent Ms. Hill to Mexico, where his West Coast connections had established a drug ring that later involved the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, to seduce numerous “top politicians, army officers, diplomats and police officials.”

Eventually, Lansky was credited with obtaining compromising photos of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sometime in the 1940s, which showed “Hoover in some kind of gay situation”, according to a former Lansky associate, who also said that Lansky had often claimed, “I fixed that sonofabitch.” The photos showed Hoover engaged in sexual activity with his long-time friend, FBI Deputy Director Clyde Tolson.

At some point, these photos fell into the hands of CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton, who later showed the photos to several other CIA officials, including John Weitz and Gordon Novel. Angleton was in charge of the CIA’s relationship with the FBI and Israel’s Mossad until he left the agency in 1972 and, as was recently mentioned, he was also in contact with Lansky.

Anthony Summers, former BBC journalist and author of Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, has argued that it was not Lansky, but William Donovan, the director of the OSS, who obtained the original photos of Hoover and later shared them with Lansky.

Summers also stated that “To [gangster Frank] Costello and Lansky, the ability to corrupt politicians, policemen and judges was fundamental to Mafia operations. The way they found to deal with Hoover, according to several mob sources, involved his homosexuality.” This anecdote shows that Lanksy and the CIA maintained a covert relationship, which included, among other things, the sharing of blackmail material (i.e., “intelligence”).

It is also possible that Hoover was ensnared by the mob during one of Rosenstiel’s “blackmail parties,” at which Hoover sometimes found himself in attendance with prominent figures of the Mafia. Hoover was said to have worn women’s clothing at the some of the events and Meyer Lansky’s wife later said that her husband had photos of the former FBI director in drag. Furthermore, Hoover is on record showing an unusual concern in the FBI’s handling of Rosenstiel’s criminal links as early as 1939, the same year that his close associate Lansky was actively orchestrating the sexual blackmail of powerful political figures.

The blackmail acquired on Hoover and the mob’s possession of the evidence has been cited as a major factor in Hoover’s decades-long denial that nationwide networks of organized crime were a serious issue. Hoover asserted that it was a decentralized, local issue and therefore outside of the bureau’s jurisdiction. By the time Hoover finally acknowledged the existence of national organized crime networks in 1963, they were so entrenched in the U.S. establishment that they were untouchable.

Congressional crime consultant Ralph Salerno told Summers in 1993 that Hoover’s willful ignorance of organized crime for most of his career as FBI director “allowed organized crime to grow very strong in economic and political terms, so that it became a much bigger threat to the wellbeing of this country than it would have been if it had been addressed much sooner.”

J. Edgar Hoover: Blackmail Victim?

Most records place the beginning of Hoover’s relationship with Rosenstiel in the 1950s, the same decade when Susan Kaufman reported that Hoover was attending Rosenstiel’s blackmail parties. Rosenstiel’s FBI file, obtained by Anthony Summers, cites the first Rosenstiel meeting as taking place in 1956, though Summers notes that there is evidence that they had met much earlier. After requesting the meeting, Rosenstiel was granted a personal face-to-face with the director in a matter of hours. The FBI file on Rosenstiel also reveals that the liquor baron heavily lobbied Hoover to aid his business interests.

During that time, the salacious details of Hoover’s sex life were already known to the U.S. intelligence community and to the mob, and Hoover was aware that they knew of his closeted sexuality and penchant for women’s clothing. Yet, Hoover apparently seemed to embrace the very type of sexual blackmail operation that had compromised his private life, given that he was seen at many of Rosenstiel’s “blackmail parties” in the 1950s and 1960s, including at venues such as Rosenstiel’s personal home and later at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. Hoover’s penchant for dressing in drag was also described by two witnesses who were not connected to Susan Kaufman.

Hoover with Dorothy Lamour on the set of The Greatest Show on Earth in 1951

Soon after their first “official” meeting, the public relationship between the two men quickly flourished, with Hoover even sending Rosenstiel flowers when he fell ill. Summers reported that, in 1957, Rosenstiel was heard telling Hoover during a meeting, “your wish is my command.” Their relationship remained close and intimate throughout the 1960s and beyond.

Like Rosenstiel, Hoover was well-known for amassing blackmail on friend and foe alike. Hoover’s office contained “secret files” on numerous powerful people in Washington and beyond, files he used to gain favors and protect his status as FBI director for as long as he wished.

Hoover’s own propensity for blackmail suggests that he may have associated with Rosenstiel’s sexual blackmail operation more directly, given he already knew he was compromised and his involvement in the operation would have served as a means of procuring the blackmail he coveted for his own purposes. Indeed, if Hoover was merely being blackmailed and extorted by the Lansky-Rosenstiel connected mob, it is unlikely that he would have been so friendly to Rosenstiel, Lansky and the other mobsters at these gatherings and participated in them with such regularity.

According to journalist and author Burton Hersh, Hoover was also tied to Sherman Kaminsky, who ran a sexual blackmail operation in New York involving young male prostitutes. That operation was busted and investigated in a 1966 extortion probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, though the FBI quickly took over the investigation and photos of Hoover and Kaminsky together soon disappeared from the case file.

Hoover and Rosenstiel’s deep ties would continue to develop over the years, an example of which can be seen in Rosenstiel’s hiring of long-time Hoover aide Louis Nichols as the vice president of his Schenley liquor empire and Rosenstiel’s donation of over $1 million to the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, which Nichols also ran at the time.

There is also more than one documented occasion wherein Hoover attempted to use blackmail to protect Rosenstiel and his “field commander,” none other than the infamous Roy Cohn, the other key figure in Rosenstiel’s sexual blackmail operation involving minors.

The Making of a Monster

Decades after his death, Roy Cohn remains a controversial figure in large part because of his close, personal relationship with current U.S. President Donald Trump. Yet reports on Cohn, both in recent and in past years, often miss the mark in their characterization of the man who became closely associated with the Reagan White House, the CIA, the FBI, organized crime and, incidentally, many of the figures who would later surround Jeffrey Epstein.

To understand the true nature of the man, it is essential to examine his rise to power in the early 1950s when, at just 23 years of age, he became a key figure in the high-profile trial of Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and later as the right-hand man of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI).

Cohn’s dedication to anti-communist activities in the 1950s is allegedly what first endeared him to J. Edgar Hoover, whom he first met in 1952. During that meeting, as described by Hersh in Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America, Hoover expressed admiration for Cohn’s aggressive and manipulative tactics and told Cohn to “call me directly” whenever he had information worth sharing. From that point on, Cohn and Hoover “traded favors, effusive compliments, gifts and elaborate private dinners. It quickly became ‘Roy’ and ‘Edgar.’” Hersh also describes Hoover as Cohn’s soon to be “consigliere.”

The date and circumstances around Cohn’s introduction to Rosenstiel are harder to come by. It is possible that the connection was made through Roy Cohn’s father, Albert Cohn, a prominent judge and an influential figure in the New York City Democratic Party apparatus then run by Edward Flynn. It was later revealed that the Democratic organization dominated by Flynn and based in the Bronx had long-standing connections to organized crime, including associates of Meyer Lansky.

Regardless of how or when it began, the relationship between Cohn and Rosenstiel was close and was often likened to that of a father and son. They were said to frequently salute each other in public and remained close until Rosenstiel was near death, at which point Cohn attempted to trick his then-barely conscious and senile “friend” and client into naming him the executor and trustee of the liquor magnate’s estate, valued at $75 million (more than $334 million in today’s dollars).

LIFE magazine reported in 1969 that Cohn and Rosenstiel had for years referred to one another as “Field Commander” and “Supreme Commander,” respectively. Media references to these nicknames appear in other articles from the period.

Though LIFE and other outlets had interpreted this as merely an anecdote about the nicknames shared in jest between close friends, the fact that notorious crime lord Meyer Lansky also calledRosenstiel “Supreme Commander” and the fact that Cohn and Rosenstiel would later become intimately involved in the same pedophile sex ring suggests that there may have been more to these “nicknames.” After all, the mob to which Rosenstiel was connected often used military-themed titles like “soldier” and “lieutenant” to differentiate the rank and importance of its members.

Once he had made his connection with Hoover, Cohn’s star began to rise even higher in Washington. Hoover’s recommendation of Cohn would become the deciding factor in his appointment as Sen. McCarthy’s general counsel over Robert Kennedy, a rival and bitter enemy of Cohn’s.

McCarthy covers the mic while having a whispered discussion with Cohn during a 1954 committee hearing. Photo | AP

Though Cohn was ruthless and seemingly untouchable as McCarthy’s counsel and helped the senator destroy many careers during both the red and lavender scares, his antics in relation to his work on the committee would eventually lead to his downfall after he attempted to blackmail the Army in return for preferential treatment for committee consultant and Cohn’s rumored lover, David Schine.

After he was forced to leave McCarthy’s side due to the scandal, Cohn returned to New York to live with his mother and practice law. A few years later New York Judge David Peck, a long-time associate of former CIA Director Alan Dulles, orchestrated Cohn’s hire to the New York law firm Saxe, Bacon and O’Shea — which would later become Saxe, Bacon and Bolan after Tom Bolan, a friend of Cohn’s, became a partner in the firm. Upon his hire, Cohn brought the firm a slew of Mafia-linked clients, including high-ranking members of the Gambino crime family, the Genovese crime family and, of course, Lewis Rosenstiel.

What happened in Suite 233?

The connections Roy Cohn built during the 1950s made him a well-known public figure and translated into great political influence that peaked during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet, as Cohn built his public image, he was also developing a dark private life, which would come to be dominated by the same blackmail pedophile racket that appears to have first begun with Lewis Rosenstiel.

One of the “blackmail parties” Susan Kaufman attended with her then-husband Lewis Rosenstiel was hosted by Cohn in 1958 at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, suite 233. Kaufman described Cohn’s suite as a “beautiful suite…all done in light blue.” She described being introduced to Hoover, who was in drag, by Cohn, who told her that Hoover’s name was “Mary” in a fit of barely concealed laughter. Kaufman testified that young boys were present and Kaufman claimed that Cohn, Hoover and her ex-husband engaged in sexual activity with these minors.

New York attorney John Klotz, tasked with investigating Cohn for a case well after Kaufman’s testimony, also found evidence of the “blue suite” at the Plaza Hotel and its role in a sex extortion ring after combing through local government documents and information gathered by private detectives. Klotz later told journalist and author Burton Hersh what he had learned:

Roy Cohn was providing protection. There were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That’s where Cohn got his power from — blackmail.”

Perhaps the most damning confirmation of Cohn’s activities in Suite 233 comes from statements made by Cohn himself to former NYPD detective and ex-head of the department’s Human-Trafficking and Vice-Related Crimes Division, James Rothstein. Rothstein later told John DeCamp — a former Nebraska state senator who investigated a government-connected child sex ring based in Omaha — among other investigators, that Cohn had admitted to being part of a sexual blackmail operation targeting politicians with child prostitutes during a sit-down interview with the former detective.

Flags fly over the main entrance of the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1982. Suzanne Vlamis | AP

Rothstein told DeCamp the following about Cohn:

Cohn’s job was to run the little boys. Say you had an admiral, a general, a congressman, who did not want to go along with the program. Cohn’s job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn told me that himself.”

Rothstein later told Paul David Collins, a former journalist turned researcher, that Cohn had also identified this sexual blackmail operation as being part of the anti-communist crusade of the time.

The fact that Cohn, per Rothstein’s recollection, stated that the child sex blackmail ring was part of the government-sponsored anti-communist crusade suggests that elements of the government, including Hoover’s FBI, may have been connected at a much broader level than Hoover’s own personal involvement, as the FBI closely coordinated with McCarthy and Cohn for much of the red scare.

It is also worth noting that among Hoover’s many “secret” blackmail files was a sizeable dossier on Senator McCarthy, the contents of which strongly suggested that the senator himself was interested in underage girls. According to journalist and author David Talbot, Hoover’s file on McCarthy was “filled with disturbing stories about McCarthy’s habit of drunkenly groping young girls’ breasts and buttocks. The stories were so widespread that they became ‘common knowledge’ in the capital, according to one FBI chronicler.”

Talbot, in his book The Devil’s Chessboard, also cites Walter Trohan, Washington Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune, as having personally witnessed McCarthy’s habit of molesting young women. “He just couldn’t keep his hands off young girls,” Trohan would later say. “Why the Communist opposition didn’t plant a minor on him and raise the cry of statutory rape, I don’t know.” Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that those “planting” minors on their political foes were McCarthy’s allies and close associates, not his enemies.

The question that necessarily arises from revelations regarding Cohn’s activities in Suite 233 is who else was Cohn “protecting” and servicing with underage prostitutes? One of them could very well have been one of Cohn’s close friends and clients, Cardinal Francis Spellman of the Archdiocese of New York, who was said to have been present at some of these parties Cohn hosted at the Plaza Hotel.

Spellman — one of the most powerful figures in the Catholic Church in North America, who was sometimes referred to as “America’s Pope” — was accused of not only condoning pedophilia in the Catholic church and ordaining known pedophiles including Cardinal Theodore “Uncle Teddy” McCarrick, but also engaging in it himself to such an extent that many New York area priests widely referred to him as “Mary.” Furthermore, J. Edgar Hoover was said to have a filedetailing the cardinal’s sex life, suggesting Spellman’s involvement in the ring and pedophile protection racket in which Cohn and Hoover were personally involved.

Cardinal Francis ‘Franny’ Spellman. Photo | Museum of the City of New York

People close to Cohn often remarked that he was frequently surrounded by groups of young boys, but seemed to think nothing of it. Similar off-handed comments about Epstein’s penchant for minors were made by those close to him prior to his arrest.

Controversial Republican political operative and “dirty trickster” Roger Stone — who, like Donald Trump, was also a protégé of Cohn — said the following about Cohn’s sex life during an interview with The New Yorker in 2008:

Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn’t discussed. He was interested in power and access.” (emphasis added)

Compare this quote from Stone to what Donald Trump, who was also close to Cohn, would later say about Jeffrey Epstein, with whom he was also closely associated:

I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” (emphasis added)

Though it is unknown how long the sex ring at the Plaza Hotel continued, and whether it continued after Cohn’s death from AIDS in 1986, it is worth noting that Donald Trump purchased the Plaza Hotel in 1988. It would later be reported and confirmed by then-attendeesthat Trump “used to host parties in suites at the Plaza Hotel when he owned it, where young women and girls were introduced to older, richer men” and “illegal drugs and young women were passed around and used.”

Andy Lucchesi, a male model who had helped organize some of these Plaza Hotel parties for Trump, said the following when asked about the age of the women present: “A lot of girls, 14, look 24. That’s as juicy as I can get. I never asked how old they were; I just partook. I did partake in activities that would be controversial, too.”

The Roy Cohn Machine

Roy Cohn was only at the beginning of his career when he waded his way into the underground sexual blackmail ring apparently led by Lewis Rosenstiel. Indeed, when Cohn first met Hoover, he was only 23 years old. Over the next three decades or so, before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1986 at the age of 56, Cohn built a well-oiled machine, largely through his close friendships with some of the country’s most influential figures.

Among Cohn’s friends were top media personalities like Barbara Walters, former CIA directors, Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy, media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman, numerous celebrities, prominent lawyers like Alan Dershowitz, top figures in the Catholic Church and leading Jewish organizations like B’nai B’rith and the World Jewish Congress. Many of the same names that surrounded Cohn until death in the late 1980s would later come to surround Jeffrey Epstein, with their names later appearing in Epstein’s now-infamous “little black book”.

Reagan meets with Rupert Murdoch, U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Wick, and Roy Cohn in the Oval Office in 1983. Photo | Reagan presidential library

While President Trump is clearly connected to both Epstein and Cohn, Cohn’s network also extends to former President Bill Clinton, whose friend and longtime political advisor, Richard “Dirty Dick” Morris, was Cohn’s cousin and close associate. Morris was also close to Clinton’s former communications director, George Stephanopoulos, who is also associated with Jeffrey Epstein.

Yet, these were only Cohn’s connections to respectable members of the establishment. He was also known for his deep connections to the mob and gained prominence largely for his ability to connect key figures in the criminal underworld to respected influential figures acceptable to the public sphere. Ultimately, as New York attorney John Klotz stated, Cohn’s most powerful tool was blackmail, which he used against friend and foe, gangster or public official alike. How much of that blackmail he acquired through his sexual blackmail operation will likely never be known.

As Part II of this exclusive investigation will reveal, Cohn and Epstein, and the sexual blackmail operations they ran share many things in common, including not only many of the same famous friends and patrons, but also connections to intelligence agencies and consortiums of mob-linked businessmen, the modern-day equivalents of Samuel Bronfman and Lewis Rosenstiel who have since rebranded as “philanthropists.”

Part II will also reveal that Cohn’s operation was known to have successors, as revealed by a series of scandals in the early 1990s that have since been swept under the rug. The significant amount of overlap between Epstein’s and Cohn’s covert activities in sexual blackmail and their ties to many of the same powerful individuals and circles of influence strongly suggest that Epstein was one of Cohn’s successors.

As will be shown in the final installment of this report, Epstein is only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive and sophisticated operation that offers a frightening window into how deeply tied the U.S. government is to the modern-day equivalents of organized crime, making it a racket truly too big to fail.

Feature photo | A composite image shows from left to right, Lewis Rosenstiel, Jeffrey Epstein, and Roy Cohn. Graphic | Emma Fiala

Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

TOO BIG TO FAIL

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case

Epstein is only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive and sophisticated operation that offers a frightening window into how deeply tied the U.S. government is to the modern-day equivalents of organized crime.

by Whitney Webb

ISRAEL SHAMIR

Russia enjoys its glorious short summer. The global warming phobia couldn’t penetrate its chilly limits. While the South of France suffers a heat wave, California burns, and the progressive forces demonstrate against the climate, the Russians shrug their shoulders in disbelief. They wouldn’t mind some global warming. Here temperatures rarely go above a comfortable 22 °C, and now, in beginning of July, they are stuck at about 15 °C. Summer is the best time for the country covered by snow for the most of the year. Now one can travel into the deep countryside and discover ancient fortresses and churches – without suffering too much.

If you have ever traveled in Russia outside of Moscow, you certainly have some horrible stories to tell about its atrocious roads, food and lodging or rather lack thereof. Things have changed greatly, and they keep changing. Now there are modern highways, plenty of cafés and restaurants, a lot of small hotels; plumbing has risen to Western standards; the old pearls of architecture have been lavishly restored; people live better than they ever did. They still complain a lot, but that is human nature. Young and middle-aged Russians own or charter motor boats and sail their plentiful rivers; they own country houses (“dachas”) more than anywhere else. They travel abroad for their vacations, pay enormous sums of money for concerts of visiting celebrities, ride bikes in the cities – in short, Russia has become as prosperous as any European country.

This hard-earned prosperity and political longevity allows President Putin to hold his own in the international affairs. He is one of a few experienced leaders on the planet with twenty years at the top job. He has met with three Popes of Rome, four US Presidents, and many other rulers. This is important: 93-years old Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad who ruled his Malaysia for 40 years and has been elected again said the first ten years of a ruler are usually wasted in learning the ropes, and only after first twenty does he becomes proficient in the art of government. The first enemy a ruler must fight is his own establishment: media, army, intelligence and judges. While Trump is still losing in this conflict, Putin is doing fine – by his Judoka evasive action.

Recently a small tempest has risen in the Russian media, when a young journalist was detained by police, and a small quantity of drugs was allegedly discovered on his body. The police made many mistakes in handling the case. Perhaps they planted the evidence to frame the young man; perhaps they had made the obvious mistakes to frame the government. The response has been tremendous, as if the whole case had been prepared well in advance by the opposition hell-bent to annoy and wake up the people’s ire against the police and administration. Instead of supporting the police, as Putin usually does, in this case he had the journalist released and senior police officers arrested. This prompt evasive action undid the opposition’s build-up by one masterly stroke.

Recently he openly declared his distaste for liberalism in the interview for the FT. This is a major heresy, like Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. “The liberals cannot dictate… Their diktat can be seen everywhere: both in the media and in real life. It is deemed unbecoming even to mention some topics… The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.” Putin condemned liberals’ drive for more immigration. He called Angela Merkel’s decision to admit millions of immigrants a “cardinal mistake”; he “understood” Trump’s attempt to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from Mexico.

Putin is not an enemy of liberalism. He is rather an old-fashionable liberal of the 19thcentury style. Not a current ‘liberal’, but a true liberal, rejecting totalitarian dogma of gender, immigration, multiculturalism and R2P wars. “The liberal idea cannot be destroyed; it has the right to exist and it should even be supported in some things. But it has no right to be the absolute dominating factor.”

In Putin’s Russia liberalism is non-exclusive, but presents just one possible line of development. Homosexuals are not discriminated against nor promoted. There are no gay parades, no persecution of gays, either. Russian children aren’t being brainwashed to hate their fathers, taken away from their families and given to same-sex maniacs, as it happened in the recent Italian case. Kids aren’t being introduced to joys of sex in primary schools. People are not requested to swear love to transgenders and immigrants. You can do whatever you wish, just do not force others to follow you – this is Putin’s first rule, and this is true liberalism in my book.

There is very little immigration into Russia despite millions of requests: foreigners can come in as guest workers, but this does not lead to permanent residency or citizenship. The Police frequently check foreign-looking people and rapidly deport them if found in breach of visa rules. Russian nationalists would want even more action, but Putin is a true liberal.

Russia is a state where ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘white guilt’ are unheard of. Boys are not forced into homosexuality; girls do not have to claim MeToo. This attitude had made Putin a cult figure among Europeans dissatisfied with mass migration, with gender totalitarianism, with feminist rule and endless wars. This is one of the reasons he is so hated by promoters of the New World Order and admired by the ordinary people.

I am certain this love of ordinary Europeans causes a happy smirk on his lips, now and then. But Putin and his administration want to be friendly with the US, the UK and Europe. This is their first priority. If the West weren’t so intransigently hostile, Russia would be its friendly giant. However, long experience had taught Putin that he can’t surrender in exchange for empty promises. He wants to fix a deal with the US, first of all. A deal that would allow Russia to live the way it wants and act as the international law permits without becoming an object of American fury.

Why does Putin care about the US? Why can’t he just stop taking dollars? This means he is an American stooge! – an eager-for-action hothead zealot would exclaim. The answer is, the US has gained a lot of power; much more than it had in 1988, when Reagan negotiated with Gorbachev. The years of being the sole superpower weren’t wasted. American might is not to be trifled with.

• The US can forbid Russians to carry on their foreign trade in US dollars via US banks, and Russia’s economy would plummet.
• The US can forbid the export of high tech to Russia, as it did in the Soviet era, and Russia would grind to a standstill.
• The US can use its copyright and license system to stop Russian computers from functioning. They already tried to forbid the Russians from using computer scripts; they can block all Microsoft-based and Apple computers in Russia. They can forbid the usage of processors, like they have tried now with Huawei.
• They can give Russia the full treatment of Iran and North Korea and ban its exports.
• They can attack the Russian power grid and computerised processes in an act of cyber warfare, as the New York Times insinuated.

True, Russia is big enough to survive even that treatment, but Russians have got used to a good life, and they won’t cherish being returned to the year 1956. They took action to prevent these worst-case scenarios; for instance, they sold much of their US debt and moved out of Microsoft, but these things are time-consuming and expensive. Putin hopes that eventually the US will abandon its quest for dominance and assume a live-and-let-live attitude as demanded by the international law. Until it happens, he is forced to play by Washington rules and try to limit antagonism.

An experienced broker came in, promising to deliver the deal. It is the Jewish state, claiming to have the means to navigate the US in the desired direction. This is a traditional Jewish claim, used in the days of the WWI to convince the UK to enter the deal: you give us Palestine; we shall bring the US into the European war on your side. Then it worked: the Brits and their Aussie allies stormed Gaza, eventually took over the Holy Land, issued the Balfour declaration promising to pass Palestine to the Jews, and in return, fresh American troops poured into the European theatre of war, causing German surrender.

This time, the Jewish state proposed that Putin should give up his ties with Iran; in return, they promised to assist in general warming of Russo-American relations. Putin had a bigger counter-proposal: Let the US lift its Iran sanctions and withdraw its armed forces from Syria, and Russia will try to usher Iranian armed forces out of Syria, too. The ensuing negotiations around Iran-Syria deal would lead to recognition of the US and Israel interests in Syria, and further on it could lead to negotiations in other spheres.

This was a clear win-win proposal. Iran would emerge free of sanctions; Israel and the US would have their interests recognised in Syria; the much-needed dialogue between Russia and the US will get a jump-start. But Israel does not like win-win proposals. The Jewish state wants clear victories, preferably with their enemy defeated, humiliated, hanged. Israel rejected the proposal, for it wanted Iran to suffer under sanctions.

The Russian proposal had been first sounded in September last year, and it was discussed behind the closed doors in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament). Prime Minister Netanyahu said: “The Russians asked us to open the gates for them in Washington”. Netanyahu rejected the Russian proposals because he thought the re-imposition of U.S. sanctions on Iran could be used as leverage on the Iranians over Syria — not the other way around, wrote a knowledgeable Israeli journalist Barak Ravid of Channel 13. “Netanyahu refused to show any flexibility on the issue of U.S. sanctions,” – he quoted an Israeli official.

Russians agreed to the weird idea of Russian and American security advisers meeting in Jerusalem, hoping it would lead to a breakthrough. My readers remember that I was very worried about this trilateral meeting of a Russian representative with the notorious warmongers John Bolton and Netanyahu. Israeli media played the summit up as the pivotal point for the region. Russia would part with Iran and pivot to Israel and the US, they predicted. This will be a new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, of Russia coming to terms with the aggressor. Good-bye, Iran, welcome, Israel.

However the gift of prophecy had been taken away from the people of Israel and given to fools, said the ever-knowing Talmud (Baba Batra 12b). The Russian representative at the summit, Nikolai Patrushev, while being friendly to Israel, didn’t pivot away from Iran. He denied Tehran is the key threat to regional security. “In trilateral Jerusalem summit, Russia sides with Iran, against Israel and US. Senior Russian official stands by Tehran’s claim that US drone was shot down in Iranian airspace, defends rights of foreign troops to remain in Syria despite Israeli opposition” – concluded an Israeli newspaper.

Russia is friendly to Israel, as many Israelis are connected to Russia by their own, or their parents’ birth. An even stronger reason is that Jews are the top dog in the US, and the Jewish state can open many doors in Washington. Jews and the Jewish state would be as important as, say, the Kurds, if they did not have a hold on the US.

Russia certainly wants to live in peace with the US, but not at the price Mr Netanyahu suggested. Mr Patrushev condemned the US sanctions against Iran. He said that Iran shot down the giant American drone RQ-4A Global Hawk worth more than a hundred million dollars over Iranian territory, not in the international airspace as the Pentagon claimed. He stated that American “evidence” that Iran had sabotaged tankers in the Persian Gulf was inconclusive. Russia demanded that the United States stop its economic war against Iran, recognize the legitimate authorities of Syria, led by President Bashar Assad, and withdraw its troops from Syria. Russia expressed its support for the legitimate government in Venezuela. Thus, Russia showed itself at this difficult moment as a reliable ally and partner, and at the same time assured the staggering Israeli leadership of its friendship.

The problem is that the drive for war with Iran is not gone. A few days ago, the Brits seized an Iranian super-tanker in the Straits of Gibraltar. The tanker was on its way to deliver oil to Syria. Before that, the United States had almost launched a missile attack on Iran. At the last moment, when the planes were already in the air, Trump stopped the operation. It is particularly disturbing that he himself unambiguously hinted that the operation was launched without his knowledge. That is, the chain of commands in the US is now torn, and it is not clear who can start a war. This has to be taken into account both in Moscow and in Tehran.

The situation is daunting. President Trump may want to climb down from that tall tree he had driven himself into when he led his country out of a multilateral nuclear deal with Iran. But he is hampered by his “deep state”, by Pompeo and Bolton; about the latter, Trump himself said that he wants to fight with the whole world. Presidents can’t always remove the ministers from whom they want to get rid of – even the absolute monarchs of the past did not always succeed.

Let us hope that, given Trump’s unwillingness to go to war and the weak position of Premier Netanyahu himself, there will be progress in this matter. But meanwhile Trump introduced new sanctions against Iran; the Iranian leader called the American leadership “insane”; the Americans are again threatening to “completely destroy” Iran.

Russia wants to help Iran, not out of sheer love to the Islamic Republic, but as a part of its struggle for multi-polar world, where independent states carry on the way they like. Iran, North Korea, Venezuela – their fight for survival is a part and parcel of Russia’s struggle. If these states will be taken over, Russia can become the next victim, Putin feels.

President Trump seems to have some positive ideas, but his hands are tied up. At the July 4 parade, his own Pentagon cruelly laughed over his wish to parade tanks in Washington. They had sent a few rusty old paint-peeling tanks, though the president demanded to send the best and most excellent equipment. Thus Trump had been shown that he can’t impose his will even over his own army.

In this situation, Putin tries to build bridges to the new forces in Europe and the US, to work with nationalist right. It is not the most obvious partner for this old-fashioned liberal, but they fit into his idea of multi-polarity, of supremacy of national sovereignty and of resistance to the world hegemony of Atlantic powers. His recent visit to Italy, a country with strong nationalist political forces, had been successful; so was his meeting with the Pope.

In the aftermath of the audience with the Pope, Putin strongly defended the Catholic Church, saying that “There are problems, but they cannot be over-exaggerated and used for destroying the Roman Catholic Church itself. I get the feeling that these liberal circles are beginning to use certain problems of the Catholic Church as a tool for destroying the Church itself. This is what I consider to be incorrect and dangerous. After all, we live in a world based on Biblical values and traditional values are more stable and more important for millions of people than this liberal idea, which, in my opinion, is really ceasing to exist”. For years, the Europeans haven’t heard this message. Perhaps this is the right time to listen.

This article was first published at The Unz Review