A "CIA within the CIA" battles against Trump
By Wayne Madsen Report
Even before he was inaugurated on January 20, President Trump faced a virtual "CIA within the CIA" that is bound and determined to derail his intelligence and foreign policy agendas. Past presidents have faced opposition from the Central Intelligence Agency -- John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter are prime examples -- but the opposition was sub rosa and not out in the open as it is today.
A number of former CIA officers have taken to CNN and MS-NBC to voice their opinions that Trump is a threat to U.S. national security. In addition to venting their own spleens about Trump, they are publicly airing the views of hundreds of their former colleagues currently serving within the CIA.
The conventional punditry in Washington is stressing, without evidence, that Trump's presidential campaign was helped by "Russian intelligence officials." A dodgy British memorandum, created by a former MI-6 spook named Christopher Steele, and embellished by the JEB campaign, which hired him to dig up dirt on Trump, is being used as "proof" of Russian interfered in the U.S. election. However, what is being overlooked is that "Russian intelligence" may be a substitute for "Russian mafia." The Russian oligarchs, many of whom are exiled in Britain, Switzerland and have no love for Trump and his previous pro-Russian views.
It recently emerged that Ukrainian parliament member Andrey Artemenko met in January with Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to deliver a proposal that would have "leased" Crimea to Russia for 100 years in exchange for a pullout of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. The "peace plan" appears to have been a red herring since there is no documented evidence of regular Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. Artemenko is a shady figure who has been involved with the scandal-plagued Federation of International Football Association (FIFA) and who is a member of the party of the corrupt former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
It was Tymoshenko's criminal conviction and imprisonment by the government of president Viktor Yanukovych that helped propel the "Euromaidan" revolution and coup that drove Yanukovych into exile in Russia. Artemenko is also close to the former Ukrainian boxer Vitali Klitschko, the current mayor of Kiev, who recently attended the Munich Security Conference along with Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and such anti-Russian U.S. delegates as Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, neocon Robert Kagan, and Kagan's wife Victoria Nuland, the chief architect of the Euromaidan revolution. At Munich, where the CIA was working overtime to cultivate new relationships and reinforce older ones, the plotters of neo-Cold War intrigue in Ukraine were all present. The CIA would have known about Klitschko's ties to Artemenko.
Trump, who has surrounded himself with shady characters like Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Hungarian-American fascist Sebastian Gorka, may not be a "puppet" of Russian President Vladimir Putin, as alleged by detractors. Instead, Trump appears to be an unwitting stooge of the Russian-Israeli mafia that wants a green light to depose Putin and replace him with one of their own, someone, for example, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Khodorkovsky, now in exile, is leading the Russian-Israeli oligarchs in their attempt to undermine Putin. International hedge fund tycoon George Soros was also in Munich, rubbing shoulders with Klitschko and his own puppet, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The intrigue on display in Munich may be complicated, but the end result may be a two-for-one deal for the Russian-Israeli gangsters: the overthrow of Putin and the impeachment of Trump. The result would be a Russian president who would complete the privatization of Russian industry and infrastructure to benefit ally, Mike Pence, in the Oval Office.
Klitschko , a colleague of Artemenko, and Ukrainian President Poroshenko in Munich rubbing shoulders with anti-Trump and anti-Russian U.S. politicians, as well as VP Pence and SecDef Mattis. Is the Ukrainian "peace deal" a red herring by Kiev and the Russian oligarchs, working with a "CIA within the CIA" to sink Trump?
As delegates were packing up to leave Munich, there was another interesting development in nearby Vienna. An Austrian appeals court approved the extradition to the United States of Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash to the where he faces corruption charges. After the Euromaidan coup in 2014, Firtash was arrested by Austrian police on an FBI warrant. Firtash was a close political ally of Yanukovych. Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort was a business partner of Firtash. In 2008, Manafort and Firtash were part of a business team that sought to buy Manhattan's Drake Hotel and demolish it to make way for a new skyscraper called the Bulgari Tower, a deal that MAY have involved the Trump Organization. The Drake deal involved another Trump adviser, Richard Gates. While she was prime minister, Tymoshenko sued Firtash over the Drake deal. Now, an ally of Tymoshenko, Artemenko, has his fingerprints on a Ukrainian peace plan.
Also in Munich with Pence, Mattis, Kagan, and Nuland was Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk. Pinchuk, a friend of John McCain, is close to both Poroshenko and Soros and a vocal opponent of Putin.
There are forces within the CIA -- the "CIA within the CIA" -- that want a return to the days of Boris Yeltsin, when everything and everyone in Russia was for sale and Russia gladly followed the diktats from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Two things stand in their way, Putin and the Putin-admiring Trump, the latter not seeming to want to "get with the program" of returning to the status quo ante in U.S.-Russian relations.
In the 1975 cinematic thriller "Three Days of the Condor," Robert Redford, who plays Joe Turner and whose CIA codename is "Condor," works at a CIA front operation in Manhattan’s Upper East Side called the "American Literary Historical Society – ALHS." Condor returns from running a lunch errand to find that all his colleagues have been shot to death. The plot centers around a "CIA within the CIA." The producers of the film, which was based on a 1974 novel by James Grady titled "Six Days of the Condor," must have had an inkling about a "CIA within the CIA."
In "Three Days of the Condor," a CIA front in Manhattan is wiped out by a "CIA Within the CIA." There is more fact than fiction in the 1975 cinematic thriller.
In 1975, the concept of a "CIA within the CIA" prompted Emily Sheketoff, a House Select Committee on Intelligence staffer who was investigating the CIA, to inquire about a "CIA within the CIA," from Robert Gambino, the chief of security for the CIA. It was Gambino who briefed Jeb Bush on his non-official cover assignment in Venezuela, prior to the ex-CIA director's son's departure in 1977 for Caracas to head up the Texas Commerce Bank's operations in the country. Gambino scoffed at the notion of a "CIA within the CIA" in an October 30, 1975 memo. Based on Gambino's ties with ex-director Bush while Jimmy Carter's director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, was in charge of the CIA, Gambino serves as "exhibit number one" when it comes to the "CIA within the CIA." In fact, Sheketoff flat out stated to Gambino that she believed the CIA's Office of Security was then the major component of the hidden CIA.
An intelligence game is now being played out by Langley and it involves unsavory mafiosi in Ukraine, London, and Langley, Virginia. In essence, a "CIA within the CIA" is attempting to stage a "soft coup" in the United States and they have a number of willing accomplices in the media and within Mr. Trump's own inner circle.