Romney? Kissinger? Petraeus?
Is there a Neocon invasion of Team Trump underway?
By Wayne Madsen Report
The purge of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie loyalists from the Donald Trump presidential transition team has little to do with Christie's Bridgegate scandal and everything to do with a battle between Bush-era neoconservatives and national security realists for control over key departments of the Trump administration. It appears that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, the publisher of the New York Observer and someone who is aligned with the Likud Party of Israel, is now the de facto chair of the Trump transition team, especially when it comes to national security matters. Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the official chairman of the team, is concentrating on domestic policy appointments, such as the rumored appointment of Texas Senator Ted Cruz as Attorney General.
Kushner fired Christie and Christie loyalist, former House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers, from the transition team and replaced them with the neocon Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy. It is likely that Gaffney will seek to bring a host of neocons who championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq into the Trump administration. Also fired was Matthew Freedman, another Christie loyalist. Kushner never liked Christie because as a federal prosecutor in north Jersey, Christie successfully prosecuted Kushner's father, real estate tycoon Charles Kushner, who received a prison sentence at Christie's urging.
Where one finds the likes of Gaffney, former CIA director James Woolsey, also a member of the Trump transition team, and John Bolton, rumored to be in consideration for Secretary of State or deputy Secretary of State, one will find the other neocons who drove the United States into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These include Richard Perle, who claimed U.S. troops invading Iraq would be met with Iraqis throwing "flowers and candy." This editor wrote the following about Perle's fatuous claim in a March 31, 2003, article for CounterPunch: "Perle’s military experience does not permit him to distinguish between flowers and candy and bullets and mortar rounds."
There is someone far more sinister than Gaffney, Bolton, and Perle chomping at the bit to join the new administration. WMR has learned from multiple knowledgeable sources that the proponent of neo-fascism, Michael Ledeen, is working closely with former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, to ensure that as many neocons from the Bush 43 and Reagan eras find senior positions in the Trump administration. Flynn co-authored a book with Ledeen that was released in July and titled, "The Field of Flight:
How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies." The book represents typical neocon pabulum more than it does realism. In July, Kushner's Observer, unsurprisingly, published a five-star review of the book. Flynn, who distinguished himself admirably by suggesting that the Obama administration was coddling the Islamic State and its allied jihadists in Syria, appears not to recognize that it has long been the desire of neocons like Ledeen, Perle, Woolsey, and Bolton to divide the Arab nation-states into warring factions so that Israel can hold ultimate sway over the entire Middle East.
The Field of Fight
The Flynn and Ledeen team spell trouble for the Trump administration
Even more worrisome about the Flynn-Ledeen duo is the fact that they may have been involved with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in staging a "self-coup," known more popularly in Latin America as an "autogolpe," in Turkey in July of this year. In April, WMR first became aware of plans for such a potential coup in Turkey when we were informed that Flynn and a group of Americans and Turks were involved in planning something "big" in Turkey. What we were not told was when and what, but it is now evident based on Flynn's connections with Ledeen. The history of Ledeen in staging deep state political operations, including prominent assassinations and coups, is perhaps without parallel in recent times. By encouraging those individuals within the Turkish military, police, judiciary, and media harboring anti-Erdogan feelings to set the ground for the July coup played right into Erdogan's hands. The July 15 Turkish coup attempt, like the July 20, 1944, coup attempt against Adolf Hitler, saw Erdogan and Hitler bide their time after the launching of the coups to successfully identify all the coup actors. Both Erdogan and Hitler were conveniently away from their respective capitals at the time of the coups, Erdogan in Marmaris on the southwest coast of Turkey and Hitler in Rastenburg in East Prussia.
Erdogan and Hitler both engaged in purges of the coup plotters in a classic "fly paper" operation. In the case of Erdogan, the Hizmet movement of Turkish businessman and Islamic spiritual leader Fethullah Gulen were identified as being behind the self-coup. Their followers throughout Turkish society were rounded up, jailed, and charged with treason. Flynn has promised that the Trump administration will extradite Gulen from his place of asylum in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, to stand trial for leading the coup after which he is certain to face an Erdogan firing squad or gallows hanging.
Italian law enforcement sources have told WMR that Ledeen is suspected of involvement in another major "false flag" operation. In 1978, leftist guerrillas with the Italian Red Brigades allegedly carried out the kidnapping and assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Moro was about to participate in a compact between his Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party, something that was anathema to a group of neocons in the United States, including Henry Kissinger. Ledeen and State Department interlocutor and "fixer" Dr. Steve Pieczenik, who is now a frequent guest on Infowars, reportedly worked through Italian fascist organizations like the P-2 Masonic lodge and the Gladio networks of the CIA and NATO, which also were running the kidnappers of Moro, to arrange for his hasty assassination.
Aldo Moro Steve Pieczenik US Italy PM killed investigation
Aldo Moro's death was at the hands of U.S. deep state players
Italian sources report that Ledeen has recently been spotted in Rome. What is of concern to the Italians is that Ledeen, who speaks fluent Italian, is in Italy to support the December 4 referendum ushed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi that would change the Italian Constitution to establish a strong prime minister and curtail the powers of the Italian Senate, Presidency, and the regional governments. The fascist forces in Italy, represented by Renzi's Democratic Party, seek to curtail the ability of the Italian senate and judiciary to carry out current Italian investigations of deep state activities, including probes into the past affairs of Gladio, Ledeen, and Pieczenik.
Ledeen is the most malignant neocon tumor to appear within the nascent Trump foreign policy apparatus. He has been a threat to U.S. national security since the Jimmy Carter administration.
A CIA document from the CIA's Office of Legislative Counsel, dated October 16, 1978, indicates that Democratic Rep. Edward Boland of Massachusetts, the first chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), had doubts about the veracity of Ledeen, then a journalist.
Boland, who would later sponsor the Boland Amendments that prohibited U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras -- a prohibition that Ledeen and his co-conspirators violated in the Iran-Contra affair -- passed along a request, via HPSCI Staff Director Thomas K. Lattimer to the CIA, asking about "the veracity of the 2 October 1978 article in the New York Magazine by Michael Ledeen about CIA [counter-intelligence] staff having planted false information in high USG [U.S. Government] circles to find out whether there was in fact a 'mole.'" The neocon line at the time was that there were Soviet moles in the U.S. Intelligence Community. However, after Reagan came to power and Ledeen joined the administration, the most destructive mole found in the government was Jonathan Pollard, a spy for Israel, and a Mossad control officer, code-named Mega, who, although never been publicly identified, has been rumored to be one of the veteran neocons being considered for a high national security or foreign affairs position in the Trump administration.
During the Bush 43 administration, Ledeen also wormed his way into the White House.
Ledeen acted as an unofficial foreign policy adviser to Karl Rove, especially in championing the cause of the Iranian terrorist group Mojahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which was also supported by rumored Trump Secretary of State choice Rudolph Giuliani. Ledeen also served as an interlocutor between the Bush administration and the Iran interlocutor from the Iran-Contra scandal, Manucher Ghorbanifar, an expatriate Iranian Jew who makes his home in Rome. Even after Ledeen's and Ghorbanifar's fingerprints were found on the bogus "yellowcake" uranium documents from Niger, falsely describing Iraq's seeking to procure uranium from the West African nation as a pretext for war with Iraq, Ledeen and Ghorbanifar sought to re-enact the same fiction, this time with Iran being the target.
Ledeen and Ghorbanifar sought $25 million from the Bush White House to have the MEK plant Desert Storm-vintage biological and chemical weapons shells, confiscated by U.S. forces in Iraq, on the Iranian side of the Iraqi border. The weapons would be used as "proof" of Iran's plan to "attack" U.S. troops in Iraq, thus prompting a U.S. military strike against Iran and another war for the United States.
In 2005, WMR reported on another scandal involving Ledeen, yet a second major espionage operation focused on Mossad agents within the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. The August 2, 2005 report is as follows: "An on-going criminal investigation in Italy has yielded copies of the minutes of meetings held at the U.S. Embassy in Rome in 1995 attended by a Colonel Franklin' from the United States, leading Italian neo-fascist politicians (including Deputy Prime Minister Giancarlo Fini), and Likud officials from Israel. The meetings were held to arrange for lucrative telecommunications and military contracts for Israeli companies with the U.S. government . . .
Air Force Reserve Colonel, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Pentagon Bureau of Near East and South Asian Affairs employee Lawrence (Larry) A. Franklin was recently indicted for passing classified information to two American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employees. The top Mossad official at the Israeli embassy in Washington and other Israeli agents are also under investigation by the FBI. Franklin served in the U.S. Air Force Reserves since 1976 and was posted to the DIA and Defense HUMINT Services. While serving his two week active duty stints, Franklin was intermittently posted to the Air Attache office at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. Franklin, who touted an aggressive military approach against Iran, also reportedly attended a December 2001 meeting in Rome on opening up back channels to Iranian dissidents. Attending the meeting, in addition to Franklin, were leading neo-con Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute and Karl Rove's chief foreign policy advisor; Pentagon neocon Harold Rhode; Iran-contra figure and known fabricator Manucher Ghorbanifar; Italian SISMI military intelligence chief Nicolo Pollari; Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino; and a number of Iranian dissidents."
Trump has only been president-elect for a week and his proto-administration is already being infiltrated by individuals who have acted as major deep state players in the political affairs of Turkey, Italy, Iraq, Iran, and other nations. The talk of Bolton as Secretary of State has so alarmed Kentucky's recently-reelected Senator Rand Paul that he will do everything in his power to seek Senate rejection of Bolton as Secretary of State. Paul and others should also object to the presence of individuals such as Gaffney, Woolsey, Perle, Ledeen, and other neocons in the Trump administration. Flynn, if nominated for a position requiring Senate confirmation, should be grilled vigorously on his and Ledeen's involvement in the Turkish self-coup of July 2016.
Is there a Neocon invasion of Team Trump underway?
By Wayne Madsen Report
The purge of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie loyalists from the Donald Trump presidential transition team has little to do with Christie's Bridgegate scandal and everything to do with a battle between Bush-era neoconservatives and national security realists for control over key departments of the Trump administration. It appears that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, the publisher of the New York Observer and someone who is aligned with the Likud Party of Israel, is now the de facto chair of the Trump transition team, especially when it comes to national security matters. Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the official chairman of the team, is concentrating on domestic policy appointments, such as the rumored appointment of Texas Senator Ted Cruz as Attorney General.
Kushner fired Christie and Christie loyalist, former House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers, from the transition team and replaced them with the neocon Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy. It is likely that Gaffney will seek to bring a host of neocons who championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq into the Trump administration. Also fired was Matthew Freedman, another Christie loyalist. Kushner never liked Christie because as a federal prosecutor in north Jersey, Christie successfully prosecuted Kushner's father, real estate tycoon Charles Kushner, who received a prison sentence at Christie's urging.
Where one finds the likes of Gaffney, former CIA director James Woolsey, also a member of the Trump transition team, and John Bolton, rumored to be in consideration for Secretary of State or deputy Secretary of State, one will find the other neocons who drove the United States into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These include Richard Perle, who claimed U.S. troops invading Iraq would be met with Iraqis throwing "flowers and candy." This editor wrote the following about Perle's fatuous claim in a March 31, 2003, article for CounterPunch: "Perle’s military experience does not permit him to distinguish between flowers and candy and bullets and mortar rounds."
There is someone far more sinister than Gaffney, Bolton, and Perle chomping at the bit to join the new administration. WMR has learned from multiple knowledgeable sources that the proponent of neo-fascism, Michael Ledeen, is working closely with former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, to ensure that as many neocons from the Bush 43 and Reagan eras find senior positions in the Trump administration. Flynn co-authored a book with Ledeen that was released in July and titled, "The Field of Flight:
How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies." The book represents typical neocon pabulum more than it does realism. In July, Kushner's Observer, unsurprisingly, published a five-star review of the book. Flynn, who distinguished himself admirably by suggesting that the Obama administration was coddling the Islamic State and its allied jihadists in Syria, appears not to recognize that it has long been the desire of neocons like Ledeen, Perle, Woolsey, and Bolton to divide the Arab nation-states into warring factions so that Israel can hold ultimate sway over the entire Middle East.
The Field of Fight
The Flynn and Ledeen team spell trouble for the Trump administration
Even more worrisome about the Flynn-Ledeen duo is the fact that they may have been involved with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in staging a "self-coup," known more popularly in Latin America as an "autogolpe," in Turkey in July of this year. In April, WMR first became aware of plans for such a potential coup in Turkey when we were informed that Flynn and a group of Americans and Turks were involved in planning something "big" in Turkey. What we were not told was when and what, but it is now evident based on Flynn's connections with Ledeen. The history of Ledeen in staging deep state political operations, including prominent assassinations and coups, is perhaps without parallel in recent times. By encouraging those individuals within the Turkish military, police, judiciary, and media harboring anti-Erdogan feelings to set the ground for the July coup played right into Erdogan's hands. The July 15 Turkish coup attempt, like the July 20, 1944, coup attempt against Adolf Hitler, saw Erdogan and Hitler bide their time after the launching of the coups to successfully identify all the coup actors. Both Erdogan and Hitler were conveniently away from their respective capitals at the time of the coups, Erdogan in Marmaris on the southwest coast of Turkey and Hitler in Rastenburg in East Prussia.
Erdogan and Hitler both engaged in purges of the coup plotters in a classic "fly paper" operation. In the case of Erdogan, the Hizmet movement of Turkish businessman and Islamic spiritual leader Fethullah Gulen were identified as being behind the self-coup. Their followers throughout Turkish society were rounded up, jailed, and charged with treason. Flynn has promised that the Trump administration will extradite Gulen from his place of asylum in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, to stand trial for leading the coup after which he is certain to face an Erdogan firing squad or gallows hanging.
Italian law enforcement sources have told WMR that Ledeen is suspected of involvement in another major "false flag" operation. In 1978, leftist guerrillas with the Italian Red Brigades allegedly carried out the kidnapping and assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Moro was about to participate in a compact between his Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party, something that was anathema to a group of neocons in the United States, including Henry Kissinger. Ledeen and State Department interlocutor and "fixer" Dr. Steve Pieczenik, who is now a frequent guest on Infowars, reportedly worked through Italian fascist organizations like the P-2 Masonic lodge and the Gladio networks of the CIA and NATO, which also were running the kidnappers of Moro, to arrange for his hasty assassination.
Aldo Moro Steve Pieczenik US Italy PM killed investigation
Aldo Moro's death was at the hands of U.S. deep state players
Italian sources report that Ledeen has recently been spotted in Rome. What is of concern to the Italians is that Ledeen, who speaks fluent Italian, is in Italy to support the December 4 referendum ushed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi that would change the Italian Constitution to establish a strong prime minister and curtail the powers of the Italian Senate, Presidency, and the regional governments. The fascist forces in Italy, represented by Renzi's Democratic Party, seek to curtail the ability of the Italian senate and judiciary to carry out current Italian investigations of deep state activities, including probes into the past affairs of Gladio, Ledeen, and Pieczenik.
Ledeen is the most malignant neocon tumor to appear within the nascent Trump foreign policy apparatus. He has been a threat to U.S. national security since the Jimmy Carter administration.
A CIA document from the CIA's Office of Legislative Counsel, dated October 16, 1978, indicates that Democratic Rep. Edward Boland of Massachusetts, the first chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), had doubts about the veracity of Ledeen, then a journalist.
Boland, who would later sponsor the Boland Amendments that prohibited U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras -- a prohibition that Ledeen and his co-conspirators violated in the Iran-Contra affair -- passed along a request, via HPSCI Staff Director Thomas K. Lattimer to the CIA, asking about "the veracity of the 2 October 1978 article in the New York Magazine by Michael Ledeen about CIA [counter-intelligence] staff having planted false information in high USG [U.S. Government] circles to find out whether there was in fact a 'mole.'" The neocon line at the time was that there were Soviet moles in the U.S. Intelligence Community. However, after Reagan came to power and Ledeen joined the administration, the most destructive mole found in the government was Jonathan Pollard, a spy for Israel, and a Mossad control officer, code-named Mega, who, although never been publicly identified, has been rumored to be one of the veteran neocons being considered for a high national security or foreign affairs position in the Trump administration.
During the Bush 43 administration, Ledeen also wormed his way into the White House.
Ledeen acted as an unofficial foreign policy adviser to Karl Rove, especially in championing the cause of the Iranian terrorist group Mojahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which was also supported by rumored Trump Secretary of State choice Rudolph Giuliani. Ledeen also served as an interlocutor between the Bush administration and the Iran interlocutor from the Iran-Contra scandal, Manucher Ghorbanifar, an expatriate Iranian Jew who makes his home in Rome. Even after Ledeen's and Ghorbanifar's fingerprints were found on the bogus "yellowcake" uranium documents from Niger, falsely describing Iraq's seeking to procure uranium from the West African nation as a pretext for war with Iraq, Ledeen and Ghorbanifar sought to re-enact the same fiction, this time with Iran being the target.
Ledeen and Ghorbanifar sought $25 million from the Bush White House to have the MEK plant Desert Storm-vintage biological and chemical weapons shells, confiscated by U.S. forces in Iraq, on the Iranian side of the Iraqi border. The weapons would be used as "proof" of Iran's plan to "attack" U.S. troops in Iraq, thus prompting a U.S. military strike against Iran and another war for the United States.
In 2005, WMR reported on another scandal involving Ledeen, yet a second major espionage operation focused on Mossad agents within the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. The August 2, 2005 report is as follows: "An on-going criminal investigation in Italy has yielded copies of the minutes of meetings held at the U.S. Embassy in Rome in 1995 attended by a Colonel Franklin' from the United States, leading Italian neo-fascist politicians (including Deputy Prime Minister Giancarlo Fini), and Likud officials from Israel. The meetings were held to arrange for lucrative telecommunications and military contracts for Israeli companies with the U.S. government . . .
Air Force Reserve Colonel, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Pentagon Bureau of Near East and South Asian Affairs employee Lawrence (Larry) A. Franklin was recently indicted for passing classified information to two American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employees. The top Mossad official at the Israeli embassy in Washington and other Israeli agents are also under investigation by the FBI. Franklin served in the U.S. Air Force Reserves since 1976 and was posted to the DIA and Defense HUMINT Services. While serving his two week active duty stints, Franklin was intermittently posted to the Air Attache office at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. Franklin, who touted an aggressive military approach against Iran, also reportedly attended a December 2001 meeting in Rome on opening up back channels to Iranian dissidents. Attending the meeting, in addition to Franklin, were leading neo-con Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute and Karl Rove's chief foreign policy advisor; Pentagon neocon Harold Rhode; Iran-contra figure and known fabricator Manucher Ghorbanifar; Italian SISMI military intelligence chief Nicolo Pollari; Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino; and a number of Iranian dissidents."
Trump has only been president-elect for a week and his proto-administration is already being infiltrated by individuals who have acted as major deep state players in the political affairs of Turkey, Italy, Iraq, Iran, and other nations. The talk of Bolton as Secretary of State has so alarmed Kentucky's recently-reelected Senator Rand Paul that he will do everything in his power to seek Senate rejection of Bolton as Secretary of State. Paul and others should also object to the presence of individuals such as Gaffney, Woolsey, Perle, Ledeen, and other neocons in the Trump administration. Flynn, if nominated for a position requiring Senate confirmation, should be grilled vigorously on his and Ledeen's involvement in the Turkish self-coup of July 2016.