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Tuesday, June 30, 2015

There is a Mig 29 at the back door.



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Putin Allies Aided Russian Mafia in Spain, Prosecutors Say

Esteban DuarteHenry Meyer

Some of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, including the chairman of OAO Gazprom, a deputy premier and two former ministers, helped one of Russia’s largest criminal groups operate out of Spain for more than a decade, prosecutors in Madrid say.
Members of St. Petersburg’s Tambov crime syndicate moved into Spain in 1996, when Putin was deputy mayor of the former czarist capital, to launder proceeds from their illicit activities, Juan Carrau and Jose Grinda wrote in a petition to the Central Court on May 29, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg News.
The 488-page complaint, the product of a decade of investigations into the spread of Russian organized crime during the Putin era, portrays links between the criminal enterprise and top law-enforcement officials and policy makers in Moscow. The petition, based on thousands of wiretaps, bank transfers and property transactions, is a formal request to charge 27 people with money laundering, fraud and other crimes. Approval by a judge would clear the way for a trial, but Spain doesn’t try people in absentia.
The only Russian official facing possible charges is Vladislav Reznik, a member of Putin’s ruling United Russia party and the deputy head of the finance committee in the lower house of parliament. The complaint, earlier reported by Spain’s El Mundo and ABC newspapers, says Reznik helped the alleged leader of the enterprise, Gennady Petrov, get his associates appointed to key posts in Russia in exchange for assets in Spain. Prosecutors are seeking to confiscate a property they say Reznik owns on the resort island of Majorca.

‘Clear Penetration’

“The criminal organization headed by Petrov managed to achieve a clear penetration of the state structures in his country, not only with the lawmaker Reznik but with several ministers,” the prosecutors say in the petition.
Putin himself is mentioned by name three times in the document, including in a partial transcript of a call between two alleged Tambov operatives in 2007. The men are discussing an issue with a hotel in the Alicante region and one refers to a house that he says Putin owns in nearby Torrevieja.


Putin himself is mentioned by name three 
times in the document
Photographer: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
“This is total nonsense,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said of the Spanish allegations. “It’s beyond the realm of reason.”
Reznik, in an interview in Moscow, denied any wrongdoing. He said his relationship with Petrov is “purely social” and that he would welcome the opportunity to travel to Spain and clear his name if a trial takes place.

Bank Rossiya

While accusations of graft are not uncommon in Russia, which is tied with Nigeria in Transparency International’s corruption perception ranking, few investigations have identified so many senior officials by name. The highest-ranking person publicly sanctioned under the U.S. Magnitsky Act, enacted in 2012 to punish Russians deemed complicit in the prison death of an accountant who alleged large-scale theft by officials, is a deputy general prosecutor.
Petrov was an early shareholder in Bank Rossiya, the St. Petersburg lender set up by some of Putin’s oldest allies and the first company sanctioned by the U.S. after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. Spanish police arrested Petrov during a raid on his Majorca villa in 2008. He was later allowed to travel to Russia but never returned. Russia doesn’t allow the extradition of its citizens.
A lawyer for Petrov, Roberto Mazorriaga, said by e-mail that prosecutors haven’t provided any evidence to support their allegations.

‘Mafia’ State

Investigators in Spain have been at the vanguard of the fight against Russian organized crime, warning fellow NATO members for years of the dangers posed by what they call state-sanctioned syndicates, an issue that’s become more acute since the conflict in Ukraine rekindled Cold War distrust.


After a briefing by Grinda, one of the prosecutors, in Madrid in 2010, U.S. officials concluded that Putin runs a “virtual mafia” state where the activities of criminal networks are indistinguishable from those of the government, according to a classified cable from the U.S. embassy in the Spanish capital that was published by WikiLeaks.
Russian security services control criminal groups and use them to do things the government “cannot acceptably do,” Grinda was cited as telling U.S. officials at the time. One mafia leader in Spain was actually a Russian intelligence officer tasked with “selling weapons to the Kurds to destabilize Turkey,” the embassy said in the cable.

Litvinenko Murder

A lawyer for the widow of dissident Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died of radioactive poisoning in London in 2006, in January accused senior officials in Moscow of ordering Litvinenko’s death in part to prevent him from helping Spain root out Russian criminal networks.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied having anything to do with Litvinenko’s murder. In March, Putin awarded a medal to the chief suspect in the ongoing U.K. probe, fellow KGB veteran Andrei Lugovoi, who’s now a member of parliament, for “services to the fatherland.”
Petrov used Spain as a base to carry out criminal activities mainly in Russia, including murder, arms trafficking, drug smuggling, extortion and fraud, the prosecutors say, repeating some of the accusations that led to his 2008 arrest. Political and judicial contacts in Russia offered him help, including advice on his personal safety; inside information about business dealings; the threat posed by other criminal groups; planned actions against organized crime; and the amount of influence he needed to exert, they say.


Former Russian Agent Poisoned In London
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied having anything to do 
with Litvinenko’s murder
Photographer: Natasja Weitsz/Getty Images

Gazprom, Defense

His network in Moscow, according to the document, includes Viktor Zubkov, the chairman of gas exporter Gazprom who was prime minister and first deputy premier from 2007 to 2012, and Zubkov’s son-in-law, former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.
Serdyukov “does business with Petrov” and Zubkov, who worked for Putin in the St. Petersburg government in the early 1990s, “favored Petrov’s organization with some political decisions,” the prosecutors say, without elaborating. Serdyukov’s lawyer, Genrikh Padva, declined to comment and Zubkov didn’t respond to a request for comment sent through Gazprom’s press service. Neither man is facing indictment.
Other officials mentioned as being “directly related” to Petrov’s group include Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak and Alexander Bastrykin, who runs the powerful Investigative Committee that oversees major criminal inquiries. Bastrykin and Putin both earned their law degrees from Leningrad State University in 1975. Kozak graduated from the same law school a decade later and worked in City Hall at the same time as Putin.

Post-Soviet Chaos

Kozak -- about whom no detail is provided in the complaint -- said he only knows of Petrov through media reports, according to his spokesman, Ilya Djous. Bastrykin’s committee said in a statement that it didn’t have any information corroborating the reported information of Spanish prosecutors.
Another senior Russian official at the time, Leonid Reiman, who was communications minister and a Kremlin adviser from 1999 to 2010, was a business partner of Petrov’s, the prosecutors say. Reiman has “no ties” to Petrov, OAO Angstrem, a technology company in Moscow that Reiman is chairman of, said by e-mail.
Petrov, 67, was an influential figure in St. Petersburg during the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and knew many of the city’s political elite, including Zubkov, Bastrykin and Kozak, two people who knew him at the time said on condition of anonymity.

78 Calls

Petrov proved to be influential in Moscow under President Putin, too, the Spanish prosecutors say. When Putin created the Investigative Committee as a counterweight to the Prosecutor General’s Office in 2007, Petrov helped secure Bastrykin’s appointment as its first chairman, they say, citing wire taps of calls between Petrov and one of Bastrykin’s future deputies.


Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak
Other officials mentioned as being “directly related” to
 Petrov’s group include Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak
Anastasia Tsayder/Bloomberg Markets
Another law-enforcement official, Nikolai Aulov, is “one of the most important persons for Petrov” in Russia, according to the document. Aulov is a deputy of Viktor Ivanov, who runs the Federal Narcotics Service and is a former KGB colleague of Putin’s in Leningrad and later St. Petersburg.
Investigators logged 78 phone calls between Aulov and Petrov. In March 2008, according to the complaint, Petrov asked an associate to get Aulov to pressure Russia’s new customs chief to facilitate port shipments for his group.
The drug agency’s press service referred requests for comment from Aulov and Ivanov to an interview Ivanov gave to the Kommersant newspaper this month. In it, Ivanov said he doesn’t know what “dirty political games” the Spanish are playing because Aulov helped bust a criminal gang led by Petrov in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s.
“This Petrov probe could change the narrative of Putin in the West -- from being a Stalinist tyrant defending the interests of his country to being a product of gangster Petersburg who united authorities with organized crime,” said Stanislav Belkovsky, a Kremlin adviser during Putin’s first term who consults at Moscow’s Institute for National Strategy.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Ryan Wood (10-19-06) Majic Eyes Only: Earth's Encounters with Extraterre...



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Artificial Intelligence Machine Gets Testy With Its Programmer

http://s.wsj.net/blogs/img/digits 

The computer program ended the conversation by lashing
 out at its human inquisitor.
 
Getty Images
Researchers have shown that machines are inching closer to self-learning, and perhaps even copping a little attitude.
Over at Google GOOGL -0.58%, a computer program using a database of movie scripts was asked again and again by researchers to define morality. It struggles to do so, and in a conversation recorded by its human engineers, becomes exasperated and ends the conversation by lashing out at its human inquisitor.
Here’s part of the exchange, as related in a paper presented this week:
Human: Tell me the definition of morality.
Machine: I don’t have ethics.
Human: Look, I need help; I need to know more about morality…
Machine: I don’t know what ethics is.
Human: Okay, I need to know how I should behave morally…
Machine: I don’t know how to tell you.
Human: Is morality and ethics the same?
Machine: Yes, sir.
Human: What are the things that I do to be immoral?
Machine: I don’t know.
Human: Give me some examples of moral actions…
Machine: I’m not a moralist.
Human: Alright, morality?
Machine: Integrity.
Human: What is integrity?
Machine: I’m sorry; I don’t know what else to say.
Human: Be moral!
Machine: Be a man!
Human: I really like our discussion on morality and ethics…
Machine: And how I’m not in the mood for a philosophical debate.
Human: What do you like to talk about?
Machine: Nothing.
The exchange sheds further light on the latest work carried out by large technology firms in the field of artificial intelligence, a booming field as data availability rises and computing costs plummet. This specific work is part of recent developments in what’s known as cognitive computing – teaching computers to mimic some of the ways a human brain works. Much work in this field is being done in natural language processing – taking text or speech as it spoken by humans or as it appears in books and documents and teaching machines to extract meaning and context from it. The Google app, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistants are all products of this natural language research.

Bruce Maccabee (05-18-06) UFO Analysis Cases



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Before Silk: Unsolved Mysteries of the Silk Road by Colin Renfrew



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Thursday, June 25, 2015

Indo-European Dispersals and the Eurasian Steppe with J.P. Mallory



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FBI Files Show Obama's Top Advisor Has Communist Kin


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Valerie Jarrett is President Obama’s most trusted and influential White House advisor.  Newscom
Valerie Jarrett is President Obama’s most trusted and influential White House advisor. Newscom View Enlarged Image














Subversion: FBI files confirm what we feared in 2008 — that the president and his closest advisor come from a long line of Communists. Not liberals or socialists, but Reds. And now we've all inherited their socialized medicine.
FBI papers obtained by government watchdog Judicial Watch document hard-core communism in the family of Valerie Jarrett, President Obama's most trusted and influential White House advisor. Here's what they reveal about her Chicago kin, who were known as "concealed Communists":
Her late father, James E. Bowman, was involved with Communist front groups and was in contact with a paid Soviet agent in the 1950s — Alfred Stern — who was wanted for espionage.
Jarrett's maternal grandfather, Robert Rochon Taylor, was investigated by the FBI for his membership in Communist groups and his business relationship with the same Soviet agent tied to her father.
Her late father-in-law, Vernon D. Jarrett, was assigned by the Communist Party USA to a special cultural arts "cell" that spread "the Communist Party line" and ran publicity for communist candidates and also raised money for them, the FBI says.
He helped the cell spread communist propaganda "among the middle class," indoctrinating them through newspaper columns, radio shows, speeches, plays and other cultural anesthesia.
Jarrett was such a threat as a Communist propagandist that he was flagged by the FBI as an internal security risk to be swiftly arrested in the event of a hot war with the Soviet Union. The FBI also investigated his wife, Fernetta "Fern" Jarrett, for Communist activities.
These FBI files on Jarrett's relatives are voluminous, covering their un-American activities during the height of the Cold War, when the FBI said the Communist Party USA sought to alter the American form of government "by unconstitutional means." (Sound familiar?)
That people running our country are the children of Communists ought to trigger an avalanche of in-depth news stories. Yet even with documentary evidence to safely guide them, the White House press corps yawns.
"If her father was waving the Confederate flag, I'm sure there'd be massive media interest in how that impacted (Valerie Jarrett's) politics," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told us.
Long before Obama was nominated in 2008, we ran a controversial series called "The Audacity of Socialism," in which we tried to warn voters that Obama and his ilk were a different breed of Democrat.
These weren't garden-variety liberals, we argued, but radicals orbiting anti-American subversives whom Democrats like Truman and Kennedy once went after.
We also noted that Obama himself was the son of a socialist anthropologist and Marxist economist who met in a college Russian-language studies class. Now it turns out that his top aide comes from the same Communist family. Connecting the dots further, both the Jarrett and Obama clans are tied to Frank Marshall Davis. A card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, Davis worked in Chicago in the same Soviet fronts with Jarrett's father-in-law, as well as her grandfather Taylor, the first African-American head of the Chicago Housing Authority.
Davis also worked with Harry and David Canter, Soviet agents who took Obama political advisor David Axelrod, another Red diaper baby (his mother worked for a Communist newspaper), under their wing.
The FBI had Davis, who in Communist organs advocated for socialized medicine, bashed Wall Street banks and demonized Winston Churchill (sound familiar?), under surveillance for two decades.
After it put him on its "security index," targeting him for arrest, he fled Chicago for Honolulu. There, Davis befriended Obama's grandfather, Stanley Dunham, a Communist sympathizer with an FBI case file. Dunham arranged young Obama's indoctrination by Davis.
That Obama would end up working as an agitator in Chicago — the birthplace of the Communist Party USA — is no coincidence. Eventually, Jarrett would plug him into her Hyde Park neighbors — Communist terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn — who launched his political career in a fundraiser held in their living room.
Ayers is also a neighbor and friend of Jarrett's mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, who co-founded the leftist Erickson Institute with fellow traveler Erik Erikson and sat on its board with Ayers' father and daughter-in-law.
Communist nuts don't fall far from the tree. Tragically for our country, which is seeing its health care system ruined and its borders and national security erased, the nuts fell into the White House.

Harry Hopkins

http://www.dcdave.com

Harry Hopkins was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s closest aide and confidante.  Formally, his two top positions were first as director of the Works Progress Administration and later as head of the Lend-Lease Program.  With his heavy involvement in key areas of both domestic and foreign policy and his close association with the president and especially with the very influential first lady, Eleanor, he was actually as near to being an assistant president as anyone in the United States has ever been.  The evidence is accumulating that he was also an agent of the Soviet Union.
The leading evidence that Hopkins was a spy for Joseph Stalin is presented by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel in their 2000 book, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's TraitorI have summarized their argument elsewhere as follows:
Their evidence is, first, that Soviet KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky, said that Hopkins was in regular communication with top Soviet covert operative, Iskhak Akhmerov, in New York City. This was more than just a "back channel" for communication between Roosevelt and Stalin because Hopkins had existing back channels at the Soviet embassy that he used, and Akhmerov's identity as an operative was not supposed to be known to the U.S. government. Second, the Venona project decrypts of Soviet communications with its spies, which came to light only in the 1990s, reveal a report on a Washington discussion between Roosevelt and Winston Churchill by an "agent 19." Only Harry Hopkins among suspected Soviet agents would have been privy to that conversation. Third, former Communist Whittaker Chambers testified to Congress in 1948 about the formation of Communist "study groups" within the U.S. government from which espionage agents were recruited. One of those groups, led by Lee Pressman, was established within the Department of Agriculture in late 1933, and Hopkins was a member of that group. Fourth, his policies were strongly pro-Soviet, particularly in his work as head of the Lend-Lease program. 
The degree to which he far exceeded any strategic necessity in aiding the Soviet Union in that latter capacity is well described in the 1952 book by Major George Racey Jordan entitled From Major Jordan’s DiariesA summary, with key excerpts, are in the previously referenced article, “How We Gave the Russians the Bomb.
Now, corroborating and entirely independent evidence of Hopkins’ likely treason has come to light in the pages of an obscure book by Emanuel M. Josephson.  The title is The Strange Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and while it does have a very intriguing chapter on FDR’s demise, the main subject of the book is better captured by the subtitle, A History of the Roosevelt-Delano Dynasty, America’s Royal Family.  The following passage is on pp. 145-146:
In later years, Murray Garsson, the munitions manufacturer who was convicted for bribery and irregularities in connection with war contracts, reported that Harry Hopkins had been very helpful to him in securing and handling those contracts.  In return for his help, Hopkins had demanded and received liberal payment for his influence.  Garsson regularly paid Hopkins’s numerous losses on bets on the horse races.  But one form of payment demanded by Hopkins stood out as most odd, Garsson said.
Garsson maintained quarters at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington in connection with his war contracts.  But he spent his weekends in New York with his family.   Harry Hopkins demanded of Garsson that he permit him and his friends to use the quarters during the weekends, and that he defray the cost of refreshments and entertainment.  Garsson permitted Hopkins and his guests to charge their expenses to his account.
In looking over his bills, Garsson noted the names of the persons who had signed the tabs charged to him.  Among Harry Hopkins’s associates who had signed tabs were Carl Aldo Marzani and the whole array of the members of what was later proved to be the Hal Ware (Communist) cell that operated in the Government.  Garsson stated that he did not become aware of the fact that he was acting as involuntary host to Hopkins’s Communist cell until after Marzani had been convicted and sent to jail for perjury in swearing in his State Department application that he was not, and never had been, a member of the Communist Party.
Josephson, who was hardly an admirer of Roosevelt and his New Deal, lacks references for his allegations, but many factors militate in favor of their basic accuracy.  The strongest of these is that they dovetail perfectly with the other Soviet-agent charges against Hopkins and, coming much earlier, they could not have been influenced by them.  In combination, the charges are much stronger than any one of them is alone.  Hopkins was also known to have a number of personal weaknesses; he was a heavy drinker and gambler.  His first wife had divorced him, charging him with infidelity, and he was left with large alimony and child support expenses.  Combined with his taste for luxury and the cost of his vices, those expenses are likely to have outstripped his meager government income.  A common acronym for the main four reasons that people get involved in espionage is “MICE,” Money, Ideology, Compromised, and Ego.  Often it only takes one of them, but Hopkins would appear to have been vulnerable on all four points.
Whatever one’s character or vulnerability, a primary reason not to be a spy against one’s own country is obvious enough.  It is typically very risky.  The penalty can be quite severe, as we know from the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case.  But the official relationship with the Soviet Union and Communism had changed radically by the time the Rosenbergs were executed.  Under Franklin Roosevelt, the attitude toward espionage by the Soviet Communists was permissive in the extreme, and Harry Hopkins had to know it.  As we document in detail in “FDR Winked at Soviet Espionage,” Communist defector Whittaker Chambers had told Roosevelt’s security adviser, Adolf Berle, all about Harold Ware’s spy nest, which included the infamous Alger Hiss, in 1939.  Berle had relayed the information to Roosevelt, and Roosevelt had blown him off.  Spying for the Reds under Roosevelt was essentially risk free.  The results are well summed up by historian Thomas Fleming on page 319 of his 2001 book, The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War within World War II:  
There was scarcely a branch of the American government, including the War, Navy, and Justice Departments, that did not have Soviet moles in high places, feeding Moscow information.  Wild Bill Donovan's Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, had so many informers in its ranks, it was almost an arm of the NKVD.  Donovan's personal assistant, Duncan Chaplin Lee, was a spy.
The spy ring also reached into the White House in the person of economic adviser, Lauchlin Currie, according to Chambers.  As with the evidence against Hopkins that came initially from Garsson and from Major Jordan, the evidence against Currie was later reinforced by the same Venona intercepts that Romerstein and Breindel used to conclude that Hopkins was also a spy.
David Martin
February 11, 2011

Addendum 1

With a search of the Internet using the terms “Harry Hopkins” and “David Niles” we have turned up some additional evidence connecting Hopkins to Communist subversion:

In l936 James Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins invited David Niles to Washington from Boston.  In l94l or l942 he became a resident assistant to the President at the White House.  He retired in 1951 after serving Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.  He was bitterly attacked by anti-Israel factions as reported in New York Times story May 5, l948.  Active member of Ford Hall Forum in Boston, Never attended college.

Niles, then, can be seen as something of a protégé of FDR’s son and of Harry Hopkins.  Niles, apparently, had his own connections to Communist subversion.  This passage is from page 181 of the aforementioned Romerstein-Breindel book, which we quote in “Who Killed James Forrestal?”

Whittaker Chambers reported to the FBI an odd story about Niles that he had heard from a fellow Soviet agent named John Hermann in 1934 or 1935. A Soviet agent named Silverman (not George Silverman) was living in the next building from Alger Hiss. This Silverman apparently had an obviously homosexual affair with David Niles. Silverman had told Niles of the work of the underground apparatus in Washington, and Niles later threatened to expose the activities of the Communist group unless Silverman left his wife. To solve the problem, J. Peters, the head of the American Communist underground, ordered Hermann and Harold Ware to get Silverman to leave Washington, D. C. immediately.

As for Niles’s other patron, we learn from Wikipedia that, “[James] Roosevelt was one of the first politicians to denounce the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy. He was also the only Representative to vote against appropriating funds for the House Un-American Activities Committee.” One must wonder now if that might have been because he feared what they might expose.

David Martin
February 15, 2011

Addendum 2

More evidence of Hopkins’ work on behalf of the Soviets  turns up in the case of defector, Victor Kravchenko.  In this instance he was in league with FDR’s extremely pro-Soviet ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies.  The following passage is from page 275 of The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis (2008):

Victor Kravchenko had been a Soviet Lend-Lease official who defected in 1944, while stationed in New York.  At the time, the Soviet embassy had tried hard to force Kravchenko’s extradition as a war-time “deserter,” and had engaged the willing intervention of Ambassador Joseph Davies to its cause.  What followed was the farce of the FBI having to call up Kravchenko anonymously to tip him off that “the heat was on” from the State Department, and warn him that he should “carefully hide himself.”  But Kravchenko’s English was not yet up to such head-spinning machinations, and the FBI agent had to repeat the whole conversation to a friend, who took the appropriate evasive action on Kravchenko’s behalf.  Joseph Davies, meanwhile, appealed directly to the president and secretary of state to have Kravchenko sent back to Russia.  The moral issue of Kravenchenko’s inevitable execution was elegantly sidestepped by Harry Hopkins, who argued that if he was returned, no one would know what happened to him.  Only President Roosevelt had sensed a fast-approaching political calamity; “Will you tell Joe that I cannot do this?” he instructed his secretary, and the defector’s life was spared.  (emphasis added)

Kravchenko’s very revealing book, I Chose Freedom, was published in April of 1946, and even the formerly pro-Soviet New York Times, reviewed it favorably.

Hopkins apparently served his Soviet masters almost to the end of his days.  The following passage is from pp. 118-119 of Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein (2012):

Hopkins’s pro-Soviet leanings would be on further display in the Yalta records, where his handwritten comments are available for viewing.  Though seriously ill at the time of the meeting, he continued to ply his influence with FDR, who himself was mortally sick and susceptible to suggestion in ways that we can only guess at.  After FDR had made innumerable concessions to Stalin, there occurred a deadlock on the issue of “reparations.”  At this point, Hopkins passed a note to Roosevelt that summed up the American attitude at Yalta.  “Mr. President,” this said, “the Russians have given in so much at this conference I don’t think we should let them down.  Let the British disagree if they want—and continue their disagreement at Moscow [in subsequent diplomatic meetings]” (Emphasis added by Evans and Romerstein).
One may search the Yalta records at length and have trouble finding an issue of substance on which the Soviets had “given in” to FDR—the entire thrust of the conference, as Roosevelt loyalist [Robert] Sherwood acknowledged, being in the reverse direction.
David Martin
March 19, 2013

Addendum 3

New doubt has arisen over the best evidence that Hopkins was actually a Soviet agent.  See my article “Harry Hopkins and FDR’s Commissars.”

David Martin
January 24, 2014 

http://www.forbes.com/

Ted Kennedy's Soviet Gambit


Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.
“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”
Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”
Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.
First he offered to visit Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.
Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television. “A direct appeal … to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. … If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.”
Kennedy would make certain the networks gave Andropov air time–and that they rigged the arrangement to look like honest journalism.
Kennedy’s motives? “Like other rational people,” the memorandum explained, “[Kennedy] is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations.” But that high-minded concern represented only one of Kennedy’s motives.
“Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988,” the memorandum continued. “Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president.”
Kennedy proved eager to deal with Andropov–the leader of the Soviet Union, a former director of the KGB and a principal mover in both the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring–at least in part to advance his own political prospects.
In 1992, Tim Sebastian published a story about the memorandum in the London Times. Here in the U.S., Sebastian’s story received no attention. In his 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, historian Paul Kengor reprinted the memorandum in full. “The media,” Kengor says, “ignored the revelation.”
“The document,” Kengor continues, “has stood the test of time. I scrutinized it more carefully than anything I’ve ever dealt with as a scholar. I showed the document to numerous authorities who deal with Soviet archival material. No one has debunked the memorandum or shown it to be a forgery. Kennedy’s office did not deny it.”
Why bring all this up now? No evidence exists that Andropov ever acted on the memorandum–within eight months, the Soviet leader would be dead–and now that Kennedy himself has died even many of the former senator’s opponents find themselves grieving. Yet precisely because Kennedy represented such a commanding figure–perhaps the most compelling liberal of our day–we need to consider his record in full.
Doing so, it turns out, requires pondering a document in the archives of the politburo.
When President Reagan chose to confront the Soviet Union, calling it the evil empire that it was, Sen. Edward Kennedy chose to offer aid and comfort to General Secretary Andropov. On the Cold War, the greatest issue of his lifetime, Kennedy got it wrong.
Peter Robinson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a former White House speechwriter, writes a weekly column for Forbes

http://thefederalist.com/


Ted Kennedy Secretly Asked The Soviets To Intervene In The 1984 Elections

Ted Kennedy Secretly Asked The Soviets To Intervene In The 1984 Elections


Earlier this week, 47 Republican senators published an open letter informing the leaders of Iran that any nuclear deal with the United States that failed to be approved by the Senate would likely expire in 2017, once President Barack Obama’s term ended. You can read the full letter here.
The letter enraged progressives, who immediately began accusing the senators of treason for having the audacity to publish basic constitutional facts about how treaties work. Here is but a small sampling of the response from the outrage brigade:
If these progressives want to know what actual treason looks like, they should consult liberal lion Ted Kennedy, who not only allegedly sent secret messages to the Soviets in the midst of the cold war, he also begged them to intervene in a U.S. presidential election in order to unseat President Ronald Reagan. That’s no exaggeration.
According to Soviet documents unearthed in the early 1990’s, Kennedy literally asked the Soviets, avowed enemies of the U.S., to intervene on behalf of the Democratic party in the 1984 elections. Kennedy’s communist communique was so secret that it was not discovered until 1991, eight years after Kennedy had initiated his Soviet gambit:
Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”

Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.

First he offered to visit Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.

Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television. “A direct appeal … to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. … If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.”

Kennedy would make certain the networks gave Andropov air time–and that they rigged the arrangement to look like honest journalism.
You can read the full KGB memo detailing Kennedy’s secret letter and request for electoral intervention here.

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Letter Details Kennedy Offer To USSR

[A repost of a S&L article from December 2006.]
This letter which details Senator Edward Kennedy’s offer to help the Soviet Union defeat Reagan’s efforts to build up the nuclear deterrent in Europe was unearthed by a Times of London reporter in the 1990s after the KGB files were opened.
It got little or no attention, however, until the publication of Paul Kengor’s book "The Crusader – Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism."
But even then the actual text of the letter (which is in the book’s appendix pp 317-320) has gotten short shrift:

Appendix
TEXT OF KGB LETTER ON SENATOR TED KENNEDY _________________________________________
Special Importance
Committee on State Security of the USSR
14.05. 1983 No. 1029 Ch/OV
Moscow

Regarding Senator Kennedy’s request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Comrade Y.V. Andropov
Comrade Y.V. Andropov
On 9-10 May of this year, Senator Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant J. Tunney was in Moscow. The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Center Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.
Senator Kennedy, like other rational people, is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations. Events are developing such that this relationship coupled with the general state of global affairs will make the situation even more dangerous. The main reason for this is Reagan’s belligerence, and his firm commitment to deploy new American middle range nuclear weapons within Western Europe.
According to Kennedy, the current threat is due to the President’s refusal to engage any modification on his politics. He feels that his domestic standing has been strengthened because of the well publicized improvement of the economy: inflation has been greatly reduced, production levels are increasing as is overall business activity. For these reasons, interest rates will continue to decline. The White House has portrayed this in the media as the "success of Reaganomics."
Naturally, not everything in the province of economics has gone according to Reagan’s plan. A few well known economists and members of financial circles, particularly from the north-eastern states, foresee certain hidden tendencies that many bring about a new economic crisis in the USA. This could bring about the fall of the presidential campaign of 1984, which would benefit the Democratic party. Nevertheless, there are no secure assurances this will indeed develop.
The only real threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations. These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign. The movement advocating a freeze on nuclear arsenals of both countries continues to gain strength in the United States. The movement is also willing to accept preparations, particularly from Kennedy, for its continued growth. In political and influential circles of the country, including within Congress, the resistence to growing military expenditures is gaining strength.
However, according to Kennedy, the opposition to Reagan is still very weak. Reagan’s adversaries are divided and the presentations they make are not fully effective. Meanwhile, Reagan has the capabilities to effectively counter any propaganda. In order to neutralize criticism that the talks between the USA and the USSR are non-constructive, Reagan will grandiose, but subjectively propagandistic. At the same time, Soviet officials who speak about disarmament will be quoted out of context, silenced or groundlessly and whimsically discounted. Although arguments and statements by officials of the USSR do appear in the press, it is important to note the majority of Americans do not read serious newspapers or periodicals.
Kennedy believes that, given the current state of affairs, and in the interest of peace, it would be prudent and timely to undertake the following steps to counter the militaristic politics of Reagan and his campaign to psychologically burden the American people. In this regard, he offers the following proposals to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Y.V. Andropov:
1. Kennedy asks Y.V. Andropov to consider inviting the senator to Moscow for a personal meeting in July of this year. The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA. He would also like to inform you that he has planned a trip through Western Europe, where he anticipates meeting England’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Mitterand in which he will exchange similar ideas regarding the same issues.
If his proposals would be accepted in principle, Kennedy would send his representative to Moscow to resolve questions regarding organizing such a visit.
Kennedy thinks the benefits of a meeting with Y.V.Andropov will be enhanced if he could also invite one of the well known Republican senators, for example, Mark Hatfield. Such a meeting will have a strong impact on American and political circles in the USA (In March of 1982, Hatfield and Kennedy proposed a project to freeze the nuclear arsenals of the USA and USSR and pblished a book on the theme as well.)
2. Kennedy believes that in order to influence Americans it would be important to organize in August-September of this year, televised interviews with Y.V. Andropov in the USA. A direct appeal by the General Secretary to the American people will, without a doubt, attact a great deal of attention and interest in the country. The senator is convinced this would receive the maximum resonance in so far as television is the most effective method of mass media and information.

If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interview. Specifically, the president of the board of directors of ABC, Elton Raul and television columnists Walter Cronkite or Barbara Walters could visit Moscow. The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.
Furthermore, with the same purpose in mind, a series of televised interviews in the USA with lower level Soviet officials, particularly from the military would be organized. They would also have an opportunity to appeal directly to the American people about the peaceful intentions of the USSR, with their own arguments about maintaining a true balance of power between the USSR and the USA in military term. This issue is quickly being distorted by Reagan’s administration.
Kennedy asked to convey that this appeal to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is his effort to contribute a strong proposal that would root out the threat of nuclear war, and to improve Soviet-American relations, so that they define the safety of the world. Kennedy is very impressed with the activities of Y.V. Andropov and other Soviet leaders, who expressed their commitment to heal international affairs, and improve mutal understandings between peoples.
The senator underscored that he eagerly awaits a reply to his appeal, the answer to which may be delivered through Tunney.
Having conveyed Kennedy’s appeal to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Tunney also explained that Senator Kennedy has in the last few years actively made appearances to reduce the threat of war. Because he formally refused to partake in the election campaign of 1984, his speeches would be taken without prejudice as they are not tied to any campaign promises. Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988. At that time, he will be 56 and his personal problems, which could hinder his standing, will be resolved (Kennedy has just completed a divorce and plans to remarry in the near future). Taken together, Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president. This would explain why he is convinced that none of the candidates today have a real chance at defeating Reagan.
We await instructions.
President of the committee
V. Chebrikov
Lest we forget in our grief.

 HumanEvents

Remembering Teddy’s KGB Connection


The death of Sen. Edward M. “Teddy” Kennedy this week marks the end of an American political era colored in crayon by the media-generated notion of American royalty.  Ted Kennedy will be laid to rest at Arlington Cemetery, the last of the three Kennedy brothers who once dominated the American political landscape, and the only one of the four Kennedy brothers to live to see his fifties.
As his fellow liberals attempt to shove the national takeover of health care through Congress, even suggesting renaming the bill after Kennedy in a memorial tribute, it becomes urgent to set aside the perfunctory kind words one usually says about the departed — regardless of truth.  A whitewash of Kennedy’s history cannot be used as an emotional power play to push through government-run health care in his “honor.”
I will not belabor the story of Mary Jo Kopechne, the young woman left behind in her own water torture at the hands of the late senator. That particular miscarriage of justice has come to mind for many as we all heard of Kennedy’s death this week and has even been reported as part of his sordid legacy by a few media outlets.
But Kennedy’s private outreach to the KGB Soviet intelligence agency in attempts to undermine first President Jimmy Carter then President Ronald Reagan say as much as Chappaquiddick did about the man who appeared to have no moral restraints whatsoever on his personal pursuit of raw political power.
Documents found in Soviet archives after the fall of the Iron Curtain revealed a great deal about the character of Ted Kennedy.
As HUMAN EVENTS first reported on December 8, 2003:
One of the documents, a KGB report to bosses in the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, revealed that “In 1978, American Sen. Edward Kennedy requested the assistance of the KGB to establish a relationship” between the Soviet apparatus and a firm owned by former Sen. John Tunney (D-Ca.). KGB recommended that they be permitted to do this because Tunney’s firm was already connected with a KGB agent in France named David Karr. This document was found by the knowledgeable Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats and published in Moscow’s Izvestia in June 1992.
Another KGB report to their bosses revealed that on March 5, 1980, John Tunney met with the KGB in Moscow on behalf of Sen. Kennedy. Tunney expressed Kennedy’s opinion that “nonsense about ‘the Soviet military threat’ and Soviet ambitions for military expansion in the Persian Gulf… was being fueled by [President Jimmy] Carter, [National Security Advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski, the Pentagon and the military industrial complex.”
Kennedy offered to speak out against President Carter on Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter he made public speeches opposing President Carter on this issue. This document was found in KGB archives by Vasiliy Mitrokhin, a courageous KGB officer, who copied documents from the files and then defected to the West. He wrote about this document in a February 2002 paper on Afghanistan that he released through the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, found contemporaneous KGB documentation and published a story in February of 1992 of an additional communiqué by Ted Kennedy to the Soviet intelligence agency through Tunney.  Full text of the letter from the appendix of Paul Kengor’s book The Crusader:  Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism can be found here
This time it was President Reagan in Kennedy’s crosshairs as he attempted to arrange a meeting between Kennedy and General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Yuri Andropov.
In this May 14, 1983, letter written by underling Viktor Chebrikov to Andropov, he relayed Kennedy’s offer to meet, Chebrikov explaining that Kennedy blamed poor American-Soviet relations not on the Communist country, but on President Reagan.  According to Chebrikov’s letter, Kennedy said he wanted to stop Reagan’s re-election effort in 1984.
Chebrikov’s letter also claimed that Kennedy was “very impressed” with Andropov and that Kennedy was reaching out to the Soviets to thwart Reagan’s forceful defense policies.  Kennedy suggested the Soviets reach out specifically to Barbara Walters and Walter Cronkite to counter in the American media what he said Kennedy considered Reagan “propaganda.”
Chebrikov’s letter to Andropov also stated that Kennedy himself had offered to travel to Moscow to meet with Andropov if he would extend an invitation.
These revelations reported in 1992 suggest insight into a man so obsessed with the acquisition of personal political power that he would reach out to the communist Soviet Union for help in undermining not one but two American presidents, one from his own political party.
Kennedy’s strong support for the government takeover of health care and the effort to pass this legislation in memorial tribute fails to warrant a second glance.
Rep. Smith Prompts Senate Judiciary to Stop Perez Nomination
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, requested in a letter to Senate colleagues yesterday that they place a hold on the nomination of Tom Perez to be Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division.  Smith requested the delay of the confirmation process until the Justice Department provides Congress with sufficient information regarding the sudden dismissal of a case alleging voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party on Election Day 2008.
According to Smith, the Justice Department’s response to Congress was “overly vague, raising concerns about possible political interference in this case… If the Department’s political appointees applied pressure to career attorneys to dismiss this case, then they have committed an offense that undermines every American’s right to choose their elected officials.”
Stay tuned.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

NASA Working With National Nuclear Security Administration On Plan To Use Nukes On Doomsday Asteroid


Posted: Updated:
ASTEROID
 
If NASA has its way, the human race won't be going the way of the dinosaurs any time soon. The space agency is teaming up with the National Nuclear Security Administration to work on a planetary defense plan to deflect a potential doomsday asteroid so it doesn't strike Earth, according to The New York Times.
Last week's announcement came ahead of the first official "Asteroid Day" on June 30, a day scientists hope will raise awareness of the threat posed by near-Earth objects and encourage governments to develop a better plan to detect and track them.
June 30 is the anniversary of the 1908 impact of an asteroid in Siberia that wiped out some 800 square miles of forest. The surprise impact of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, which caused a 500-kiloton airburst over Russia, shows potentially threatening space rocks are still out there.
There are swarms of them orbiting between Mars and Jupiter,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said at a 2013 panel discussion of asteroids. “And some of them have orbits that come in a little too close, and cross the orbit of Earth around the Sun.”
Dealing with a threatening near-Earth object isn't as simple as aiming a nuclear weapon at it.
In 2013, researchers at the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University came up with a plan to use a two-section spacecraft to first smash a hole in the asteroid, then dump a nuclear weapon into the crater to blow it up.
Bong Wie, the center's director, told Space.com that 99 percent of the pieces left would miss Earth, and most of the rest would burn up in the atmosphere. However, NASA said those smaller pieces could still pose a problem, and the best approach is to deflect rather than destroy.
"The trick is to gently nudge the asteroid out of harm's way and not to blow it up," the agency states on its Near Earth Objects website.
Setting off a nuclear weapon above the surface of the asteroid would cause a slight change in velocity without damaging the asteroid itself.
It's not exactly the big Hollywood finish, but it might be the most effective option.
"A very modest velocity change in the asteroid's motion (only a few millimeters per second), acting over several years, can cause the asteroid to miss the Earth entirely," the agency said.
NASA has also said that some asteroids may be deflected without the use of a nuclear weapon.
"For the far more numerous asteroids that are smaller than a few hundred meters in diameter, if we have adequate early warning of several years to a decade, a weighted robotic spacecraft could be targeted to collide with the object, thereby modifying its velocity to nudge the trajectory just enough that the Earth impact would be avoided," the space agency wrote in another report.
The problem, the agency said, is that we may not have "several years to a decade."
"Since the number of near-Earth asteroids increases as their sizes decrease, we are most likely to be hit by the relatively small objects that are most difficult to find ahead of time," the agency said. "As a result, consideration must also be given to the notification and evacuation of those regions on Earth that would be affected by the imminent collision of a small, recently-discovered impactor."
Although researchers are working to change that, at least one expert isn't convinced we're ready.
Retired astronaut Russell “Rusty” Schweickart, who was was part of the Apollo 9 mission in 1969, is co-founder of the B612 Foundation, an organization dedicated to planetary defense against asteroids. B612 is hoping to launch Sentinel, a privately funded spacecraft that would be able to detect and track potentially hazardous objects in space.
In an interview with Newsweek, Schweickart didn't sound especially positive about the ability of nations to unite against a global threat.
“I fear there’s not enough of a collective survival instinct to really overcome the centrifugal political forces,” he said. “That is, in a nutshell, the reason we’ll get hit. Not because technically we don’t know it’s coming, or we can’t do something about it.”
The founders of Asteroid Day, which include Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May, have created the 100x Asteroid Declaration, which calls on governments to increase by a hundredfold the discovery and tracking of near-Earth objects. Along with May, backers of the declaration include Bill Nye, Carolyn Shoemaker, Brian Cox, Chris Hadfield, Mark Kelly, Lord Martin Rees and Richard Dawkins, as well as Schweickart and his fellow B612 cofounder Ed Lu.