by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Since the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 4, 1964, off the coast of Vietnam,  the US Government has believed it has needed a lie, voted by a majority of the US Congress, to launch a war. Not since then has the Congress doubted, or the rest of us accepted, that a war-starting fabrication like that one will always succeed in Washington to start the war.

Nor has the truth of the incident — however delayed in discovery — brought the war to an end;  nor inhibited the war party from starting the next one. Force deters or ends wars; truth does neither.

“This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States and we should take that seriously,” declared Richard Durbin, the chief whip of the Democratic Party in the US Senate  on December 12, a month after he won election to a fifth term.

Durbin was referring to US government and media reports of the operation allegedly conducted  by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) to penetrate the SolarWinds company software installations in US Government computers.   What is unusual about this alleged attack is that there has been no confirmed damage, no casualty, no loss, reported Reuters “according to three of the people familiar with the matter”.

The New York Times claimed: “the broad Russian espionage attack on the U.S. government and private companies, underway since spring and detected only a few weeks ago, is among the greatest intelligence failures of modern times.” But the newspaper qualified this by adding it didn’t know this for sure. “The sweep of stolen data is still being assessed…Investigators were struggling to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence community and nuclear laboratories were affected by the highly sophisticated attack.”     This followed months of investigation:  “investigators spent Monday [December 14] trying to understand the extent of the damage.”

Durbin — born in 1944 to a Ukrainian mother and Irish father — was just out of short pants when the Gulf of Tonkin incident was staged by the Johnson Administration to commence its full-scale ground, air and naval war against North Vietnam and the Vietcong. There hasn’t been a war since then which Durbin didn’t vote for.

Except for a difference of wording to start the war against Iraq in October 2002.  When the Senate considered the authorising resolution to launch that one and topple Saddam Hussein, Durbin proposed amending the authorisation to limit the use of US force against an “imminent threat” posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – if they existed – instead of the “continuing threat to the national security of the United States” represented by Iraq. Durbin’s amendment was defeated by 70 votes to 30.

When it comes to war against Russia, Durbin no longer distinguishes between “imminent threat” and “continuing threat”.  Durbin now says: “Russia is relentlessly trying to invade America’s cyberspace, Durbin added, and this latest hack proves they are having at least some success. We must start taking Russia’s ongoing threats to our democracy more seriously.”

In this US war against Russia’s “ongoing threats”, there is no limit to the Russian targets which the US and allies will attack – with Durbin’s approval – and no restriction on the lies required to justify the war.

This is what we have to look forward to in the new year.

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by Editor - Friday, December 18th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Elephants are the truly self-knowing creatures of our world.

We know this because when they are about to die, they go somewhere no one else can find. It’s the elephantine way of saying they aren’t convinced they are leaving anything behind that’s worth remembering, so in their last act of will, they escape the speculators.   

Not so writers, especially the big-money ones. Thus, when John Le Carré (aka David Cornwell) died over the weekend, we know that it happened in Truro, Cornwall; in a hospital; and that the cause of death was pneumonia, but not the Covid-19 type.  He was 89 years old.  

His commission agent issued a statement claiming he should be remembered for having “define[d] the Cold War era with the help of his character, George Smiley, and through his complex plots and beautiful prose, beamed a harsh light at the injustices of our world.” In marketing circles this is known as talking your book. The agent attached two hyperboles – one approximately true, one absolutely false. “He has sold more than sixty million copies of his work worldwide. His like will never be seen again.”

The Murdoch Times also tried hyperbole: “[Le Carré] created a new school of fiction, not so much spy stories as anti-spy stories, convoluted tales of disillusionment and betrayal.” The Financial Times cut the pedestal down by several notches. “[He] elevat[ed] the spy novel to a higher literary form that reached well beyond the flimsy, hard-boiled, action-packed capers often common to the genre.” If you think about that for an instant, it’s no reach at all. It’s a description of the FT’s reporting on Russia.     

The Guardian momentarily suspended its Russia-hating obsession to record the career and personal betrayals Cornwell performed against fellow Englishmen when he was employed as an agent, first of MI5 and then of MI6. Evidently, there was much worse he did to them, but the newspaper’s obituarist added: “the precise details of his work have never been spoken of.” This comes close to the truth about the Le Carré books – from them we learn next to nothing about the other side, only how discreditable our side is.

“Always George’s problem,” le Carré wrote in his last tale of his best-known MI6 officer, George Smiley, “seeing both sides of everything.” About the Russians, not so — not Smiley,  certainly not Le Carré.  

It was clear last year that he had ceased to have his wits about him when he wrote the following to be pasted on the front cover of a book MI6 had dictated about the Skripal affair  to a BBC correspondent called Mark Urban. “A scrupulous piece of reporting,” Le Carré wrote —  “necessary, timely and very sobering”. Later, when the evidence was pointed out to Le Carré that he had been quite wrong, and was asked to set his own record straight, he arranged the following pretence with his agent. She wrote: “Mr Cornwell is away writing currently and has asked that we decline all requests for him at this time.”

Now that Le Carré is away permanently, it is time to remember his predecessor, Eric Ambler (lead image, left and right). He died also aged 89; that was in London in 1998. At the time it was said he had “raised the thriller to the level of literature. He brought intellectual substance to the genre at a time when it often suffered from shortages of surprise, maturity, verisimilitude and literary skill.”

On his way out, Ambler said: “Thrillers are respectable now. Back in the beginning, people weren’t quite that sure about them. But ‘they really say more about the way people think and governments behave than many of the conventional novels. A hundred years from now, if they last, these books may offer some clues to what was going on in our world.”

With elephantine flair he titled his autobiography “Here Lies Eric Ambler”. There Ambler tells of creating “Soviet agents who were on the side of angels”, and the “only Communist Party speaker who ever carried conviction with me”. Ambler amused himself, and also the reader, when eating eggs on toast in a café on the Edgware Road with the Communist and a professional burglar. According to Ambler, the latter told the former: “I suppose you could say that I redistribute wealth”.

In the real world Cornwell would have reported to his superiors on them both; in his fiction Le Carré would have affected guilt.   Ambler judged both to be laughable, the latter more so.

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by Editor - Monday, December 14th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Until Christopher Steele (lead images, 1^st and 2^nd left) was introduced to Victoria Nuland in 2014, there had not been as penetrating a British spy penetration of US policymakers in Washington since 1943. That was when Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, on orders from London, unbuttoned their flies and penetrated as many of the wives of US politicians, newspaper proprietors, and oil corporation chiefs as London thought they should mount in order to tap their pillow talk, and by whispering in their ears influence their husbands.  

The story of Steele’s relationship with Nuland over two years, 2014 to 2016, has just been unbuttoned, er declassified, by two Republican committee chairmen of the US Senate in a file of 126 pages.  At the time, Nuland was the State Department’s chief policymaker for Russia and the Ukraine as Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs. The chaperone, er go-between, was a State Department official named Jonathan Winer (lead images, 3^rd left and right). At the time, Winer wasn’t working directly for Nuland; officially, he was State’s special envoy for Libya.

The disclosure of the role Winer played to introduce Steele to Nuland, and persuade her to trust confidential reports Steele was writing on Russia, has been forced by Republican senators who have accused Secretary of State John Kerry and other Obama Administration officials of fabricating Steele’s reputation in preparation for the role he was subsequently hired to play by Hillary Clinton in the scheme to discredit Donald Trump during and after the election campaign of 2016. Winer had already spent ten years working for Kerry in the Senate and was personally influential with him.

Steele’s reports, opened here for the first time, reveal more of the micturition he became famous for in mid-2016; that was revealed for the first time as the Golden Showers dossier in January 2017.

Among Steele’s papers, it is now revealed he told Nuland that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was preparing for “a big war” against Russia in eastern Ukraine before Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down in July of 2014;  that none of his sources, or the State Department officials he was briefing,  believed MH17 had been shot down by a Russian missile or by a Russian group; the incident was a success for the US because “the Russian President’s aims of dividing the US and EU appeared to have been shattered by the downing”; and that “by the end of the year [2014] there would be a string of serious [Russian] corporate defaults and in 6- 12 months the [Putin] regime could be on its knees.”

“Fascinating”, responded Nuland in one email. “Tx as ever”. “Love these, tx” she emailed after reading another of Steele’s reports. “I’m honored to be the telegraph operator”, Winer replied.  

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by Editor - Sunday, December 13th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Not since before the end of the Soviet Union have Russians been more certain the country has deadly enemies. They are also in no doubt the US is the biggest of them, trailed by the Ukrainian enemy, the British, the European Union, and the Poles.  

There has been a brief exception. In September 2014, following the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 and the mobilisation of NATO forces for an invasion of eastern Ukraine, 84% of those polled by the Levada Centre agreed the country had enemies. This past September the comparable figure was 82%. Today there is less uncertainty than before – in 2014 8% of Russians told their face-to-face interviewer they weren’t sure; now it’s only 5%.

This is the outcome of years of US and European military, economic and propaganda operations aimed at convincing the world to support regime change in the Kremlin, and Russians to believe they would be better off  if this happens. The outcome of these operations this year has been defeat on each of the hot war fronts – Ukraine, Syria, Libya, and Armenia – and failure in the major cyber-war operations: the Skripal Novichok case; the MH17 trial in The Netherlands; the Alexei Navalny affair in Germany.

Failure of cyber-warfare means that it doesn’t matter what  the attackers say happened to Skripal or MH17, if the Russians resist believing what they are told. In the Navalny case, despite all the publicity he has attracted since he collapsed on the toilet of his airplane to Moscow on August 20, the proportion of Russians supporting him politically has stuck in the margin for statistical error; that’s  between 3% and 6%. Despite the increased name recognition and sympathy for his earlier anti-corruption message, there has been a sharp increase in Russian disapproval of Navalny’s promotion of himself from his bunker in Berlin.

In recent days too, the retreating commanders of the enemy states have asked President Vladimir Putin for Marshal Kutuzov’s golden bridge.  That’s a reliable back-channel for negotiations; an agreement for a ceasefire, then exit from the battlefield; the resumption of profitable interstate trade and investment, despite sanctions. This was Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s purpose sending a junior foreign minister to Moscow in mid-November; it is Putin’s purpose for naming Anatoly Chubais to be the negotiating counterpart of John Kerry, President-elect Joseph Biden’s appointee as “Special Presidential Envoy for Climate”.  

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by Editor - Thursday, December 10th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Even as the British Empire was collapsing, and its army was defeated by the Germans,  Japanese, Israelis, Egyptians, Indians, Cypriots, and the Kenyan Mau Mau, British intelligence officers were unshaken in their confidence that they were cleverer than their adversaries;   their espionage and deception operations an uninterrupted success  despite the loss of men, materiel, territory, terms of trade, and the pound.  

“We have the brains. [The Americans] have the money,” remarks one of these officers, Sir David Omand (lead image).

A former head of the signals intelligence agency GCHQ, then coordinator of the intelligence and security services for the prime  minister, Omand has just published a book  with the aim of converting some of the brains into more of the money. More, that is, than Omand already draws from his seat   on the board of Babcock International, a maker of warships, submarines, air force trainers,  helicopters, plus a division Omand and Babcock call cyber intelligence and security.  

It’s natural, therefore, that Omand is talking his own book — in the sales department sense of the term. Natch too, the book, entitled “How Spies Think, Ten Lessons in Intelligence”, is a success story. All that’s missing is the eleventh lesson Omand leaves out.  That’s the one about how the principal enemies in Omand’s world, the Russians, keep managing to succeed in their operations – invasions, assassinations, deceptions, hacking, phishing, spoofing, and faking — despite all the defeats Omand and his colleagues have been inflicting on them, year in, year out.

Omand’s twelfth lesson is to keep trying to beat the Russians. That, he concludes, requires giving GCHQ and the rest of the British intelligence establishment — not to mention Babcock International — new powers, new money from the state treasury, and relief from the law.  “The surveillance that is needed to uncover those responsible and to detect malware… can appear highly invasive of personal privacy. I do not believe we have any alternative for the protection of society from those who mean us harm other than to allow our intelligence and security agencies to use such powerful tools.”

Cyber-attack against Russia is Omand’s thirteenth lesson — with enough extra power, money,  and  exemptions from the criminal code he promises that victory over the Russians is just around the corner.  Omand projects this into the pages of the Economist seven years into the future,  when he and his colleagues imagine they will be counting “the cumulative gains in cybersecurity following the top priority given to countering subversion as an intelligence requirement. There had been corresponding additional investment in the UK National Cyber Security Centre, working in partnership with the private sector and in close cooperation with its counterparts overseas. The public was much more security-savvy. The critical infrastructure was now [2028] much more resilient to any attempts to disrupt it. A small number of highly targeted offensive cyber-operations…had demonstrated that the UK and US were prepared to defend themselves from cyber-coercion. The UK cyber-domain (.uk) was now protected by active cyber defences that identified malware in bulk traffic, and removed bad websites and fake internet addresses…”

This wishful thinking Omand is trying to sell at £21 per copy.

So far, wishful thinking is paying off for the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) which was created in 2017 as a new section of GCHQ with a budget of £1.9 billion. Before that, it was a group of smaller, cheaper, competitive organisations operating inside other ministries and the Bank of England, with a great many more targets than Russians, including each other.  But the NCSC is facing a budget review in March 2021. In a recent report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee there was considerable skepticism about the Centre’s performance. The MPs didn’t believe what the intelligence officers told them. “The weak evidence base and the lack of a business case for the National Cyber Security Programme that helps to deliver the Strategy make it difficult for the Department to assess whether it will meet all its objectives by 2021. A lack of a business case also means it is unclear whether the money allocated at the start of the Programme was the right amount, making it more difficult to judge value for money.”

For Omand, the Centre and the GCHQ, the Russian enemy remains the big money shot.

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by Editor - Tuesday, December 8th, 2020
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By Liane Theuerkauf, Munich 
  @bears_with

Last month Germany’s  Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) headed by Bruno Kahl (lead image) joined with the Chancellery and other ministries in Berlin to provide the first official catalogue of the German government’s allegations in the case of Alexei Navalny.

This was published on November 19.  Press reporting in Germany has been scant; in Russian, the texts did not appear in translation until last week. In English, there has been almost no reporting at all.  

Required to answer by a formal 76-point questionnaire presented to the German Government in the Bundestag  by deputies of the Alternative for Germany party (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD),  the combination of the questions and the Government’s answers reveals a catalogue of lies. By examining the fine print the extent of this lying becomes both obvious and shocking.

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by Editor - Monday, December 7th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The German Government has revealed to the German parliament that it had decided Alexei Navalny (lead image, left) had been the victim of a crime within minutes of his collapse on board a flight between Tomsk and Moscow on August 20. That was before Navalny’s staff in Tomsk had begun filming their search of Navalny’s hotel room in Tomsk; and also before Navalny’s flight was diverted to Omsk, and he was examimed at the Omsk Emergency Hospital number 1.  

The officials in Berlin (2^nd, 3^rd from left, right) who decided to send a medical evacuation aircraft to fly Navalny from Omsk to the Charité clinic in Berlin,  now acknowledge that before they made this decision, they were “not aware” of the medical data on Navalny’s condition. Although the government arranged the evacuation flight, it says it has “no knowledge” of whether the German flight crew and medics on board the evacuation flight wore any form of protective clothing. No subsequent testing for contamination of the aircraft, ambulance, or personnel attending Navalny has occurred, according to the German officials. This is an indirect admission by the officials that the crime against Navalny was not treated as a chemical warfare attack until after it was reported by the Institut für Pharmakologie und Toxikologie der Bundeswehr (IPTB, Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology of the German Army) to the head of the  German intelligence agency BND, Bruno Kahl, (2^nd left) and by him to Chancellor Angela Merkel   (3^rd left).

On September 2, thirteen days after the Germans say they knew there had been a crime, officials in Berlin  now say they  “provided all EU member States… as well as all NATO allies on 3 September 2020, with unequivocal evidence in writing of poisoning with a Novichok chemical warfare agent.” Only after that did the Germans request the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Swedish and French military experts to double-check by taking samples of Navalny’s “biomaterials” (blood, urine). The Bundestag has been told the Swedes arrived at Navalny’s bedside on September 5; the French and the OPCW on September 6. The Swedes reported  back to Berlin in 48 hours, on September 7; the French took four days until September 10; the OPCW needed almost a month for their testing until October 5. 

The latest admissions by German officials also reveal that the water bottle which Navalny staff claim to have been the murder weapon has not been analysed by the Germans themselves, the Swedes, French or the OPCW. The bottle, brought from Tomsk to Berlin by Navalny’s associate Maria Pevchikh, has not been fingerprinted in Germany to confirm whether Navalny had touched it.

German officials told the Bundestag they are “not aware” and have “no data” on whether Pevchikh was on board Navalny’s medevac aircraft,  or whether she carried the bottle to Germany. Asked to confirm if Pevchikh has been questioned by the German authorities,  the officials say: “It is impossible to answer this question due to the current rules of law. Despite the fundamental constitutional obligation of the Federal government to meet the information requests of the Bundestag, it is affected by the need to keep certain data secret due to current legal norms. Not to distribute the details of the criminal process to the public is the principle of the rule of law, which has equal constitutional force.”

These disclosures in the form of official answers presented to 76 questions submitted by deputies of the Alternative for Germany party (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) were published by the Bundestag on November 19. A translation into Russian by Ekho Moskvy radio station and the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper appeared on Monday of this week. Deustche Welle, the German state propaganda organ – motto,  “Made for Minds” —  has not reported the question-and-answer document in either German or English.

No Anglo-American newspaper has reported the document in English.

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by Editor - Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Yulia Skripal (lead image) has telephoned home to say that she and her father, Sergei Skripal, are alive and well in the UK; living in separate rented accommodations;  paying for them with the pension her father gets from MI6; getting plenty of exercise on a treadmill and nature walks; keeping her diabetic father’s sugar level down; and planning to meet next for a Christmas or New Year dinner together.

Sergei has a minder living with him. Yulia described him as a medic whose job is to  maintain a tracheostomy tube installed in Sergei’s throat. Its function is to compensate for what she said was partial paralysis of his nasopharyngeal muscles, for his lack of air to breathe, and for the danger that Sergei might choke on his own phlegm.  

In an hour-long telephone call at noon, British time, on November 21, Yulia Skripal also said she wanted to set the record straight that her father never wrote a letter to President Vladimir Putin asking for permission to return to Russia,  nor gave an interview to Mark Urban, a BBC reporter who published a book of what he claims Skripal told him.

She also said: “I really want to go to New Zealand, but, unfortunately, not yet.”

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by Editor - Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

It requires unusual degrees of self-confidence, political power, and lawlessness for the generals commanding the winning side in war to hold themselves innocent of the killing which the troops under their command committed against the losing side or suspected sympathisers.   

In Washington, in February of 1946, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court Frank Murphy warned that if the law of war requires the most senior commander of soldiers running amok with blood lust to be responsible with his own life for what his men have done – even if the commander didn’t know and had no effective means of controlling the troops – the precedent might one day reach to the US commander-in-chief, the President.  “No one in a position of command in an army, from sergeant to general,” said Murphy, “can escape those implications. Indeed, the fate of some future President of the United States and his chiefs of staff and military advisers may well have been sealed by this decision.”

That decision has come to be known as the Yamashita Standard after Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita (lead image, top, 1^st left).  But when Australian soldiers killed more than 39 Afghan civilians between 2007 and 2016,  in a judgement publicly released a few days ago, their commanders – Generals Angus Campbell (2^nd left), Paul Kenny (3^rd left), Adam Findlay (4^th left), and Richard Burr (right) — have been cleared of command duty and personal responsibility.

They have been judged by the Army, the Government in Canberra, and the entire Australian press to be innocent. From their time as special forces’ commanders in Afghanistan, they have been promoted to general rank; appointed to advise the prime minister and his ministers on fresh battlefield operations, including the plan to invade  eastern Ukraine after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014.

That was a crime, the guilt for which the Dutch Government aims to convict the Russian chain of command all the way to the President. The Dutch government says it is applying its version of the Yamashita Standard, with evidence of chain of command communications fabricated by the Ukrainian secret service, the SBU; by a NATO propaganda unit; and by a cartoon of Moscow’s command responsibility presented to the press  by a Dutch policeman named Wilbert Paulissen (lead image, bottom ).

The American, Australian and Dutch commands have not yet won their war against Russia, so the MH17 war crime trial is premature. It is also contradicted by their own policy for the Afghan war. “Such circumstances,” declared the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman last Friday, “cast doubt on the genuine willingness of the Australian authorities to bring to justice all military personnel responsible for crimes, as well as on the seriousness of the stated intentions of the armed forces command to reform army special forces units. The massive, systemic and grave crimes committed over the years by fighters of Australian elite units against the inhabitants of Afghanistan make a new assessment of the meaning of the relentlessly proclaimed commitment of official Canberra to a ‘rules-based world order.’ What are these rules?”

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by Editor - Monday, November 30th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Grief for his loss has prevented me from writing about Krissy (Kris, Kriska, Krisichka, Kiryusha from КРЫСА meaning “rat”). He is the cat to whom I belonged who died at our home in Moscow nine years ago, on December 9, 2011.

The efforts of a Russian oligarch to kill me, and then, having failed at that, to expel me from Russia; and the equal exertion of Australian foreign ministry and aluminium business officials to cover up the crime, prevented me from being with Krissy when his heart stopped beating. For several hours in advance, perhaps for a day, he knew death was coming; he was seventeen cat-years old – 84 in human years. He also knew that my kind of practical optimism to save his life would be fruitless this time. He had survived so much already. He, his mistress and I had often considered the risks of exposing oneself to bad Russians and bad Australians. One of his lives had been saved, he knew, by a South African, a very good one.

John Gray, a British philosophical writer who loves cats, tries to explain these things from their  point of view in a new book, which  until Gray came on to a section about Spinoza was encouraging,  Between Spinoza’s birthday in Amsterdam on November 24 – he would have been 388 last week – and Krissy’s dying day, there are a few things which deserve to be remembered. Russian things.

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by Editor - Sunday, November 29th, 2020
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