The Breedlove-Stoltenberg Plan for NATO’s Russia Campaign – Wayne Madsen

TND Guest Contributor: Wayne Madsen

A hacked private Gmail message sent by then-NATO supreme military commander General Philip Breedlove to former Secretary of State Coin Powell in 2014 shows that Breedlove sought, in contravention of President Obama’s policy, to implement a more aggressive military stance against Russia over the situation in Ukraine.

By bolting from the relatively “measured” policy of America’s Commander-in-Chief, Obama, with regard to Ukraine, Breedlove’s public Cold War mania was only exceeded by his private treasonous behavior. Breedlove’s email to Powell stated that the NATO military chief saw the events in Ukraine as an “opportunity”. In his email to Powell, Breedlove believed the 2014 anti-democratic coup against President Viktor Yanukovych and the declaration of self-government by Crimea and the regions of Lugansk and Donetsk was an opportunity for the United States and NATO to engage militarily with Russia. Breedlove described some “stalwart” allies of the United States as wishing to ratchet up tensions with Russia. It is obvious that these “stalwart” allies not only included the right-wing coup government in Kiev, but NATO members itching for a NATO-led military confrontation with Russia. It is almost certain that these “stalwarts” included Poland and the Baltic states.

Breedlove used as an interlocutor with Powell the former Pentagon consultant Harlan Ullman, the man who came up with the “shock and awe” US doctrine used against Iraq. The “shock and awe” concept borrows heavily from the Nazi German “blitzkrieg” tactics, whereby a swift “lightning” strike is used against an enemy. And like the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe officers who punctuated their military offenses with visits to brothels in the countries they occupied, Breedlove’s friend Ullman carried on in this most ignominious of German traditions. Ullman “shocked and awed” Washington in 2007, when it was revealed that he availed himself of the services of Pamela Martin & Associates, a Washington, DC sex escort service.

It is clear that Breedlove, Ullman, the neoconservative Potomac Foundation, former NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark, and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland conspired to undertake what Ullman described as an effort to “leverage, cajole, convince or coerce the US to react” to Russia in Ukraine. By “react”, these treasonous co-conspirators meant open warfare between NATO and Russia. Not since the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when President John F. Kennedy faced a treasonous Joint Chiefs of Staff, has an American president seen such blatant mutinous behavior from the senior ranks of the US military.

Breedlove and his cohorts did everything possible to stir up tensions with Russia. Breedlove overestimated by 20,000 the number of Russian troops stationed near the Ukrainian frontier. “Intelligence” photos distributed to the media purporting to be Russian tanks inside Ukraine were actually Russian tanks in South Ossetia during the 2008 war with Georgia. Breedlove also tried to convince Bulgaria, a less-than-enthusiastic member of NATO, of Russian plans to invade it next after Ukraine. The invasion plan was a mere figment of Breedlove’s imagination.

The fact that Breedlove went out of his geographical area-of-responsibility by convincing Pakistan to offer Ukraine’s coup government TOW missile launcher and missiles demonstrated that the conspiracy against Obama’s policy went far beyond NATO. The plotters would have also included US Central Command chief, General Lloyd Austin, due to the fact that the transfers of US-supplied weapons from Pakistan to Ukraine would have required Austin’s approval.

Another conspirator in Breedlove’s dangerous liaisons was the then-NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former Danish Prime Minister. Rasmussen is now a political consultant to Ukrainian coup president Petro Poroshenko. One of Rasmussen’s close friends, the CIA-installed former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, is the Poroshenko-appointed governor of Odessa in Ukraine. Ukraine has never before resembled a NATO protectorate. There was also some question about why NATO chose as a successor to Rasmussen another Scandinavian, former Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. It is clear that another Scandinavian was chosen in order to ensure NATO has the political support throughout Europe to develop a two-pronged military attack strategy against Russia: one in the south involving a planned Black Sea fleet and another in the north involving NATO members Norway, Denmark, the Baltic States, and Poland supplemented by formerly neutral/non-aligned Sweden and Finland.

It is traditionally neutral/non-aligned Sweden and Finland that NATO desperately hopes to entrap in its bowels. Although Rasmussen and Stoltenberg have had no problem in getting the commitment of the southern European flank countries of the Balkans and Ukraine to take part in operations against Russia, in northern Europe, the neutral Swedes and Finns have not been as supportive of NATO’s plans as have the Balts and the Poles.

It is now known that during the Cold War, the “neutrality” of Sweden and Finland was a smoke screen. The Finns cooperated with NATO in collecting military and signals intelligence on Soviet targets in Russian Karelia – which some Finns want to see re-incorporated into a “Greater Finland”, the Kola peninsula, and Leningrad. Finland’s VKL Finnish Intelligence Research Establishment (“Viestikoelaitos”) provided the US National Security Agency with intercepts of Russian military and diplomatic communications. The Swedes also routinely shared aerial and maritime reconnaissance intelligence collected on the Soviet Union with the United States and NATO. Swedish signals intelligence facilities maintained by the “Försvarets radioanstalt” (National Defense Radio Establishment), including one located inside the Swedish embassy that overlooked the strategic Helsinki harbor, were connected to the network of listening stations maintained by the United States and Great Britain.

NATO’s manic desire for Sweden and Finland to become part of NATO’s anti-Russian drive matches completely with that of Adolf Hitler’s “Drang nach Osten“, the “drive to the East”. Not only did Hitler manage to convince the Finns to join his Axis alliance but Sweden permitted German troops trains to routinely cross from Finland to Norway and vice versa. Sweden also gladly sold the Nazis war supplies, including iron ore critical for steel production.

Breedlove, Rasmussen, Stoltenberg, and their neo-Cold War confederates all pine for the “good old days” of military confrontation with Russia. These Cold War aficionados have their allies in US military commands in Hawaii, Japan, and South Korea who hope for a similar military confrontation with China. To say that these individuals are “madmen” would be a disservice to actual madmen.

American military officials are fond of saying they are given the responsibility to “keep the peace”. Nothing could be further from the truth. The destabilization of a half dozen countries in the Middle East, from Libya and Syria to Iraq and Yemen, is proof that the Pentagon has perpetuated strife. The confrontations with Russia over South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, and Transnistria demonstrate that the Pentagon sees these as potential flash points with Russia and not as regions requiring diplomatic negotiations.

NATO also sees Finland as an important ally in stoking up irredentist and nationalistic fervor among the Finno-Ugric ethnic groups from Karelia and the Baltic eastward through the increasingly-important geopolitical prize of Russia Arctic north. For that reason, the Finnish Military Intelligence Service has maintained, for at least thirty years, a small top secret branch responsible for outreach to Finno-Ugric groups, which routinely sends Finno-Ugric linguist agents deep into the Russian north to conduct liaison with groups that would assist Finland and NATO in the event of a war with Russia.

With the leak of a few Gmail messages, Breedlove’s and his colleagues’ plans for a war with Russia have been laid bare. The danger is that unlike Breedlove’s fictional almost-namesake, Dr Strangelove, the war that could result from such treason would not be a Hollywood comedy but a real one with perhaps billions of real victims.

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About Wayne Madsen:

Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. Has some twenty years experience in security issues. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. He has been invited to testify as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club. Lives in Washington, D.C.

This article was published at the Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal www.strategic-culture.org and is reprinted with permission.