"The Final Solution (Part 1 & 2)" - 9/27-28/20
“The Final Solution (Part 1 & 2)” – 9/27-28/20
This is long, it’s going to be time consuming and not for those just looking to skim through in a few minutes. This is for the info hounds that don’t mind spending some time on this subject. This is multiple articles and videos by several excellent data miners and writers.
This is a worthwhile compilation of info on the cov19 scamdemic operation.
There’s a common thread that runs through all of these nefarious machinations !
(Note :The tag along video player and/or randomly inserted ad blocks or statements/links are not part of this article. They are aggravating and a hindrance to the continuity of the article. I apologize for the aggravation. I have no control over their placement in the body of this article.)
by Anthony Patch @ http://www.anthonypatch.com/
That common thread that runs through all of this!
Luciferase and Bioluminescent Quantum Dots
/ Bill Gates’ Quantum Dot Digital Tattoo
Implant To Track COVID-19 Vaccine
Compliance !
(Note :The tag along video player and/or randomly inserted ad blocks or statements/links are not part of this article. They are aggravating and a hindrance to the continuity of the article. I apologize for the aggravation. I have no control over their placement in the body of this article.)
May 18, 2020
If you ever wanted to SEE How Obvious it has ALL Become and the END of The WORLD Guaranteed, then watch THIS VIDEO.
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheJonathankleck/about
https://www.show-notes.info/thisistheend/
http://www.thisisitbe4thefire.com/
http://www.thisisitbe4thefire.com/downloads.html
http://www.jonathankleck.com/listen.htm
Bill Gates’ Quantum Dot Digital Tattoo
Implant to Track COVID-19 Vaccine
Compliance
http://stateofthenation.co/?p=10358
by Afshin Yaghtin
SAVED Magazine
Microsoft founder Bill Gates announced on March 18, 2020 during a “Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ session” that he is working on a new, invisible “quantum dot tattoo” implant that will track who has been tested for COVID-19 and who has been vaccinated against it.
According to BioHackInfo.Com: “The quantum-dot tattoos involve applying dissolvable sugar-based microneedles that contain a vaccine and fluorescent copper-based ‘quantum dots’ embedded inside biocompatible, micron-scale capsules. After the microneedles dissolve under the skin, they leave the encapsulated quantum dots whose patterns can be read to identify the vaccine that was administered.”
The Covid-19 vaccine is already under research and development and experts say it will likely be available in about 18 months. Will this mean forced vaccinations or perpetually “sheltering in place” for those who refuse the coronavirus vaccine? Gates is simultaneously working on the ID2020 Certification Mark, which according to pymnts.com utilizes “immunization to serve as a platform for digital identity”. The Gates Foundation has also formed an alliance with Accenture, IDEO, Gavi, and the Rockefeller Foundation to make ID2020 a reality.
It was recently announced that Covid-19 has the ability to survive on cash for up to 10 days. How long before businesses shun paper money for fear of the virus and people demand a cashless society? According to New9.Com: “A growing number of businesses and individuals worldwide have stopped using banknotes in fear that physical currency, handled by tens of thousands of people over its lifetime, could be a vector for the coronavirus”. In South Korea, the country’s central bank went as far as taking cash out of circulation for two weeks, and even burned paper money in some cases. A draft of the upcoming economic stimulus bill also contained a provision that required creating a U.S. digital dollar, but was removed at the last minute. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has been pushing for the digital dollar, saying that it would “allow everyone to set up a digital dollar wallet, called a ‘FedAccount,’ a free bank account that can be used to receive money, make payments, and take out cash.” Will this eventually be tied into a “mark” or digital tattoo, let’s say, that has the ability to not only track you with ID2020, confirm if you’ve been vaccinated, and also tie in the banking system all into one easy to implant, invisible, digital mark?
Bill Gates with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIAID and Dr. Francis Collins, NIH Director.
MIT has been developing the quantum tattoo at Bill Gates’ direction and funding. MIT researchers have “found a covert way to embed the record of a vaccination directly in a patient’s skin rather than documenting it electronically or on paper—and their low-risk tracking system could greatly simplify the process of maintaining accurate vaccine records, especially on a larger scale,” according to ScienceAlert.Com. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded MIT’s research for the invisible mark, which was published in the journal, Science Translational Medicine, in December 2019. “The invisible “tattoo” accompanying the vaccine is a pattern made up of minuscule quantum dots – tiny semiconducting crystals that reflect light – that glows under infrared light.”
It would be very clever of Satan to make the mark of the beast invisible.
While we cannot predict “the day or the hour”, when you put all these components together, it’s starting to look a lot like the beginnings of the end. “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name” (Revelation 13:16-17).
At the very least, world events signal the very real likelihood of compelled vaccinations, as the world complies with orders to “shelter in place”.
http://stateofthenation.co/?p=10358
END.
Head of the Hydra: The Rise of Robert Kadlec
BIG PHARMA
A powerful network of political operatives, a global vaccine
mafia and their man in Washington.
by Raul Diego and Whitney Webb
https://www.mintpressnews.com/head-of-the-hydra-the-rise-of-robert-kadlec/267584/
May 15th, 2020
By Raul Diego and
Whitney Webb Whitney Webb
WASHINGTON DC (The Last American Vagabond) — Last Friday, a group of Democratic Senators “demanded” that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) Robert Kadlec, “accurately disclose all his personal, financial and political ties in light of new reporting that he had failed to do so previously” after it was revealed that he had failed to note all “potential conflicts of interest” on his nomination paperwork.
The report in question, published last Monday by The Washington Post, detailed the ties of Kadlec to a man named Fuad El-Hibri, the founder of a “life sciences” company first known as BioPort and now called Emergent Biosolutions. Kadlec had previously disclosed his ties to El-Hibri and Emergent Biosolutions for a separate nomination years prior, but had failed to do so when nominated to head ASPR.
Though The Post does note Kadlec’s recent failure to disclose these connections, the article largely sanitizes Kadlec’s earlier yet crucial history and even obfuscates the full extent of his ties to the BioPort founder, among other glaring omissions. In reality, Kadlec has much more than his ties to El-Hibri looming large as “potential conflict of interests,” as his decades-long career in shaping U.S. “biodefense” policy was directly enabled by his deep ties to intelligence, Big Pharma, the Pentagon and a host of corrupt yet powerful characters.
Thanks to a long and deliberate process to introduce biodefense policy, driven by Robert Kadlec and his sponsors, $7 billion dollars-worth of federally-owned vaccines, antidotes and medicines – held in strategically arranged repositories across the country in case of a health emergency – are now in the hands of one single individual. Those repositories, which compose the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), are the exclusive domain of HHS’ ASPR, a post created under Kadlec’s watchful eye and tailored over the years to meet his very specific requirements.
From this perch, Robert Kadlec has final say on where the stockpile’s contents are sourced, as well as how, when and where they are deployed. He is the sole source procurer of medical material and pharmaceuticals, making him the best friend of Big Pharma and other healthcare industry giants who have been in his ear every step of the way.
Kadlec assures us, however, that the fact that he now holds the very office he worked so long to create is merely a coincidence. “My participation in the ASPR project began at that time when I was working for the chairman of the Subcommittee on Bioterrorism and Public Health Preparedness…The bill was made law and the ASPR was created. It just was a coincidence that, 12 or 14 years later, I was asked to become the ASPR,” Kadlec stated in 2018.
It was all a random twist of fate, Kadlec asserts, that saw him occupy ASPR at this crucial moment in U.S. history. Indeed, with the country now in the middle of a WHO-declared coronavirus pandemic, Kadlec now has full control over the far-reaching “emergency” powers of that very office, bestowed upon him by the very law that he had written.
The story of how a former USAF flight surgeon came to have the exclusive dealer license over the single biggest stash of drugs in the history of the world is as disturbing as it is significant in light of current events, particularly given that Kadlec now leads the coronavirus response for all of HHS. Yet, Kadlec’s rise to power is not a case of an evil mastermind conquering a uniquely vulnerable point of the nation’s resources. Instead, it is a case of a man deeply enmeshed in the world of intelligence, military intelligence and corporate corruption dutifully fulfilling the vision of his friends in high places and behind closed doors.
In this third installment of “Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex,” Kadlec is shown to hail from a tight-knit group of “bioterror alarmists” in government and the private sector who gained prominence thanks to their penchant for imagining the most horrific, yet fictitious scenarios that inspired fear among Presidents, top politicians and the American public. Among those fictitious scenarios was the “Dark Winter” exercise discussed in Part I.
Some of these alarmists, among them “cold warriors” from Fort Detrick’s days of openly developing offensive weapons, would engage in unsettling anthrax experiments and studies while developing suspect ties in 2000 to a company called BioPort. As noted in Part II of this series, BioPort stood to lose everything in early September 2001 due to controversy over its anthrax vaccine. Of course, the 2001 anthrax attacks that followed shortly thereafter would change everything, not just for BioPort, but U.S. biodefense policy. With the stage set, Kadlec would quickly spring into action, guiding major policy changes on the heels of subsequent major events and disasters, culminating in his crowning as King of the stockpile.
The accidental madman
Robert Kadlec describes himself as having been an “accidental tourist” regarding his introduction to biological warfare. An Air Force physician who had specialized in tropical diseases, Kadlec would later say his interest in the field began when he was assigned to be a special assistant for Chemical and Biological Warfare to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), advising then-head of Special Operations Command Maj. Gen. Wayne Downing, on the eve of the first Gulf War.
Kadlec would later state that he had witnessed firsthand how the military, immediately prior to the Gulf War, had “lacked the necessary protective equipment, detectors, and medical countermeasures including vaccines and antibiotics against the immediate threats posed by Iraq,” allegedly prompting him to want to better U.S. biodefense efforts.
While holding this post at JSOC, Kadlec was privy to the advice of William C. Patrick III, a veteran of the U.S.’ bioweapons program who had developed the U.S.’ method for weaponizing anthrax and held no less than five classified patents related to the toxin’s use in warfare. Patrick, who had left government service in 1986 to become a consultant, advised the Pentagon — then headed by Dick Cheney — that the risk of a biological weapons attack by Iraq, particularly anthrax, was high. Patrick’s warning prompted the U.S. military to vaccinate tens of thousands of its troops using the controversial anthrax vaccine “anthrax vaccine adsorbed (AVA).” Kadlec would personally inject AVA into around 800 members of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Kadlec would later note in Congressional testimony that no definitive proof of an alleged Iraqi biological weapons program was found during the war or afterwards, but nevertheless claimed elsewhere that “the Iraqis later admitted they had procured large quantities of a biological agents-anthrax and botulism toxin,” suggesting that Patrick’s warnings had had some basis in reality.
However, Kadlec failed to point out that these anthrax and botulism samples had been sold, with the U.S. government’s full approval, to Iraq’s Ministry of Education by a U.S. private non-profit called the American Type Culture Collection. Donald Rumsfeld, who was then an envoy for the Reagan administration and running a pharmaceutical company later sold to Monsanto, would also be involved in the shipment of these samples to Iraq.
Following the war, American microbiologist Joshua Lederberg was tasked by the Pentagon to head the investigation into “Gulf War Syndrome,” a phenomenon that studies later linked to the adverse effects of the anthrax vaccine. Lederberg’s task force argued that evidence regarding an association between the symptomology and the anthrax vaccine was insufficient. However, he would later come under fire after it was reported that he sat on the board of the American Type Culture Collection, the very company that had shipped anthrax to Iraq’s government between 1985 and 1989 with the U.S. government’s blessing. Lederberg later admitted that the investigation he led had not spent enough “time and effort digging out the details”. The taskforce’s findings were later harshly criticized by the Government Accountability Office.
Dr. Lederberg would prove to be an early, if not seminal, influence on Robert Kadlec’s outlook regarding the subject of biowarfare. The Nobel Laureate and long-time president of Rockefeller University was one of the fathers of bioterror alarmism in the United States, alongside William C. Patrick III and other members of a tight-knit group of “cold warrior” microbiologists. Kadlec and Lederberg would go on to collaborate on several books and policy studies throughout the late 1990s and into 2001.
Years later, at a Congressional hearing, Kadlec would say that Lederberg’s words “resonate constantly with me and serve as a practical warning.” Aside from Lederberg, Kadlec was also writing numerous books and articles with Randall Larsen, who would later hire the Medical doctor to teach “military strategy and operations” at the National War College, where Larsen’s close friend – William C. Patrick III – also taught.
A poisoned oasis
Many of Kadlec’s bioterror ravings have been preserved in 25-year old textbooks, like a U.S. Air War College textbook entitled “Battlefield of the Future” where Kadlec calls on the government to create a massive stockpile of drugs and vaccines to protect the population from a biological weapons attack, particularly anthrax or smallpox. In one chapter, Kadlec argued that stockpiles of necessary antibiotics, immunoglobulins and vaccines would have to be procured, maintained, and be readily available to administer within hours.”
Kadlec’s views on the matter at the time of writing were greatly influenced by his first tour as a UNSCOM weapons inspector in Iraq in 1994, where he was accompanied by William Patrick, among others. Kadlec would later return to Iraq in the same capacity in 1996 and 1998 in search of Iraq’s alleged stores of weaponized anthrax that Patrick had been so sure were there, but had never materialized.
After three visits, Kadlec would later confess that, despite what Kadlec called “the most intrusive inspection and monitoring regime ever conceived and implemented” by the UN, the UNSCOM weapons inspectors, including himself and William Patrick, “failed to uncover any irrefutable evidence of an offensive BW program.” Kadlec would later return to Iraq on two separate occasions following the 2003 U.S. invasion of country, again finding no proof of the program’s existence.
By 1995, Kadlec was already imbued with the bioweapons alarmism that had been championed by Lederberg and Patrick. That year, he fleshed out several “illustrative scenarios” regarding the use of “biological economic warfare” against the United States. One of these fictional scenarios, titled “Corn Terrorism,” involves China planning “an act of agricultural terrorism” by clandestinely spraying corn seed blight over the Midwest using commercial airliners. The result of the “Corn Terrorism” scenario is that “China gains significant corn market share and tens of billions [of] dollars of additional profits from their crop,” while the U.S. sees its corn crop obliterated, causing food prices to rise and the U.S. to import corn. Another scenario, entitled “That’s a ‘Lousy’ Wine,” involves “disgruntled European winemakers” covertly releasing grape lice they have hidden in cans of paté to target California wine producers.
Around this same time, in 1994, the relatively young Congressional Office of Technology Assessment or OTA, which informed policy decisions around questions of technological and scientific complexity on matters of national security, was cut by the new Republican majority that took both houses in the pivotal 1994 midterms elections. At the time of its defunding, Lederberg sat on the OTA’s Technology Assessment Advisory Council (OTA-TAAC), along with pharma industry insiders from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Lilly Research Labs and pre-merger Smith-Kline, and chaired one of its last study panels.
In OTA’s place, an independent, non-profit entity called The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies (PIPS) was co-founded by Special Consultant to President H.W. Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) and a former CIA program monitor, Michael S. Swetnam, who was reportedly “tasked with profiling Osama Bin Laden before the September 11th attacks were enacted.”
The defunding of the OTA and subsequent creation of PIPS transferred policy-making on what are, perhaps, the most sensitive issues of national security away from Congress and into a private foundation teeming with operators from the vast underbelly of the military industrial complex (MIC). Former military officers, DARPA scientists, NASA policy experts, FBI agents, CIA operatives and defense contractors like Northrop Grumman can all be found on their member rolls and in their boardrooms.
PIPS and its sponsors would shadow Robert Kadlec’s career in government from the very beginning and remain in close proximity to him today. One PIPS-linked individual would work particularly closely with Kadlec, Tevi Troy – a senior fellow at PIPS and an adjunct fellow at the much more polished Hudson Institute, itself a major funder of PIPS. Troy has long been integral in shaping Kadlec’s biodefense policy agenda, which would remain conspicuously static and unchanging throughout the career he was just beginning.
Pox Americana
By 1996, talks had begun within military leadership regarding what would become the Pentagon’s mandatory anthrax vaccination program, a policy tirelessly promoted by Joshua Lederberg, who was involved in “investigating” the links between the anthrax vaccine and Gulf War Syndrome. The private talks took place in parallel with a public push to bring biological warfare to the forefront of American public consciousness. One particularly egregious example occurred when then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen went on ABC News with a five-pound bag of sugar, stating that “this amount of anthrax could be spread over a city—let’s say the size of Washington. It would destroy at least half the population of that city.”
At the same time, Joshua Lederberg was also advocating for the stockpiling of a smallpox vaccine, which the U.S. military also took to heart, giving a company called DynPort an exclusive multi-million dollar contract to produce a new smallpox vaccine in 1997. Soon after, BioPort, DynPort’s sister company, was formed and would soon come to monopolize the production of that vaccine.
By the time BioPort (now known as Emergent Biosolutions) had controversially gained control over this lucrative Pentagon contract in 1998, then-President Bill Clinton was publicly warning that the U.S. must “confront the new hazards of biological and chemical weapons,” adding that Saddam Hussein specifically was “developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them.” However, there was no intelligence to back up these claims, especially after the failed attempts by weapon inspectors, like Robert Kadlec and William Patrick, to find any evidence of an Iraqi biological weapons program.
Despite the lack of evidence regarding Iraq’s alleged “WMD” programs, Clinton’s concern over a biological weapons threat was said to have been the result of his reading of “The Cobra Event”, a novel about how a genetically-modified pathogen called “brainpox” ravages New York City. The novel’s author, Richard Preston, had been advised on biowarfare and genetically-modified pathogens by none other than William Patrick. Patrick, then an adviser to the CIA, FBI and military intelligence, also participated in closed door meetings with Clinton on biological weapons, claiming that their use was inevitable and that the deadliest of pathogens could easily be made in a “terrorist’s garage.”
It is also likely that Clinton’s alarmism over biological and chemical weapons had been informed, in part, by a roundtable hosted at the White House on April 10, 1998. This “White House Roundtable on Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons,” included a group of “outside experts” spear-headed by Joshua Lederberg and included several other bioterror alarmists, such as: Jerome Hauer, then-serving as Director of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (who also was advised by William Patrick III) and Thomas Monath, a vaccine industry executive and chief science advisor to CIA director George Tenet.
Discussed in-depth at the roundtable were “both the opportunities and the national security challenges posed by genetic engineering and biotechnology” as well as “classified material relating to threat assessments and how the United States responds to particular scenarios.”
Robert Kadlec, despite being a Republican, remains very fond of Bill Clinton, perhaps because the former president was so attentive to the dire predictions of the “biodefense experts” who shadowed Kadlec’s own career. Kadlec credits the former president with doing a “lot of good things” and making important contributions to the advancement of the biotech industrial complex’s policy agenda.
Clinton would issue several executive orders and Presidential Decision Directives (PDDs) during this period, such as PDD-62, which specifically addressed preparations for a “WMD” attack on the U.S. and called for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), then-led by Donna Shalala, to lead the national response to a WMD attack. Fortuitously for Kadlec, PDD-62 also called for the construction of a national stockpile of vaccines, antibiotics and other medical supplies.
At the time, Kadlec was already evangelizing the public about a seemingly imminent, doomsday anthrax attack he was certain would strike at any second. As quoted in a 1998 article from the Vancouver Sun, Kadlec speculated:
If several kilograms of an agent like anthrax were disseminated in New York City today, conservative estimates put the number [of] deaths occurring in the first few days at 400,000. Thousands of others would be at risk of dying within several days if proper antibiotics and vaccination were not started immediately. Millions of others would be fearful of being exposed and seek or demand medical care as well. Beyond the immediate health implications of such an act, the potential panic and civil unrest would create an equally large response.”
Kadlec’s doomsday speculations about biological weapons attacks had caught the attention of Randall Larsen, the then-director of the National War College’s Department of Military Strategy and Operations, who hired Kadlec because he “had become convinced that the most serious threat to national security was not Russian or Chinese missiles, but a pandemic – either man-made or naturally occurring.” Soon after, Kadlec and Larsen would collaborate closely, co-authoring several studies together.
Meanwhile, their colleague at the National War College, William Patrick III was simultaneously working for the U.S. military and intelligence contractor, the Battelle Memorial Institute, where he was secretly developing a genetically-modified, more potent form of anthrax for a classified Pentagon program.
The bioterror intelligentsia
A year after hiring Robert Kadlec to teach at the National War College, Randall Larsen was also involved in the creation of a new organization called the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security (ANSER-IHS), and served as its director. This Institute for Homeland Security, first initiated and funded in October 1999, was an extension of the ANSER Institute, which itself had been spun off from the RAND Corporation in the late 1950s. The RAND Corporation is a national security-focused “think tank” with long-standing ties to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the Carnegie Corporation.
ANSER’s expansion through ANSER-IHS was foreshadowed by the entry of “homeland defense” into popular political discourse within the Washington Beltway. The term is alleged to have first originated from a National Defense Panel report submitted in 1997 and is credited to Defense Panel member and former CIA officer with ties to the agency’s Phoenix program, Richard Armitage. Armitage was part of the group known as the “Vulcans,” who advised George W. Bush on foreign policy matters prior to the 2000 presidential election.
As journalist Margie Burns pointed out in a 2002 article, the need for “homeland defense” as a major focus of U.S. government policy, including the push to create a new “homeland security” agency, was dramatically amplified following its alleged coining by Armitage in 1997. This was thanks, in part, to a web of media outlets owned by South Korean cult leader and CIA asset Sun Myong Moon, including the Washington Times, Insight Magazine and UPI, all of which published numerous articles penned by ANSER analysts or that heavily cited ANSER reports and employees regarding the need for a greatly expanded “homeland security” apparatus.
One such article, published by Insight Magazine in May 2001 and entitled “Preparing for the Next Pearl Harbor,” heavily cites ANSER and its Institute for Homeland Security as being among “the nation’s top experts” in warning that a terrorist attack on the U.S. mainland was imminent. It also stated that “the first responders on tomorrow’s battlefield won’t be soldiers, but city ambulance workers and small-town firefighters.”
ANSER-IHS was created at the behest of ANSER’s CEO, Dr. Ruth David, who became ANSER’s top executive after leaving a lengthy career at the CIA, where she had served as the agency’s Deputy Director for Science and Technology. On ANSER-IHS’s board at the time, alongside David, were Joshua Lederberg and Dr. Tara O’Toole, then-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Bio-defense Studies who would later co-write the Dark Winter exercise.
Though first created in 1999, ANSER-IHS did not officially launch until April 2001. That same month, Robert Kadlec, at the National War College, sponsored the paper “A Micro-threat with Macro-Impact: The Bio-Threat and the Need for a National Bio-Defense Security Strategy.” That paper starts by citing several former CIA officials as well as Dr. O’Toole (who now works for the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel) as proof that a bioterrorist attack is “perhaps the greatest threat the U.S. faces in the next century” and that such an attack would inevitably target “Americans on American soil.”
This Kadlec-sponsored report also called for the creation of the National Homeland Security Agency (NHSA), the framework for which was contained in H.R. 1158, introduced a month prior in March 2001. The paper urged that the creation of this new cabinet-level agency be enacted “quickly, so the resulting single executive agent (identified from here on as the NHSA) can begin its critical work.” It also argued that this agency include “a deputy director position … specifically responsible for preparing and responding to a bio-attack.”
Other measures recommended in the paper included greatly expanding the national defense stockpile; creating a national disease reporting system; and the creation of real-time, automated bio-threat detectors. The latter would be initiated soon after the publication of this paper, resulting in the controversial Biological Aerosol Sentry and Information Systems (BASIS). BASIS was discussed in Part I of this series, particularly its role in “induc[ing] the very panic and social disruption it is intended to thwart” during and after the 2001 anthrax attacks that would occur months later. BASIS was developed largely by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose national security fellow – former Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) director Jay Davis, was then-chairman of ANSER’s board of directors.
Also notable is the fact that Kadlec’s April 2001 report cites the largely discredited yet still influential Ken Alibek on several occasions, including his allegation that anyone with internet access and a few bucks could produce and unleash weapons-grade anthrax with ease. Some of the nation’s top anthrax experts would discredit this claim, with the exception of William C. Patrick III.
This is likely because it was Patrick who had been asked by the CIA to “vet” Alibek after he had first defected from the Soviet Union 1992, making Patrick responsible for determining the credibility of Alibek’s controversial claims, including his incorrect assertions that Saddam Hussein had overseen a massive biological weapons program. Regarding their meeting, Patrick would later say “I won’t say we fell in love, but we gained an immediate respect for one another.”
At the time of Alibek’s defection, Robert Kadlec – who had been assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of the Secretary of Defense for Counter-proliferation policy after the Gulf War – would later recall during 2014 Congressional testimony having “witnessed the efforts to ascertain the truth behind the former Soviet Union’s BW [biological weapons] effort” that had intimately involved Alibek and Patrick. Kadlec would also note that “the fate of these agents [related to the Soviet Union’s BW program] and associated weapons,” including those described by Alibek, “was never satisfactorily resolved.”
Alibek’s shocking yet dubious claims were often used and promoted by Joshua Lederberg (who had debriefed other Soviet bioweapons researchers after their defections), Patrick and others to support their favored “biodefense” policies as well as the need for “defensive” bioweapons research, including clandestine efforts to genetically-engineer anthrax on which Patrick and Alibek would later collaborate.
Setting the wheels in motion
Just a few months before ANSER-IHS’ “official” launch, another organization with a related focus was launched — the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). Created by media mogul Ted Turner and former Senator Sam Nunn in January 2001, NTI aimed not only to “reduce the threat” posed by nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological weapons.
In announcing NTI’s formation on CNN, the network Turner had founded, Nunn stated that while “nuclear weapons pose the gigantic danger, but biological and chemical weapons are the most likely to be used. And there are thousands of scientists in the former Soviet Union that know how to make these weapons, including chemical, biological and nuclear, but don’t know how to feed their families.” Nunn continued, stating that NTI hoped “to begin to help, some hope for gainful employment for people that we don’t want to end up making chemical and biological and nuclear weapons in other parts of the world.” NTI’s mission in this regard likely came as welcome news to Joshua Lederberg, who had long advocated that the U.S. offer employment to bioweapons researchers from the former Soviet Union to prevent their employ by “rogue regimes.”
Alongside Nunn and Tuner on NTI’s board was William Perry, a former Secretary of Defense; former Senator Dick Lugar, for whom the alleged U.S. bioweapons lab in Georgia is named; and Margaret Hamburg, who was NTI’s Vice President overseeing its work on biological weapons. Margaret Hamburg’s father, David Hamburg, a long-time president of the Carnegie Corporation, was also an advisor and “distinguished fellow” at NTI. David Hamburg was a longtime close advisor, associate, and friend of Joshua Lederberg.
Both Sam Nunn and Margaret Hamburg of NTI, as well as top officials from ANSER, would come together in June 2001 to participate in an exercise simulating a bioweapons attack called “Dark Winter.” Nunn would play the role of president in the exercise and Hamburg played the head of HHS in the fictional scenario. Jerome Hauer, then-managing director of the intelligence-linked outfit Kroll Inc. and a Vice President at the military-intelligence contractor Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), played the head of FEMA.
The Dark Winter exercise itself was largely written by Tara O’Toole (ANSER-IHS board member) and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Bio-defense Studies as well as Randall Larsen of ANSER-IHS. Robert Kadlec also participated in the creation of the script and appears in the fictional, scripted news clips used in the exercise.
As detailed in Part I of this series, the Dark Winter exercise eerily predicted many aspects of what would follow just months later during the 2001 anthrax attacks, including predictions that threatening letters would be sent to members of the press with the promise of biological weapons attacks involving anthrax. Dark Winter also provided the initial narrative for the 2001 anthrax attacks, which held that Iraq and Al Qaeda had been jointly responsible. However, soon after the attacks, evidence quickly pointed to the anthrax having originated from a domestic source linked to military experiments. In addition, several Dark Winter participants and authors either had apparent foreknowledge of those attacks (especially Jerome Hauer) and/or were involved in the FBI’s controversial investigation into the attacks (including Robert Kadlec).
On the day of September 11, 2001, Kadlec and Randall Larsen were set to begin co-teaching a course on “Homeland Security” at the National War College. It’s course syllabus draws from quotes on the imminent threat of bioterrorism from Joshua Lederberg as well as Dark Winter participant and former CIA director James Woolsey, who called a biological weapons attack “the single most dangerous threat to U.S. national security in the foreseeable future.”
The course was also set to include its own lengthy use of the Dark Winter exercise, where students would re-enact the June 2001 exercise as part of an end-of-semester research project. However, given the events that took place on September 11, 2001, Kadlec never went on to teach that course, as he instead went to the Pentagon to focus on the “bio-terror threat” in the weeks that preceded the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The after (Anthrax) party
Immediately after the events of September 11, 2001, Kadlec became a special advisor on biological warfare to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. In the days that followed, Rumsfeld openly and publicly stated that he expected America’s enemies, specifically Saddam Hussein, to aid unspecified terrorist groups in obtaining chemical and biological weapons, a narrative that was analogous to that used in the Dark Winter exercise that Kadlec had helped create.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Dark Winter’s other co-authors — Randall Larsen, Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby — personally briefed Dick Cheney on Dark Winter, at a time when Cheney and his staff had been warned by another Dark Winter figure, Jerome Hauer, to take the antibiotic Cipro to prevent anthrax infection. It is unknown how many members of the administration were taking Cipro and for how long.
Hauer, along with James Woolsey and New York Times reporter Judith Miller (who also attended Dark Winter), would spend the weeks between 9/11 and the public disclosure of the anthrax attacks making numerous media appearances (and, in Miller’s case, writing dozens of reports) regarding the use of anthrax as a biological weapon. Members of the controversial think thank the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which included Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld among its ranks, also warned that a biological weapons attack was set to follow on the heels of 9/11. These included Richard Perle, then advising the Rumsfeld-led Pentagon, and Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard.
One would think that all of these well-timed warnings would have left this clique of government insiders the least surprised once the anthrax attacks were publicly disclosed on October 4, 2001. However, despite constantly warning of doomsday anthrax attack scenarios for a decade and advising the Pentagon on this very threat immediately beginning just weeks prior, Robert Kadlec would subsequently claim to have yelled, “You gotta be sh*ttin’ me!” when he first learned of the attacks.
Another pre-attack anthrax prophet, Judith Miller, would recall becoming distraught and despondent upon receiving a letter that appeared to contain anthrax. Her first reaction was to call William C. Patrick III, who calmed her down and told her that the anthrax powder contained in the letter “was most likely a hoax.” Indeed, Patrick would prove correct in his analysis as the powder in the letter Miller had opened was, in fact, harmless.
Kadlec quickly began contributing to the FBI’s controversial investigation into the attacks, known by its case name “Amerithrax.” Kadlec was tasked with following up on the alleged presence of bentonite in the anthrax used in the attacks. Bentonite was never actually found in any of the anthrax samples tested by the FBI, but claims that it had been found were used to link the anthrax used in the attacks to Iraq’s alleged use of bentonite in its biological weapons program, the very existence of which still lacked conclusive evidence.
This erroneous claim was first mentioned to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz by Peter Jahrling, a Fort Detrick scientist, who claimed during a briefings that the spores “appeared to have been treated” with a “particular chemical additive” resembling bentonite. Jahrling then added that Iraq’s government had used bentonite to “suspiciously” produce bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a “nonlethal cousin” of anthrax widely used in agriculture. “Everyone grabbed on to that,” Kadlec would later remember of Jahrling’s haphazard link between bentonite and a harmless, distant cousin of anthrax.
Tasked by Wolfowitz with shoring up evidence for the bentonite “smoking gun,” Kadlec would contact a Navy scientist that had accompanied him and William Patrick to Iraq in their unsuccessful efforts to find proof of Iraq’s biological weapons back in 1994, James Burans. Burans was unconvinced of the bentonite connection and other government scientists soon agreed.
Nonetheless, media outlets continued to play up the bentonite-anthrax claim as proving Iraq’s role in the anthrax attacks, despite findings to the contrary. By late October 2001, one nationwide poll found that 74% of respondents wanted the U.S. to take military action against Iraq, despite a lack of evidence connecting the country to either 9/11 or the anthrax attacks. A month later, Rumsfeld would draw up plans in consultation with Wolfowitz regarding justifications for initiating war with Iraq, including discovering links between Saddam Hussein and the anthrax attacks and initiating disputes with Iraq over WMD inspections.
While the Kadlec-advised Pentagon was seeking to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq, the NTI – headed by Dark Winter “president” Sam Nunn – kicked its agenda into over-drive, earmarking “$2.4 million in initial grants to finance scientific collaboration with scientists who once worked in the former Soviet Union’s covert biological weapons program.” NTI also set aside millions more for transforming former Soviet Union bioweapons labs into “vaccine production facilities” and “helping identify Western drug companies willing to work with former Soviet bioweaponeers on commercial ventures.”
Closed door investigation
William C. Patrick III would also become involved the FBI’s Amerithrax investigation, even though he was initially suspected of involvement in the attacks. However, after having passed a lie detector test, he was added to the FBI’s “inner circle” of technical advisors on the Amerithrax case, despite the fact that Patrick’s protege, Stephen Hatfill, was the FBI’s top suspect at the time. Hatfill was later cleared of wrongdoing and the FBI eventually blamed a Fort Detrick scientist named Bruce Ivins for the crime, hiding a “mountain” of evidence exonerating Ivins to do so, according to the FBI’s former lead investigator.
In the 1990s, Patrick had told associates of his desire to find someone who would carry on his work, eventually finding this person in Stephen Hatfill. Hatfill and Patrick’s friendship was close, with one bioterror expert calling them “like father and son.” Hatfill traveled together often and, on occasion, Hatfill would drive Patrick to his consulting jobs at the military and intelligence contractor SAIC. In 1999, Patrick would return the favor by helping Hatfill score a job at SAIC. A year later, Jerome Hauer, a friend to both Hatfill and Patrick, would join SAIC as a Vice President.
That same year, Hatfill offered Patrick another consulting job at SAIC and commissioned Patrick to perform a study describing “a fictional terrorist attack in which an envelope containing weapons-grade anthrax is opened in an office.” The Baltimore Sun would later report that Patrick’s study for SAIC discussed the “danger of anthrax spores spreading through the air and the requirements for decontamination after various kinds of attacks” as well as how many grams of anthrax would need to be placed within a standard business envelope in order to conduct such an attack.
Patrick’s involvement in this SAIC study is particularly interesting given that he was also involved in another project involving anthrax at the time, this one managed by Battelle Memorial Institute. In 1997, the Pentagon created plans to genetically engineer a more potent variety of anthrax, spurred by the work of Russian scientists who had recently published a study that found that a genetically engineered strain of anthrax was resistant to the standard anthrax vaccine, at least in animal studies.
The stated goal of the Pentagon’s plan, per a 2001 report in The New York Times, was “to see if the [anthrax] vaccine the United States intends to supply to its armed forces is effective against that strain.” Battelle’s facility at West Jefferson, Ohio was contracted by the Pentagon to create the genetically-modified anthrax, a task that was overseen by Battelle’s then-program manager for all things bioweapons, Ken Alibek. A 1998 article in the New Yorker noted that William Patrick, also a consultant for Battelle and Alibek’s “close friend,” was working with Alibek on a project involving anthrax at the time. It would later be revealed that access to the very anthrax strain used in the attacks, the Ames strain, was controlled by Battelle.
In addition, the FBI’s supposed “smoking gun” used to link Bruce Ivins’ to the anthrax attacks was the fact that a flask in Ivins’ lab labeled RMR-1029 was determined to be its “parent” strain. Yet, it would later be revealed that portions of RMR-1029 had been sent by Ivins to Battelle’s Ohio facility prior to the anthrax attacks. An analysis of the water used to make the anthrax also revealed that the anthrax spores had been created in the northeastern United States and follow-up analyses narrowed down the only possible sources as coming from one of three labs: Fort Detrick, a lab at the University of Scranton, or Battelle’s West Jefferson facility.
After Ivins’ untimely “suicide” in 2008, Department of Justice civil attorneys would publicly challenge the FBI’s assertions that Ivins had been the culprit and instead “suggested that a private laboratory in Ohio” managed by Battelle “could have been involved in the attacks.”
Patrick’s work with Battelle on creating a more potent form of anthrax, as well as his work with SAIC in studying the effect of anthrax sent through the mail, began around the same time that BioPort had secured a monopoly over the production of the anthrax vaccine, recently made mandatory for all U.S. troops by the Pentagon. As detailed in Part II of this series, BioPort’s facility that produced its anthrax vaccine was, at the time, rife with problems and had lost its license to operate. Despite the Pentagon having given BioPort millions to use for renovations of the factory, much of that money instead went towards senior management bonuses and redecorating executive offices. Millions more simply “disappeared.”
In 2000, not long after receiving its first Pentagon bail-out, BioPort contracted none other than Battelle Memorial Institute. The deal gave Battelle “immediate exposure to the vaccine” it was using in connection with the genetically-modified anthrax program that involved both Alibek and Patrick. That program then began using the BioPort-manufactured vaccine in tests at its West Jefferson facility. At the time, Battelle was also lending “technical expertise” to BioPort and hired 12 workers to send to BioPort’s troubled Michigan facility “to keep the operation running.”
At the time, a BioPort spokeswomen stated “We have a relationship with Battelle to extend our reach for people we are trying to attract for critical positions on our technical side. They’re also assisting with our potency testing as really sort of a backup. They’re validating our potency tests.” Reports on the BioPort-Battelle contract stated that the terms of their agreement were not publicly disclosed, but also noted that the two companies had “previously worked together on an unsuccessful bid to make other vaccines for the government.”
As previously noted in Part II of this series, BioPort was set to lose its contract for anthrax vaccine entirely in August 2001 and the entirety of its anthrax vaccine business was rescued by the 2001 anthrax attacks, which saw concerns over BioPort’s corruption replaced with fervent demands for more of its anthrax vaccine.
Rumsfeld saves BioPort
One of the post-attack advocates for salvaging the BioPort anthrax vaccine contract was Donald Rumsfeld, who stated after the attacks that, “We’re going to try to save it, and try to fashion some sort of an arrangement whereby we give one more crack at getting the job done with that outfit [BioPort]. It’s the only outfit in this country that has anything under way, and it’s not very well under way, as you point out.”
While Rumsfeld and others worked to salvage the troubled BioPort-anthrax vaccine deal, another recurrent figure in this sordid saga, Jerome Hauer, would also play a key role in pushing for increased purchases of BioPort’s most lucrative and most controversial product. In addition to being managing director of Kroll Inc. and a Vice President at SAIC, Hauer was also a national security advisor to HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson on September 11, 2001. It was also this same day that Hauer would also tell top administration officials to take Cipro to prevent anthrax infection.
Hauer played a key role advising HHS leadership as the anthrax attacks unfolded. After the attacks, Hauer pushed Thompson to create the Office of Public Health Preparedness (OPHP) within HHS, which was created later that year. It was first headed by D.A. Henderson, a close associate of Joshua Lederberg and the original founder of the Johns Hopkins Working Group on Civilian Biodefense, which included Jerome Hauer and Henderson’s protege Tara O’Toole. Hauer himself would come to replace Henderson as OPHP just a few months later.
Subsequent legislation, shaped in part by Robert Kadlec, would see OPHP give way to the position of Assistant Secretary for Public Health Emergency Preparedness (ASPHEP), a position Hauer would also fill. Hauer would use this post to push for the stockpiling of vaccines, including BioPort’s anthrax vaccine. Hauer and his deputy, William Raub, would then help push the Pentagon to restart vaccinating the troops, despite long-standing concerns over the vaccine’s safety. Soon after leaving HHS in 2004, Hauer would quickly be added to the board of directors of BioPort under its new name Emergent Biosolutions, a post he still holds today.
All systems go
In the aftermath of the anthrax attacks, Robert Kadlec’s doomsday predictions for bioterror incidents went into over-drive. “It’s not your mother’s smallpox,” Kadlec would tell the LA Times in late October 2001, “It’s an F-17 Stealth fighter – it’s designed to be undetectable and to kill. We are flubbing our efforts at biodefense. We don’t think of this as a weapon – we look naively at this as a disease.” As the article notes, this “stealth fighter” strain of smallpox did not exist. Instead, Kadlec – who now had Rumsfeld’s ear on issues of biodefense – expected that such a strain might soon be genetically engineered.
Of course, at the time, the only government known to be genetically engineering a pathogen was the U.S., as reported by the New York Times’ Judith Miller. Miller reported in October 2001 that the Pentagon, in the wake of the anthrax attacks, had approved “a project to make a potentially more potent form of anthrax bacteria” through genetic modification, a project that would be conducted by the Battelle Memorial Institute.
This was the continuation of the project, which had involved William Patrick and Ken Alibek, and the Pentagon moved to restart it after the attacks, though it is unclear if either Patrick or Alibek continued to work on the subsequent iteration of Battelle’s efforts to produce a more virulent strain of anthrax. That project was paused a month prior when Miller and other journalists disclosed the existence of the program in an article published on September 4, 2001.
After news broke of the Pentagon’s plans to again begin developing more potent anthrax strains, accusations were made that the U.S. was violating the bioweapons convention. However, the U.S. narrowly avoided having to admit it had violated the convention given that, just one month after the Dark Winter exercise in July 2001, the U.S. had rejected an agreement that would have enforced its ban on biological weapons.
The New York Times noted specifically that the genetically-modified anthrax experiments being performed by Battelle’s West Jefferson facility were a “significant reason” behind the Bush administration’s decision to reject the draft agreement and the U.S. government had argued at the time that “unlimited visits to pharmaceutical or defense installations by foreign inspectors could be used to gather strategic or commercial intelligence.” Of course, one of those “pharmaceutical or defense installations” was ultimately the source of the anthrax used in the attacks.
The groundwork
On the heels of the chaos of late 2001, Kadlec’s vision for U.S. biodefense policy was rapidly coming to fruition before his very eyes. The first enabling statute for the SNS was the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness Act of 2002, largely motivated by the anthrax attacks, which directed the Secretary of HHS to maintain a “Strategic National Stockpile (SNS).” The legislation had been the direct result of a process begun years earlier when Congress earmarked funding for the CDC to stockpile pharmaceuticals in 1998. The program was originally called the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile (NPS) program.
Kadlec’s role in directing subsequent developments in the SNS and other related legislative developments was considerable given that, in 2002, he became director for biodefense on the recently created Homeland Security Council. His work on the council, which he left in 2005, resulted in the Bush administration’s “National Biodefense Policy for the 21st Century,” which unsurprisingly echoed the recommendations of the paper Kadlec had sponsored at the National War College.
On March 1, 2003, the NPS became the Strategic National Stockpile program and was managed jointly by DHS and HHS after George W. Bush issued Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD-5). Two days before, Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge and then Secretary of HHS Tommy Thompson had presented the Project BioShield Act to Congress. It was a sweeping piece of legislation that established what would become a government money teller-window for Big Pharma, called the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), among other entities and powers, not least of which was moving control of the SNS away from DHS and closer to HHS.
Soon after BioShield was signed into law, BioPort/Emergent BioSolutions co-founded a lobby group called the Alliance for Biosecurity as part of its strategy to easily secure lucrative BioShield contracts. That lobby group saw Emergent BioSolutions join forces with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity, which was then-led by Tara O’Toole and advised by Randall Larsen.
With this framework in place, the Kadlec-drafted National Biodefense Policy for the 21st Century was used as the framework for Bush’s Homeland Security Presidential Directive 10 (HSPD-10), which further expanded BioShield, the SNS and other controversial programs. Project BioShield was made law in 2004 and, one year later, Kadlec joined Senator Richard Burr’s subcommittee on bioterrorism and public health. There, Kadlec served as staff director on the committee that drafted the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), containing the specific policy directives for the roll out of Project BioShield and creating Kadlec’s future position at HHS.
PAHPA was passed the following year in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and established the statutory relationship between the various agencies enacted or included in the BioShield legislation. This includes delegating to the newly creation position of HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) to “exercise the responsibilities and authorities of the Secretary [of HHS] with respect to the coordination of ”the stockpile and to oversee the advanced research and development of medical counter-measures funded by BARDA, but conducted by Big Pharma. ASPR was also given the leadership role in directing HHS’ response to a national health emergency.
Serving alongside Kadlec in the White House throughout this entire process was Tevi Troy, a Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy; a role which made him the White House’s lead adviser on health care, labor, education and other issues with a special focus on crisis management. Troy, who had come up through the department of labor as deputy assistant for policy was already a Senior fellow at both the Hudson Institute and its satellite think tank, the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies (PIPS), where the real policy development work was undertaken.
Both Troy and Kadlec would exit the administration at the end of Bush’s first term and not return until the latter half of his second term. In the meantime, the wheels had been set in motion with the passing of Project BioShield and PAHPA and, soon after their passage, panic over a “Bird flu” outbreak began, which had spread first in 33 cities in Vietnam and then led to an outbreak of the poultry-killing disease that affected all of Eurasia, Africa and the Middle East. The outbreak sparked panic in the U.S. in late 2005, thanks in large part to over-the-top warnings made by Tommy Thompson’s successor as head of HHS, Michael Leavitt.
Despite the fact that Leavitt’s claims were wildly inaccurate, some administration officials benefited financially from the fear-mongering, such as Donald Rumsfeld, whose stock holdings in the pharmaceutical company Gilead netted him $5 million once the scare had ended. Part of the reason for Gilead’s jump in profitability resulted from the decision of the Pentagon and other U.S. government agencies to stockpile 80 million doses of Tamiflu, a drug promoted to treat the Bird Flu that was originally developed by Gilead. Rumsfeld had been the top executive at Gilead before joining the George W. Bush administration. Aside from those who benefited monetarily, the Bird Flu scare also gave a considerable boost to the biodefense “stockpile” agenda that Kadlec and other insiders supported.
Kadlec would return to the White House as Special Assistant for Homeland Security and Senior Director for Biological Defense Policy in 2007 to further solidify his eventual grip on the Strategic National Stockpile and the office of ASPR, along with his Hudson Institute/PIPS sidekick, Tevi Troy, concurrently appointed Deputy Director of HHS. This put Troy in charge of implementing the very policies enshrined in PAHPA and the departmental changes enacted as part of Project BioShield.
The Bush administration came to its inevitable conclusion as Barack Obama was elected and sworn in, early 2009. Kadlec and Troy, once again, left their government posts and disappeared into their private sector lairs. But, that same year, the first practice run for Kadlec’s freshly retrofitted SNS took place when the “Swine Flu” (H1N1) pandemic triggered its “largest deployment” ever, distributing nearly 13 million antiviral regimens, as well as medical equipment and other drugs nationally and internationally in conjunction with BARDA. Gilead (and Rumsfeld) again profited handsomely, as did other large pharmaceutical companies, which were eager to restock the SNS after its large-scale deployment.
The virus’ origins have been a matter of controversy for several years, alternatively identified as having sprung from pigs in Mexico or Asia. One of the last studies conducted in 2016 claims to have definitively traced the source to hogs in Mexico. Regardless of its true origins, interested observers were able to glean vital data from the exercise to prepare for the “next one.”
Troy’s horses
Departing HHS Deputy Director Tevi Troy soon took a gig as a high-powered lobbyist for the JUUL e-cigarette company, which had run into some regulatory barriers as a result of the Tobacco Control Act, which had just been signed by then-President Obama. Margaret Hamburg, founding member of the NTI, was then Commissioner of the FDA and stalled enforcement of the new regulations; a tacit non-enforcement policy had persisted at the FDA until the recent vaping flavor ban, which followed renewed health concerns raised by a 2018 NIH report.
Why a former HHS official would take up the mantle to promote the use of a product known to be injurious to health can be answered by looking at Dr. Troy’s close links with PIPS and the Hudson Institute. Couched in free-market rhetoric, these institutions are vehicles for the policy initiatives their billionaire funders want to see implemented, with its subsidiary think tanks, like PIPS, serving as satellites orbiting closer to the center of power.
As an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute and senior fellow at PIPS, Tevi Troy appears to play a pivotal role coordinating between the two. The Hudson Institute was founded in 1961 by former RAND military strategist, systems theorist and Dr. Strangelove inspiration Herman Kahn. After Kahn’s passing in 1983, the Institute was “heavily recruited” by the Lilly Endowment – the largest private foundation in the United States, by far – and became a magnet for the same radical conservative billionaire networks that patronize it today.
Among its biggest donors are familiar names like Microsoft, Lockheed Martin Corporation, The Charles Koch Foundation, Boeing and Emergent BioSolutions. In 2004, Lilly Endowment returned to Washington D.C., announcing it would “return to its roots of national security and foreign policy” as a result of the war on terror becoming an “overarching national concern”.
PIPS and the Hudson Institute would come to play a central role in Kadlec’s upcoming efforts to make biodefense a national priority with him at the helm of a vastly expanded office of ASPR. But, it would be a few years yet. Meanwhile, there was more to be done in the area of legislation, not to mention private enterprise.
Building on all previous versions of Kadlec’s original PAHPA, the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act (PAHPRA) of 2013 established two more instruments that strengthened his ultimate goal. First, the PHEMCE Strategy and Implementation Plan (SIP) was codified into law, which formalized the original legislation’s ties to the budget office and secondly, it streamlined the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) facility for the FDA to fast-track drug approvals.
Show me the money
Soon upon returning to the private sector, Robert Kadlec helped found a new company in 2012 called “East West Protection,” which develops and delivers “integrated all-hazards preparedness and response systems for communities and sovereign nations.” The company also “advises communities and countries on issues related to the threat of weapons of mass destruction and natural pandemics.”
Kadlec formed the company with W. Craig Vanderwagen, the first HHS ASPR after the post’s creation had been largely orchestrated by Kadlec. The other co-founder of East West Protection was Fuad El-Hibri, the founder of BioPort/Emergent Biosolutions, who had just stepped down as Emergent’s CEO earlier that year.
El-Hibri has numerous business connections to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he and his father, Ibrahim El-Hibri, had once sold stockpiles of anthrax vaccine to the Saudi government for an exorbitant price per dose. East West Protection chased after the opportunity to fit the Kingdom with a custom-built biodefense system, but ultimately failed to finalize the deal despite El-Hibri’s connections. Instead, East West Protection sold its products to a handful of U.S. states.
Kadlec was the firm’s director from its founding until at least 2015, later selling his stake in the company to El-Hibri. Upon being nominated to serve as ASPR in the Trump administration, Kadlec failed to disclose his ties to East West Protection and El-Hibri and he has since claimed to only have been involved in the founding of the firm, despite evidence to the contrary.
Robert Kadlec’s forays into the private sector during this period went far beyond East West Protection. Kadlec’s consultancy firm, RPK Consulting, netted him in $451,000 in 2014 alone, where he directly advised Emergent Biosolutions as well as other pharmaceutical companies like Bavarian Nordic. Kadlec was also a consultant to military and intelligence contractors, such as the DARPA-backed firm Invincea and NSA contractor Scitor, which was recently acquired by SAIC.
Kadlec’s consulting work for intelligence-linked companies earned him the praises of spooks turned entreprenuers, including Steve Cash – a former CIA officer and founder of Deck Prism, itself a consultancy firm that retained Kadlec. Cash recently told The Washington Post that “Everybody loves Dr. Bob [Kadlec],” adding that he was a “national treasure.”
On Biowarfare’s eve
Kadlec had certainly been accumulating a treasure chest of power aided by some very cozy relationships in the consulting business and, by now, the stage had been set for a big push to create an official body within the halls of the legislature; an embedded consultancy firm, of sorts, to promote the designs of the biowarfare clique.
That year, Robert Kadlec put together a Blue Ribbon Study Panel sponsored jointly by the Hudson Institute and a PIPS subsidiary institution called the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies (IUCTS), managed by Dr. Yonah Alexander. Kadlec’s Blue Ribbon Panel was chaired by Senator Joe Lieberman and included the indispensable input of Tom Daschle, Donna Shalala and other members of the biowarfare policy club.
The study panel issued a report in late 2015 entitled “A National Blueprint for Biodefense” calling for 33 specific initiatives, such as the creation of a “biodefense hospital system” and implementing a “military-civilian collaboration for biodefense.” In addition, the panel recommended that the office of the Vice President lead a White House “Coordination Council” to oversee and guide biodefense policy.
An official body called the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense would be formed shortly thereafter with all the Blue Ribbon Panel members and many others like Commission co-chair Tom Ridge and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Tevi Troy and Yonah Alexander, who serve as Ex-officio members. Alongside them is Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former Chief of Staff to Dick Cheney and Senior Vice President of the Hudson Institute, which also happens to be the fiscal sponsor of the Commission.
In the acknowledgements, the panel’s 2015 report includes an homage to Robert Kadlec to whom they bestow credit for the achievement, which only “exists because of the foresight, forbearance, and perpetual optimism of Dr. Robert Kadlec. Bob understood that as much progress as had been made in the national effort to prevent and prepare for biological threats, it is not yet enough. He knew that with the right impetus, we could do much more, and he envisioned this Panel as a means to that end. We are glad he did.”
Kadlec mounted this last offensive while serving as Deputy Staff Director for Senator Richard Burr’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a position he would hold until the eve of Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Trump would then nominate him to the office of the ASPR and Kadlec would be confirmed in early August of the following year.
Only one piece of the puzzle was left, but it wouldn’t be very long before Robert Kadlec would become the biggest capo of them all with a subtle change that was introduced in the 2018 PAHPRA:
Title III – Sec 301
1) DELEGATION TO ASPR.—Subsection (a)(1) of section 319F–2 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 247d–6b) is amended by striking ‘‘in collaboration with the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’’ and inserting ‘‘acting through the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.’’
Feature photo | Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Dr. Robert Kadlec testifies before a Senate Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on the coronavirus on Capitol Hill, March 3, 2020, in Washington. Andrew Harnik | AP
Whitney Webb is a writer and researcher for The Last American Vagabond as well as a MintPress News contributor and former staff writer. She has contributed to several independent media outlets and her work has been featured by The Real News Network, The Ron Paul Institute, The Zero Hour, and The Jimmy Dore Show, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.
Stories published in our Daily Digests section are chosen based on the interest of our readers. They are republished from a number of sources, and are not produced by MintPress News. The views expressed in these articles are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
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End.
There’s Much More To This COVID 19 Event
Than Most Are Aware Of
BOB LANGER THE CORONAVIRUS “COMMON
DENOMINATOR” TIED TO CHARLES LIEBER & ISRAEL’S NY
“SMART CITIES”
20 MAY 2020
POSTED BY RYAN CRISTIÁN
Welcome to The Daily Wrap Up, a concise show dedicated to bringing you the most relevant independent news, as we see it, from the last 24 hours (5/20/19).
As always, take the information discussed in the video below and research it for yourself, and come to your own conclusions. Anyone telling you what the truth is, or claiming they have the answer, is likely leading you astray, for one reason or another. Stay Vigilant.
(https://www.rokfin.com/TLAVagabond)
(https://www.bitchute.com/channel/24yVcta8zEjY/)
Video Source Links
https://youtu.be/r6baIveZO08?t=1385
https://twitter.com/HenryMakow/status/1262386891640516611
http://tapnewswire.com/2020/05/u-s-govt-loses-landmark-vaccine-lawsuit/
https://www.newsweek.com/israel-flagged-top-spy-threat-us-new-snowdennsa-document-262991
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-said-to-have-offered-lewinsky-tapes-for-pollard/
https://team8.vc/member/mike-rogers/
https://www.jpost.com/Business/Globes/Eric-Schmidts-Israeli-dream-team
https://www.linkedin.com/in/talzaks/
https://www.wbur.org/edify/2019/08/28/media-lab-director-epstein-gets-public-support
https://www.israel21c.org/israeli-device-to-make-needles-obsolete/
https://news.mit.edu/2015/implantable-drug-delivery-microchip-device-0629
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-buffett-loses-nearly-300m-on-teva-1001285893
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqnnyDa7C7Q&feature=emb_title
http://cml.harvard.edu/people/charles-m-lieber
https://newatlas.com/medical/quantum-dot-tattoos-patient-vaccine-history/
https://www.mintpressnews.com/cia-israel-mossad-jeffrey-epstein-orwellian-nightmare/261692/
https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-covid-19-urban-planning-health/
https://langerlab.mit.edu/langer-bio/
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/01/28/metro/harvard-scientists-arrest-stuns-colleague/
MEDIA IGNORES ISRAEL CONNECTION TO ERIC SCHMIDT’S
PUSH FOR NY “SMART CITIES”
20 MAY 2020 POSTED BY WHITNEY WEBB
WITH NY GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO RECENTLY ANNOUNCING THAT FORMER HEAD OF GOOGLE, ERIC SCHMIDT, WOULD LEAD AN EFFORT TO “REIMAGINE” POST-PANDEMIC LIFE IN THE STATE, MEDIA REPORTS HAVE FAILED TO NOTE THAT THE GROUNDWORK FOR THAT “REIMAGINING” WAS LAID LAST YEAR AND INTIMATELY INVOLVES THE STATE OF ISRAEL.
In recent weeks, considerable media attention has been given to the decision by NY Governor Andrew Cuomo to tap former Google executive Eric Schmidt to lead a 15-member panel tasked with “reimagining” New York’s post-pandemic tech infrastructure as well as its education, economic and healthcare system. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was also recruited for this initiative by Gov. Cuomo, leading some American media outlets to criticize the venture as turning New York “into a Silicon Valley science experiment.”
However, it is much more than merely a Silicon Valley experiment. As The Last American Vagabond reported last month, Schmidt currently chairs the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which discussed plans last May regarding how to re-make American society to foster the mass adoption of AI-driven technologies, including so-called “smart cities” and related systems of mass surveillance. That commission includes key people, not just from Silicon Valley, but also the U.S. military and intelligence communities – a testament to how the divisions between Big Tech, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence have become increasingly blurred in recent years.
Unsurprisingly, one of the main initiatives that the Schmidt-chaired New York panel is set to promote is the fast-tracking of “smart city” implementation as outlined by the Schmidt-chaired NSCAI. The use of the term “reimagining” in the announcement that Schmidt would chair this panel also underscores this point, given that Google’s “smart city” subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs, describes itself as “reimagining cities from the Internet up.” Smart cities are more accurately defined as cities that are micromanaged by technocrats via an all encompassing system of mass surveillance and a vast array of “internet of things” devices that provide a constant and massive stream of data that is analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI).
Notably, Cuomo’s appointment of Schmidt to lead this panel aimed at “reimagining” life in New York came right before news broke that a Google subsidiary was scrapping its plans to build a smart city prototype in Toronto. Schmidt still chaired Google’s parent company, Alphabet, when that deal was first negotiated in 2017. At the time, Schmidt had said that Google’s effort to turn Toronto into a “smart city” had come “from Google’s founders getting excited thinking of ‘all the things you could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge’.”
Though smart cities have been largely unpopular among Americans to date, the coronavirus crisis has led to a spate of positive PR pieces promoting their implementation, such as a recent piece in Wired which claims that “smart city planning could slow future pandemics” and an article from Forbes about how “smart cities are protecting against coronavirus.”
While the current coronavirus crisis and Schmidt’s increasingly public role in ushering in AI-driven technological “solutions” throughout New York have given a boost to the smart city agenda, the plan to create these cities in New York was in the works well before coronavirus. However, those pre-pandemic smart city plans intimately involve one key actor that has, thus far, gone unnamed in recent media reports – the state of Israel.
WHO WILL BUILD NEW YORK’S SMART CITIES?
Last June, NY Governor Cuomo announced a $2 million partnership agreement with the Israel Innovation Authority, a branch of Israel’s Economy Ministry, that aimed to “further strengthen economic development ties between New York State and Israel.” The agreement was specifically related to the “co-development and commercialization” for technologies related to smart cities, cybersecurity and drones (unmanned aerial vehicles), among others.
A key component of this partnership was the creation of the “Smart Cities Innovation Partnership (SCIP),” which Cuomo’s office described as “a new initiative that will share innovative technologies, research, talent and business resources between cities in New York and Israel.” It was also stated that “New York and Israel will contribute an equivalent amount of matching resources” to the project. Cuomo, at the time, also said that New York’s Incubator programs for start-ups – an initiative with funds exceeding $5 million — would “implement a new focus on Israeli companies,” as opposed to local companies.
Regarding this new “Smart Cities Innovation Partnership,” Dr. Ami Applebaum – chairman of the Israel Innovation Authority and Chief Scientists of the Israel’s Economy Ministry – stated the following:
“As technology advances and touches every facet of our daily lives, the future of Smart Cities is just around the corner and highly depends to [sic] new and innovative technologies. This collaboration between the ESD (Empire State Development of New York State) and the Israel Innovation Authority, facilitated by our Americas Operations desk and the Ministry of Economy, Foreign Trade Administration (FTA), headed by Mr. Inon Elroy, Economic Minister to North America, will provide startups an opportunity for pilot validation sites to address the strategic concerns of both States such as cybersecurity, supply chain, energy, health, transportation, wastewater, water, civic engagement, parks, public works, and safety.”
The partnership specifically called for the establishment of five “Smart Cities” in Regional Economic Development Council (REDC) regions in New York that would interact with “test bed sites” created in Israel. This means that this “smart city” partnership only involves the creation of smart cities in New York, not Israel, but gives Israeli companies a major role in designing these five New York smart cities.
Though the press release from last year claims this would be an “equal venture,” an article on the SCIP published by The Jerusalem Post in March asserts that New York’s state government will be funding the entire $2 million project, giving $1 million to the Israel Innovation Authority and $1 million to Israeli companies. The New York government website, however, currently states that the $2 million partnership involves New York state giving $1 million exclusively to New York-based companies and the Israel Innovation Authority giving additional $1 million exclusively for Israeli companies seeking to develop New York-based projects.
On March 18, the SCIP was launched “via educational outreach and solicitation of interest in different New York localities.” The five “winning” New York municipalities, who will be announced in July, will be required “to designate physical or virtual sites to be used in new pilot technologies” sometime over the course of 2020, with those “smart city” technologies being implemented in early 2021.
The selection of the projects will be overseen by Eric Gertler, President and CEO of the Empire State Development (ESD), who was nominated to the position shortly after Cuomo announced the NY-Israel Smart City partnership and returned to a trip from Israel. Notably, Gertler is also currently chairman of the America-Israel Friendship League (AIFL) and is on the Board of Governors for Tel Aviv University and Israel’s Technion. He also has long-standing close ties to Mort Zuckerman, a Zionist media mogul who recently came under fire for his ties to his former business associate, Jeffrey Epstein. Gertler used to work for Zuckerman as former co-publisher of the Zuckerman-owned New York Daily News and Gertler is also a trustee of Zuckerman’s family foundation.
SMART CITIES AND CYBERNYC
The initiation of the SCIP followed the launch of another major New York partnership with Israel that created two new, massive cybersecurity centers. Those cybersecurity centers, built in New York City and funded by New York taxpayers, are managed by private Israeli companies with close ties to Israel’s government, pro-Israel lobby organizations and Israeli intelligence-linked firms. Known as “CyberNYC” and first announced in 2018, the program officially seeks to “spur the creation of 10,000 cybersecurity jobs and make New York City a global leader in cyber innovation.”
However, Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and SOSA –the two Israeli companies set to run these two “CyberNYC” centers – have been rather clear that they view the centers, not as a “collaborative” effort, but as a means for providing Israeli cybersecurity companies a foothold in the American market and as a springboard for their global expansion. A report I previously wrote for MintPress News noted that both JVP and SOSA are Israeli government and military contractors and are also connected to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, particularly companies started by former members of Israel’s Unit 8200 signal intelligence unit. Notably, SOSA’s “CyberNYC” center in particular is associated with the America-Israel Friendship League, chaired by the President of New York’s ESD Eric Gertler who is involved in the NY-Israel “Smart Cities Innovation Partnership.”
Though there are numerous other such connections, the most crucial and relevant to note is that the “CyberNYC” initiative directly involves the participation of the Unit 8200 “start-up incubator” called Team8. As I previously reported for MintPress:
“Team8, particularly its presence in New York, has long been associated with the push by pro-Israel political donor and American hedge fund manager Paul Singer and Israel’s government to make Israel the global cybersecurity leader as a means of preventing countries from boycotting Israel over human rights violations and war crimes. Team8’s role in CyberNYC will see them not only finance part of the initiative but also training cybersecurity workers who will be hired as part of the partnership.”
Team8, in addition to being closely tied with controversial Unit 8200-linked companies like Cybereason, also has developed close ties to former U.S. government officials, including the former head of the U.S.’ National Security Agency (NSA) Mike Rogers, who now works for Team8. Another notable U.S. connection to Team8 is the fact that one of Team8’s leading investors is none other than Eric Schmidt, who is now set to “reimagine” life in New York at Cuomo’s behest. In addition to Team8, Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors fund is heavily invested in several Israeli “internet of things” companies and other Israeli hi-tech start-ups.
In addition, Schmidt’s former employer, Google, has partnered with the Israeli company Carbyne911 for the implementation of emergency services and 911 call functions for “smart cities.” Carbyne911 is chaired by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and was partially financed by Barak’s close friend Jeffery Epstein. Its software, designed by former Unit 8200 members, has built-in “pre-crime” functionality, among other Orwellian features.
Given that Schmidt’s involvement in the new Cuomo-created panel to “reimagine” New York’s tech infrastructure, it is very disconcerting that media reports have failed to even mention the clear role that Israeli government-backed initiatives, as well as Israeli intelligence-linked start-ups and incubators, are set to have on New York’s future.
These ties are particularly concerning given that Israel’s government and intelligence service has a long history of aggressively spying on the U.S. federal government and/or blackmailing top American politicians, particularly using technological means. In addition, Israel’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has an explicit policy of creating U.S. dependence on Israeli tech companies in order to counter the nonviolent Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement within the U.S. and to make Israel the dominant global “cyber power.” It is no coincidence, then, that Israel has also been chosen by other countries with strong Zionist lobbies to create “smart cities,” some specifically for “low-income residents,” in places like Brazil and elsewhere in the years since this policy began in 2012.
Of course, while these policies and the NY-Israel smart city partnership are set to be a major boon for Israeli companies and Israel’s geopolitical goals, New Yorkers stand to be the biggest losers of the “reimagining” of their state. Not only are high-paying jobs in New York’s hi-tech future being given to foreigners and foreign-owned companies, but also the already privacy-eroding potential of “smart cities” will be placed largely in the hands of a foreign power.
Question Everything, Come To Your Own Conclusions.
AS MODERNA’S COVID-19 VACCINE TAKES THE LEAD, ITS
CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER’S RECENT PROMOTION OF
“GENE-EDITING VACCINES” COMES TO LIGHT
18 MAY 2020 POSTED BY WHITNEY WEBB
MODERNA’S CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER HAS DESCRIBED THE COMPANY’S PRODUCTS AS “HACKING THE SOFTWARE OF LIFE” AND PERMANENTLY ALTERING A PERSON’S GENETIC CODE. IF MODERNA IS POISED TO BRING THE FIRST COVID-19 VACCINE TO MARKET, A DEEPER LOOK AT HIS COMMENTS AND HIS EMPLOYER ARE WARRANTED.
More and more frequently, government officials, political pundits and self-appointed “global health experts” like billionaire Bill Gates have been instructing the public that mass gatherings and any semblance of “normalcy” will not return until a vaccine for the novel coronavirus Covid-19 is created and subsequently distributed to the masses. In recent weeks, it has quickly become apparent that the leading Covid-19 vaccine candidate is the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine being developed by Boston-based Moderna Inc.
Today, Moderna announced that its vaccine candidate, named mRNA-1273, “appeared to produce an immune response in eight people who received it.” Moderna’s response is odd given that the “study” in question is focused on safety and “is actually not designed to measure effectiveness of the vaccine,” according to a report in TIME. Notably, none of the study’s findings on vaccine safety were reported aside from claims it was “generally safe.” It is also worth noting that this “safety-focused” study only began in March and thus, to date, represents only an examination of the vaccine’s effects in the very short term.
Major media outlets in multiple countries ran with the headlines trumpeting that Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine “shows promising early results” and has presented “encouraging early signs” because of its purported ability to produce Covid-19 antibodies in humans. In addition, these media reports failed to raise other simple yet necessary questions such as how a sample size of only eight people can translate into scientific findings of any real significance without further testing involving larger sample sizes. They also failed to note that the study in question is not even finished as a U.S. government press release noted that the findings in question are merely “interim results.” In addition, the study is being led by the U.S.’ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), itself headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is a key figure in the U.S. government’s coronavirus response.
Though it is unclear if these “encouraging early signs” will be replicated in future tests of larger samples that are actually designed to test the vaccine’s effectiveness, the news is surely welcome to Moderna, given that their past mRNA vaccines failed to produce hardly any immune response at all, explaining why the company has never brought an mRNA vaccine to market in its entire history as a company.
However, since at least last fall, Moderna has sought to resolve this issue by adding “nanoparticles” to its mRNA vaccine, a modification financed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Moderna is a “strategic ally” of DARPA and has received millions from DARPA and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation several years prior to the current coronavirus crisis. DARPA’s plans for nanoparticles and nanotechnology and their potentially Orwellian applications were the subject of a recent The Last American Vagabond report.
Thanks to the “interim results” of this new study, Moderna is set to take the lead in the race to gain government approval for a Covid-19 vaccine. Moderna had already pulled ahead of other Covid-19 vaccine candidates in recent weeks, being the first vaccine in the U.S. to go the human trials (after it was allowed to skip animal trials) and also enjoying strong support from the U.S. government. For instance, Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine recently received fast-track approval from the Food and Drug administration (FDA) after receiving the “green light” to proceed to Phase 2 testing prior to the results of Phase 1 being published. Moderna’s president, Dr. Stephen Hoge, recently said the company now expects to begin the final third phase of testing sometime this summer.
In addition to support from the FDA, Moderna has also received considerable U.S. government funding ($438 million) from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a division of HHS overseen by HHS’ Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) Robert Kadlec. Moderna has also stated that it is directly collaborating with the U.S. government to bring its vaccine candidate to market.
Moderna’s considerable lead has also been the result of backing that it received in January from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which was founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine has also received additional millions from long-time Moderna backer Bill Gates. Gates recently authored an article where he described Moderna’s mRNA vaccine for Covid-19 as the “most exciting” and discussed it at length.
Gates’ affinity for Moderna may owe to the fact that Moderna’s co-founder, MIT’s Robert Langer, is a Gates associate whose lab developed the Gates-funded “quantum dot ‘tattoo’” vaccine identification marker that is “visible using a special smartphone camera app and filter” and was described by Science Alert as “a low-risk tracking system.” Another Langer-Gates partnership is a “birth control microchip” inserted to the body that releases contraceptives and can be turned on and off wirelessly.
MEET DR. ZAKS
With Moderna taking a firm lead relative to the other Covid-19 vaccine hopefuls, it is worth taking a closer look at the man who has overseen its development, Moderna’s current Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Tal Zaks. Zaks, an Israeli citizen who began his career at GlaxoSmithKline, oversees “preclinical development, clinical development and regulatory affairs” for Moderna and all of its subsidiaries.
In a 2017 TED Talk, two years after joining Moderna, Zaks spoke at length about how he views mRNA vaccines and their modality, including those he produces at Moderna. In a speech entitled “The disease-eradicating potential of gene editing,” Zaks’ description of Moderna’s mRNA products as, making permanent edits to human genes, clashes with often touted claims that the genetic material in mRNA vaccines “degrade” over time and do not permanently alter human genetics like DNA vaccines.
Beginning his talk, Zaks states that Moderna and similar companies “are actually hacking the software of life and that it’s changing the way we think of and treat disease.” He describes mRNA as “critical information that determines what a cell will actually do” and then states that, if one could “introduce a line of code or change a line of code” in a person’s genome, that has “profound implications for everything.” He then falsely claims that Moderna’s products at the time were proven to “work in people” as the company, prior to Covid-19, was never able to convince the federal government to license its mRNA vaccines for human use due to their lack of effectiveness.
Zaks further described his view of well-known diseases like cancer as being caused by “screwed-up DNA” that can be “fixed” with Moderna mRNA vaccines, which he also refers to in the talk as “information therapy” given that he says Moderna’s vaccines work by altering the “operating systems” of human cells, i.e. their genetic code.
The summary of Zaks’ talk encapsulates his view as the following simple question: “If our cells are the hardware and our genetic material the operating system, what if we could change a few lines of code?” — seemingly suggesting that the permanent introduction of changes into the human genome is as simple as troubleshooting or programming a computer or phone application. It also says that Zaks considers the future of “personalized medicine” to be “gene-editing vaccines tailored to each patient’s immune system.” The Ted Talk recommended after viewing Zaks’ speech on the Ted Talk website notably broaches a key point that Zaks overlooks, namely that gene-editing can “change an entire species – forever.”
Zaks’ statements are noteworthy and concerning for several reasons, including the fact that DARPA — Moderna’s “strategic ally” — is also openly funding research aimed at “reprogramming genes” and “manipulat[ing] genes or control[ling] gene expression to combat viruses and help human bodies withstand infection” caused by Covid-19. The DARPA-backed project would use a method that is known to cause severe genetic damage that has actually been shown to aggravate the conditions it was meant to cure.
With such permanent gene-altering technology on the fast-track to become the first Covid-19 vaccine widely available for use, it is deeply concerning that this experimental vaccine with potentially far-reaching consequences is being rammed through thanks to fervent support from both the U.S. government and controversial philanthropists that apparently have little interest in studies examining the mRNA vaccine’s long-term effects. Given that the stage has already been set for mandatory vaccinations that will be “distributed” throughout the U.S. by the military, now is the time to vigorously raise awareness about the Moderna vaccine’s gravely under-reported ability to “hack the software of life” in ways that could harm public health.
Question Everything, Come To Your Own Conclusions.
How the CIA, Mossad and “the Epstein
Network” are Exploiting Mass Shootings to
Create an Orwellian Nightmare
Following another catastrophic mass shooting or crisis event, Orwellian “solutions” are set to be foisted on a frightened American public by the very network connected, not only to Jeffrey Epstein, but to a litany of crimes and a frightening history of plans to crush internal dissent in the United States.
by Whitney Webb
https://www.mintpressnews.com/cia-israel-mossad-jeffrey-epstein-orwellian-nightmare/261692/
(Note :The tag along video player and/or randomly inserted ad blocks or statements/links are not part of this article. They are aggravating and a hindrance to the continuity of the article. I apologize for the aggravation. I have no control over their placement in the body of this article.)
September 06th, 2019
Following the arrest and subsequent death in prison of alleged child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a little-known Israeli tech company began to receive increased publicity, but for all the wrong reasons. Not long after Epstein’s arrest, and his relationships and finances came under scrutiny, it was revealed that the Israeli company Carbyne911 had received substantial funding from Jeffrey Epstein as well as Epstein’s close associate and former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist and prominent Trump backer Peter Thiel.
Carbyne911, or simply Carbyne, develops call-handling and identification capabilities for emergency response services in countries around the world, including the United States, where it has already been implemented in several U.S. counties and has partnered with major U.S. tech companies like Google. It specifically markets its product as a way of mitigating mass shootings in the United States without having to change existing U.S. gun laws.
Yet, Carbyne is no ordinary tech company, as it is deeply connected to the elite Israeli military intelligence division, Unit 8200, whose “alumni” often go on to create tech companies — Carbyne among them — that frequently maintain their ties to Israeli intelligence and, according to Israeli media reports and former employees, often “blur the line” between their service to Israel’s defense/intelligence apparatus and their commercial activity. As this report will reveal, Carbyne is but one of several Israeli tech companies marketing themselves as a technological solution to mass shootings that has direct ties to Israeli intelligence agencies.
In each case, these companies’ products are built in such a way that they can easily be used to illegally surveil the governments, institutions and civilians that use them, a troubling fact given Unit 8200’s documented prowess in surveillance as a means of obtaining blackmail and Israel’s history of using tech companies to aggressively spy on the U.S. government. This is further compounded by the fact that Unit 8200-linked tech companies have previously received U.S. government contracts to place “backdoors” into the U.S.’ entire telecommunications system as well as into the popular products of major American tech companies including Google, Microsoft and Facebook, many of whose key managers and executives are now former Unit 8200 officers.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it no secret that placing Unit 8200 members in top positions in multinational tech companies is a “deliberate policy” meant to ensure Israel’s role as the dominant global “cyber power”, while also combating non-violent boycott movements targeting Israel’s violations of international law and stifling the United Nations’ criticisms of Israeli government policy and military operations abroad.
As Jeffrey Epstein’s links to intelligence in both the United States and Israel — the subject of a recent four-part series exclusive to MintPress — began to be revealed in full, his financing of Carbyne came under scrutiny, particularly for the company’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence as well as to certain Americans with known connections to U.S. intelligence. Ehud Barak’s own role as both financier and chairman of Carbyne has also added to that concern, given his long history of involvement in covert intelligence operations for Israel and his long-standing ties to Israeli military intelligence.
Another funder of Carbyne, Peter Thiel, has his own company that, like Carbyne, is set to profit from the Trump administration’s proposed hi-tech solutions to mass shootings. Indeed, after the recent shooting in El Paso, Texas, President Trump — who received political donations from and has been advised by Thiel following his election — asked tech companies to “detect mass shooters before they strike,” a service already perfected by Thiel’s company Palantir, which has developed “pre-crime software” already in use throughout the country. Palantir is also a contractor for the U.S. intelligence community and also has a branch based in Israel.
Perhaps most disturbing of all, whatever technological solution is adopted by the Trump administration, it is set to use a controversial database first developed as part of a secretive U.S. government program that involved notorious Iran-Contra figures like Oliver North as a means of tracking and flagging potential American dissidents for increased surveillance and detention in the event of a vaguely defined “national emergency.”
As this report will reveal, this database — often referred to as “Main Core” — was created with the involvement of Israeli intelligence and Israel remained involved years after it was developed, and potentially to the present. It was also used by at least one former CIA official on President Reagan’s National Security Council to blackmail members of Congress, Congressional staffers and journalists, among others.
Given recent reports on the Trump administration’s plan to create a new government agency to use “advanced technology” to identify “neurobehavioral signs” of “someone headed toward a violent explosive act” using data collected by consumer electronic devices, the picture painted by the technology currently being promoted and implemented under the guise of “keeping Americans safe” is deeply Orwellian. In fact, it points directly to the genesis of a far-reaching surveillance state far more extensive than anything yet seen in American history and it is being jointly developed by individuals connected to both American and Israeli intelligence.
Demystifying Carbyne
Carbyne911, which will be referred to simply as Carbyne in this report, is an Israeli tech-startup that promises to revolutionize how calls are handled by emergency service providers, as well as by governments, corporations and educational institutions. Not long after it was founded in 2014 by veterans of Israeli military intelligence, Carbyne began to be specifically marketed as a solution to mass shootings in the United States that goes “beyond the gun debate” and improves the “intelligence that armed emergency responders receive before entering an armed shooter situation” by providing video-streaming and acoustic input from civilian smartphones and other devices connected to the Carbyne network.
Prior to Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest in July, Carbyne had been receiving high praise from U.S. and Israeli media, with Fox News hailing the company’s services as the answer to the U.S.’ “aging 911 systems” and the Jerusalem Post writing that the company’s platform offers “hi-tech protection to social workers and school principals.” Other reports claimed that Carbyne’s services result in “a 65% reduction in time-to-dispatch.”
Carbyne’s call-handling/crisis management platform has already been implemented in several U.S. counties and the company has offices not only in the U.S. but also in Mexico, Ukraine and Israel. Carbyne’s expansion to more emergency service provider networks in the U.S. is likely, given that federal legislation seeks to offer grants to upgrade 911 call centers throughout the country with the very technology of which Carbyne is the leading provider. One of the main lobby groups promoting this legislation, the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), has a “strong relationship” with Carbyne, according to Carbyne’s website. In addition, Carbyne has also begun marketing its platform for non-emergency calls to governments, educational institutions and corporations.
Yet, what seemed like the inevitability of Carbyne’s widespread adoption in the U.S. hit a snag following the recent arrest and subsequent death of sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who exploited underage girls for the purpose of obtaining “blackmail” on the rich and poweful, an operation that had clear ties to intelligence. Epstein, after his first arrest and light sentence for soliciting sex from a minor in 2007, was tapped by former Israeli Prime Minister and former head of Israeli military intelligence Ehud Barak, to become a key financial backer of Carbyne.
Ehud Barak, center, poses with Carbyne co-founders Alex Dizengof, Amir Elichai and Lital Leshem. Photo | Yossi Seliger
As a result of increased scrutiny of Epstein’s business activities and his ties to Israel, particularly to Barak, Epstein’s connection to Carbyne was revealed and extensively reported on by the independent media outlet Narativ, whose exposé on Carbyne revealed not only some of the key intelligence connections of the start-up company but also how the architecture of Carbyne’s product itself raises “serious privacy concerns.”
MintPress detailed many of Carbyne’s main intelligence connections in Part III of the investigative series “Inside the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: Too Big to Fail.” In addition to Barak — former Israeli prime minister and former head of Israeli military intelligence — serving as Carbyne’s chairman and a key financer, the company’s executive team are all former members of Israeli intelligence, including the elite military intelligence unit, Unit 8200, which is often compared to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
Carbyne’s current CEO, Amir Elichai, served in Unit 8200 and tapped former Unit 8200 commander and current board member of AIPAC Pinchas Buchris to serve as the company’s director and on its board. In addition to Elichai, another Carbyne co-founder, Lital Leshem, also served in Unit 8200 and later worked for Israeli private spy company Black Cube. The only Carbyne co-founder that didn’t serve in Unit 8200 is Alex Dizengof, who previously worked for Israel’s Prime Minister’s office.
As MintPress noted in a past report detailing Israeli military intelligence’s deep ties to American tech giant Microsoft, Unit 8200 is an elite unit of the Israeli Intelligence corps that is part of the IDF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence and is involved mainly in signal intelligence (i.e., surveillance), cyberwarfare and code decryption. It is frequently described as the Israeli equivalent of the NSA and Peter Roberts, senior research fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, characterized the unit in an interview with the Financial Times as “probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stand[ing] on a par with the NSA in everything except scale.”
Notably, the NSA and Unit 8200 have collaborated on numerous projects, most infamously on the Stuxnet virus as well as the Duqu malware. In addition, the NSA is known to work with veterans of Unit 8200 in the private sector, such as when the NSA hired two Israeli companies, to create backdoors into all the major U.S. telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and Google. Both of those companies, Verint and Narus, have top executives with ties to Israeli intelligence and one of those companies, Verint (formerly Comverse Infosys), has a history of aggressively spying on U.S. government facilities. Unit 8200 is also known for spying on civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories for “coercion purposes” — i.e., gathering info for blackmail — and also for spying on Palestinian-Americans via an intelligence-sharing agreement with the NSA.
Unlike many other Unit 8200-linked start-ups, Carbyne also boasts several tie-ins to the Trump administration, including Palantir founder and Trump ally Peter Thiel — another investor in Carbyne. In addition, Carbyne’s board of advisers includes former Palantir employee Trae Stephens, who was a member of the Trump transition team, as well as former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. Trump donor and New York real-estate developer Eliot Tawill is also on Carbyne’s board, alongside Ehud Barak and Pinchas Buchris.
Yet, privacy concerns with Carbyne go beyond the company’s ties to Israeli intelligence and U.S. intelligence contractors like Peter Thiel. For instance, Carbyne’s smartphone app extracts the following information from the phones on which it is installed:
Device location, video live-streamed from the smartphone to the call center, text messages in a two-way chat window, any data from a user’s phone if they have the Carbyne app and ESInet, and any information that comes over a data link, which Carbyne opens in case the caller’s voice link drops out.” (emphasis added)
According to Carbyne’s website, this same information can also be obtained from any smartphone, even if it does not have Carbyne’s app installed, if that phone calls a 911 call center that uses Carbyne or merely any other number connected to Carbyne’s network.
Carbyne gathers data points from users’ phones as well as a myriad of other web-connected devices.
Carbyne is a Next-Generation 9-11 (NG911) platform and the explicit goal of NG911 is for all 911 systems nationwide to become interconnected. Thus, even if Carbyne is not used by all 911 call centers using an NG911 platform, Carbyne will ostensibly have access to the data used by all emergency service providers and devices connected to those networks. This guiding principle of NG911 also makes it likely that one platform will be favored at the federal level to foster such interconnectivity and, given that it has already been adopted by several counties and has ties to the Trump administration, Carbyne is the logical choice.
Another cause for concern is how other countries have used platforms like Carbyne, which were first marketed as emergency response tools, for the purpose of mass surveillance. Narativ noted the following in its investigation of Carbyne:
In May, Human Rights Watch revealed Chinese authorities use a platform not unlike Carbyne to illegally surveil Uyghurs. China’s Integrated Joint Operations Platform brings in a much bigger data-set and sources of video, which includes an app on people’s phones. Like Carbyne, the platform was designed to report emergencies. Chinese authorities have turned it into a tool of mass surveillance.
Human Rights Watch reverse-engineered the app. The group discovered the app automatically profiles a user under 36 “person types” including “followers of Six Lines” which is the term used to identify Uyghurs. Another term refers to “Hajj,” the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. The app monitors every aspect of a user’s life, including personal conversations [and] power usage, and tracks a user’s movement.”
Such technology is currently used by Israeli military intelligence and Israel’s domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet to justify “pre-crime” detentions of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. As will be noted in greater detail later in this report, Palestinians’ comments on social media are tracked by artificial intelligence algorithms that flag them for indefinite detention if they write social media posts that contain “tripwire” phrases such as “the sword of Allah.”
Carbyne’s platform has its own “pre-crime” elements, such as it’s c-Records component, which stores and analyzes information on past calls and events that pass through its network. This information “enables decision makers to accurately analyze the past and present behavior of their callers, react accordingly, and in time predict future patterns.” (emphasis added)
Concerns have recently been raised that “pre-crime” technology may soon become more widely adopted in the U.S., after President Trump stated that one of his planned solutions to mass shootings in the wake of the recent tragedy in El Paso was for big tech companies to detect potential shooters before they strike.
Israeli intelligence, Blackmail and Silicon Valley
Though many of the individuals involved in funding or managing Carbyne have proven ties to intelligence, a closer look into several of these players reveals even deeper connections to both Israeli and U.S. intelligence.
One of Carbyne’s clearest connections to Israeli intelligence is through its chairman and one of its funders, Ehud Barak. Though Barak is best known for being a former prime minister of Israel, he is also a former minister of defense and the former head of Israeli military intelligence. He oversaw Unit 8200’s operations, as well as other units of Israeli military intelligence, in all three of those positions. For most of his military and later political career, Barak has been closely associated with covert operations.
Prior to the public scrutiny of Barak’s relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, following the latter’s arrest this past July and subsequent death, Barak had come under fire for his ties to disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein. Indeed, it was Ehud Barak who put Weinstein in contact with the Israeli private intelligence outfit Black Cube, which employs former Mossad agents and Israeli military intelligence operatives, as Weinstein sought to intimidate the women who had accused him of sexual assault and sexual harassment. Former Mossad director Meir Dagan led Black Cube’s board until his death in 2016 and Carbyne co-founder Lital Leshem is Black Cube’s former director of marketing.
After Barak put him in contact with Black Cube’s leadership, Weinstein, according to The New Yorker, used the private spy firm to “‘target,’ or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focused on their personal or sexual histories.” In addition, The New Yorker noted that “Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally” and “also enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to some sources who received them, felt intimidating.”
Yet, more recently, it has been Barak’s close relationship to Epstein that has raised eyebrows and opened him up to political attacks from his rivals. Epstein and Barak were first introduced by former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in 2002, a time when Epstein’s pedophile blackmail and sex trafficking operation was in full swing.
Barak was a frequent visitor to Epstein’s residences in New York, so often that The Daily Beast reported that numerous residents of an apartment building linked to Epstein “had seen Barak in the building multiple times over the last few years, and nearly half a dozen more described running into his security detail,” adding that “the building is majority-owned by Epstein’s younger brother, Mark, and has been tied to the financier’s alleged New York trafficking ring.” Specifically, several apartments in the building were “being used to house underage girls from South America, Europe and the former Soviet Union,” according to a former bookkeeper employed by one of Epstein’s main procurers of underage girls, Jean Luc Brunel.
Barak is also known to have spent the night at one of Epstein’s residences at least once, was photographed leaving Epstein’s residence as recently as 2016, and has admitted to visiting Epstein’s island, which has sported nicknames including “Pedo Island,” “Lolita Island” and “Orgy Island.” In 2004, Barak received $2.5 million from Leslie Wexner’s Wexner Foundation, where Epstein was a trustee as well as one of the foundation’s top donors, officially for unspecified “consulting services” and “research” on the foundation’s behalf.
In 2015, Barak formed a limited partnership company in Israel for the explicit purpose of investing in Carbyne (then known as Reporty) and invested millions of dollars in the company, quickly becoming a major shareholder and subsequently the company’s public face and the chairman of its board. At least $1 million of the money invested in this Barak-created company that was later used to invest in Carbyne came from the Southern Trust Company, which was owned by Jeffrey Epstein.
In July, Bloomberg reported that Epstein’s Southern Trust Company is identified in U.S. Virgin Islands filings as “a DNA database and data mining” company. Given Carbyne’s clear potential for data-mining and civilian profiling, Epstein’s investment in Carbyne using this specific company suggests that Carbyne’s investors have long been aware of this little advertised aspect of Carbyne’s product.
In a statement to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Barak asserted:
I saw the business opportunity and registered a partnership in my control in Israel. A small number of people I know invest in it…Since these are private investments, it wouldn’t be proper or right for me to expose the investors’ details.”
However, Barak later admitted that Epstein had been one of the investors.
MintPress’ recent series on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal noted in detail Epstein’s ties to CIA/Mossad intelligence assets, such as Adnan Khashoggi; CIA front companies, such as Southern Air Transport; and organized crime, through his close association with Leslie Wexner. In addition, Epstein’s long-time “girlfriend” and alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, has family links to Israeli intelligence through her father, Robert Maxwell. While it appears that Epstein may have been working for more than one intelligence agency, Zev Shalev, former executive producer for CBS News and journalist at Narativ, recently stated that he had independently confirmed with two unconnected sources “closely connected to the Epstein story and in a position to know” that Epstein had “worked for Israeli military intelligence.”
Exclusive: We have two independent sources confirming Jeffrey Epstein worked for Israeli military intelligence. In each case the source is closely connected to the Epstein story and in a position to know. You can take it to the bank. @narativlive http://narativ.org/2019/07/27/building-big-brother/ …
Jeffrey Epstein: Building Big Brother
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Notably, Epstein, who was known for his interest in obtaining blackmail through the sexual abuse of the underaged girls he exploited, also claimed to have “damaging information” on prominent figures in Silicon Valley. In a conversation last year with New York Times reporter James Stewart, Epstein claimed to have “potentially damaging or embarrassing” information on Silicon Valley’s elite and told Stewart that these top figures in the American tech industry “were hedonistic and regular users of recreational drugs.” Epstein also told Stewart that he had “witnessed prominent tech figures taking drugs and arranging for sex” and claimed to know “details about their supposed sexual proclivities.”
In the lead-up to his recent arrest, Jeffrey Epstein appeared to have been attempting to rebrand as a “tech investor,” as he had done interviews with several journalists including Stewart about technology investing in the months before he was hit with federal sex trafficking charges.
Jessica Lessin, editor-in-chief of The Information, told Business Insider that a journalist working for The Information had interviewed Epstein a month before his recent arrest because “he was believed to be an investor in venture capital funds.” However, Lessin claimed that the interview was not “newsworthy” and said the site had no plans to publish its contents. Business Insider claimed that the way the interviews with Epstein had been arranged “suggests that someone in Silicon Valley may have been trying to help Epstein connect with reporters.”
Though it is unknown exactly which Silicon Valley figures were most connected to Epstein and which tech executives were potentially being blackmailed by Epstein, it is known that Epstein associated with several prominent tech executives, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Last year, Epstein claimed to be advising Tesla and Elon Musk, who had been previously photographed with Epstein’s alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell. A few years ago, Epstein also attended a dinner hosted by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, where Musk had allegedly introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg. Google’s Sergey Brin is known to have attended a dinner hosted by Epstein at his New York residence where Donald Trump was also in attendance.
Elon Musk with Epstein’s alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell at an Oscars after-party on March 2, 2014. Kevin Mazur | VF14
These associations suggest that the person in Silicon Valley who was trying to boost Epstein’s image as a tech investor before his arrest may have been Peter Thiel, whose Founders Fund had also invested in Carbyne. Thiel was an early investor in Facebook and is still on its board, connecting him to Zuckerberg; he is also a funder of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a former colleague of Musk’s through PayPal. In addition, Thiel has ties to Reid Hoffman and both Thiel and Hoffman are prominent backers of Facebook.
It is unknown whether Epstein’s “damaging information” and apparent blackmail on notable individuals in the American technology industry were used to advance the objectives of Carbyne, which recently partnered with tech giants Google and Cisco Systems — and, more broadly, the expansion of Israeli intelligence-linked tech companies into the American tech sector, particularly through the acquisition of Israeli tech start-ups linked to Unit 8200 by major U.S. tech companies.
The latter seems increasingly likely given that the father of Ghislaine Maxwell — one of Epstein’s chief co-conspirators in his intelligence-linked sexual blackmail operation involving minors — was a Mossad operative who helped sell software that had been bugged by Israeli intelligence to government agencies and sensitive facilities around the world, including in the United States.
As will be noted later in this report, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — to whom all of Israel’s intelligence agencies answer by virtue of his position — has stated on more than one occasion that the acquisition of Israeli intelligence-linked start-ups by foreign tech giants, especially in Silicon Valley, is a current and “deliberate policy” of the state of Israel.
Carbyne’s ties to U.S. intelligence
While Epstein and Barak are the two financiers of Carbyne whose ties to intelligence are clearest, another funder of Carbyne, Peter Thiel, has ties to U.S. intelligence and a history of investing in other companies founded by former members of Unit 8200. Thiel co-founded and still owns a controlling stake in the company Palantir, which was initially funded with a $2 million investment from the CIA’s venture capital fund In-Q-Tel and quickly thereafter became a contractor for the CIA.
After the success of its contract with the CIA, Palantir became a contractor for a variety of federal agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Homeland Security(DHS) and the military’s Special Operations Command, among others. Last year, it won a contract to create a new battlefield intelligence system for the U.S. Army. Palantir is also in demand for its “pre-crime technology,” which has been used by several U.S. police departments. According to the Guardian, “Palantir tracks everyone from potential terrorist suspects to corporate fraudsters, child traffickers and what they refer to as ‘subversives’… it is all done using prediction.”
Thiel has gained attention in recent years for his support of President Trump and for becoming an adviser to Trump following the 2016 election, when he was “a major force in the transition,” according to Politico, and “helped fill positions in the Trump administration with former staff.” One of those former staffers was Trae Stephens, who is also on Carbyne’s board of advisers. Thiel also has business ties to Trump’s son-in-law and influential adviser, Jared Kushner, as well as to Kushner’s brother Josh. A senior Trump campaign aide told Politico in 2017 that “Thiel is immensely powerful within the administration through his connection to Jared.”
Thiel has also backed some prominent Israeli tech start-ups connected to Unit 8200, such as BillGuard, which Thiel funded along with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other investors. BillGuard was founded by Raphael Ouzan, a former officer in Unit 8200, who serves on the board of directors of Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC) alongside neoconservative American hedge fund manager Paul Singer, neoconservative political operative and adviser Dan Senor, and Terry Kassel, who works for Singer at his hedge fund, Elliott Management.
Peter Thiel greets Netanyahu during a 2017 meeting in Israel. Photo | Israel PM
SUNC is an organization founded by Paul Singer, who has donated heavily to both President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Since it was founded in 2012, SUNC has sought to integrate Unit 8200-connected Israeli tech start-ups into foreign companies, primarily American companies, and has helped oversee the shift of thousands of high-paying tech jobs from the U.S. to Israel.
Another Carbyne-connected individual worth noting is the former head of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, who serves on Carbyne’s board of advisers. In addition to Chertoff’s ties to DHS, Chertoff’s company, The Chertoff Group, employees several prominent former members of the U.S. intelligence community as principals, including Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and former director of the NSA; and Charles Allen, former assistant director of Central Intelligence for Collection at the CIA, who worked at the agency for over 40 years.
The Chertoff Group has a long-standing and lucrative contract with the company OSI Systems, which produces full-body scanners and markets itself as a solution to mass shootings and crisis events, not unlike Carbyne. While Chertoff’s company was advising OSI Systems, Chertoff went on a media blitz to promote the widespread use of the machines produced by OSI Systems and even called on Congress to “fund a large-scale deployment of next-generation systems.” Chertoff did not disclose his conflict of interest while publicly promoting OSI’s full-body scanners.
Some have also alleged that Chertoff’s mother, Livia Eisen, had links to Israeli intelligence. According to her 1998 obituary, cited by both researcher/author Christopher Bollyn and journalist Jonathan Cook, Eisen participated in the Mossad operation code-named “Magic Carpet” while working for Israel’s El Al Airlines. Both Bollyn and Cook have suggested that Eisen’s participation in this covert Israeli intelligence operation strongly indicates that she had ties to the Mossad.
Melding into Silicon Valley
Beyond its troubling connections to Silicon Valley oligarchs, Israeli military intelligence and the U.S.-military industrial complex, Carbyne’s recent partnerships with two specific technology companies — Google and Cisco Systems — raise even more red flags.
Carbyne announced its partnership with Cisco Systems this past April, with the latter announcing that it would begin “aligning its unified call manager with Carbyne’s call-handling platform, allowing emergency call centers to collect data from both 911 callers and nearby government-owned IoT [Internet of Things] devices.” A report on the partnership published by Government Technology magazine stated that “Carbyne’s platform will be integrated into Cisco Kinetic for Cities, an IoT data platform that shares data across community infrastructure, smart city solutions, applications and connected devices.” The report also noted that “Carbyne will also be the only 911 solution in the Cisco Marketplace.”
As part of the partnership, Carbyne’s President of North American Operations Paul Tatro told Government Technology that the Carbyne platform would combine the data it obtains from smartphones and other Carbyne-connected devices with “what’s available through nearby Cisco-connected road cameras, roadside sensors, smart streetlamps, smart parking meters or other devices.” Tatro further asserted that “Carbyne can also analyze data that’s being collected by Cisco IoT devices … and alert 911 automatically, without any person making a phone call, if there appears to be a worthy problem,” and expressed his view that soon most emergency calls will not be made by human beings but “by smart cars, telematics or other smart city devices.”
A few months after partnering with Cisco Systems, Carbyne announced its partnership with Google on July 10, just three days after Carbyne funder Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in New York on federal sex trafficking charges. Carbyne’s press release of the partnership described how the company and Google would be teaming up in Mexico “to offer advanced mobile location to emergency communications centers (ECCs) throughout Mexico” following the conclusion of a successful four-week pilot program between Carbyne and Google in the Central American nation.
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt meets Netanyahu at his Jerusalem office. Israel PM | YouTube
The press release also stated:
Carbyne will provide Google’s Android ELS (Emergency Location Service) in real time from emergency calls made on AndroidTM devices. Deployment for any ECC in the country won’t require any integration, with Carbyne providing numerous options for connection to their secure ELS Gateway once an ECC is approved. The Carbyne automated platform, requiring no human interaction, has the potential to save thousands of lives each year throughout Mexico.”
The reason Carybne’s partnerships with Cisco Systems and Google are significant lies in the role that Cisco and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have played in the creation of a controversial “incubator” for Israeli tech start-ups with deep ties to Israeli military intelligence, American neoconservative donor Paul Singer, and the U.S.’ National Security Agency (NSA).
This company, called Team8, is an Israeli company-creation platform whose CEO and co-founder is Nadav Zafrir, former commander of Unit 8200. Two of the company’s other three co-founders are also “alumni” of Unit 8200. Among Team8’s top investors is Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, who also joined Peter Thiel in funding the Unit 8200-linked BillGuard, as well as major tech companies including Cisco Systems and Microsoft.
Last year, Team8 controversially hired the former head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, Retired Admiral Mike Rogers, and Zafrir stated that his interest in hiring Rogers was that Rogers would be “instrumental in helping strategize” Team8’s expansion in the United States. Jake Williams, a veteran of NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) hacking unit, told CyberScoop:
Rogers is not being brought into this role because of his technical experience. …It’s purely because of his knowledge of classified operations and his ability to influence many in the U.S. government and private-sector contractors.”
Team8 has also been heavily promoted by Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC). SUNC prominently features Team8 and Zafrir on the cybersecurity section of its website and also sponsored a talk by Zafrir and an Israeli government economist at the World Economic Forum, often referred to as “Davos,” that was attended personally by Paul Singer.
SUNC itself has deep ties to Israeli military intelligence, with former Unit 8200 officer Raphael Ouzan serving on its board of directors. Another example of SUNC-Unit 8200 ties can be seen with Inbal Arieli, who served as SUNC’s Vice President of Strategic Partnerships from 2014 to 2017 and continues to serve as a senior adviser to the organization. Arieli, a former lieutenant in Unit 8200, is the founder and head of the 8200 Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support Program (EISP), which was the first start-up accelerator in Israel aimed at harnessing “the vast network and entrepreneurial DNA of [Unit] 8200 alumni” and is currently one of the top company accelerators in Israel, alongside Team8. Arieli was the top executive at 8200 EISP while working at SUNC and several other top SUNC staffers are also connected to Israeli military intelligence.
Thus, Google and Cisco’s connections to Team8 suggests that their partnerships with another Israeli military intelligence-connected firm like Carbyne is a deepening of those two companies’ links to the growing bi-national security state that is uniting key players in the U.S. military-industrial complex and Israeli intelligence.
Mossad-backed Panic Buttons, coming to a school near you
Carbyne is hardly the only Israeli intelligence-linked tech company marketing itself in the United States as a solution to mass shootings. Another Israeli start-up, known as Gabriel, was founded in 2016 in response to a shooting in Tel Aviv and the Pulse Nightclub shooting in the United States, which took place just days apart.
Created by Israeli-American Yoni Sherizen and Israeli citizen Asaf Adler, Gabriel is similar to Carbyne in the sense that elements of its crisis response platform require installation on civilian smartphones as well as devices used by crisis responders. The main difference is that Gabriel also installs one or a series of physical “panic buttons,” depending on the size of the building to be secured, that also double as video and audio communication devices connected to the Gabriel network.
As with Carbyne, the ties between Gabriel and Israeli intelligence are obvious. Indeed, Gabriel’s four-person advisory board includes Ram Ben-Barak, former deputy director of the Mossad and former director-general of Israel’s intelligence ministry; Yohanan Danino, former chief of police for the state of Israel; and Kobi Mor, former director of overseas missions for the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet. The only American on the advisory board is Ryan Petty, the father of a Parkland shooting victim and friend of former Florida Governor Rick Scott.
Gabriel’s only disclosed funder is U.S.-based MassChallenge, a start-up accelerator non-profit. Gabriel is funded by MassChallenge’s Israel branch, which was opened six months prior to Gabriel’s creation and is partnered with the Israeli government and the Kraft Group. The Kraft Group is managed by Robert Kraft, who is currently embroiled in a prostitution scandal and is also a close friend of President Trump.
Notably, one of MassChallenge Israel’s featured experts is Wendy Singer, the executive director of SUNC, the organization created and funded by neoconservative Trump backer Paul Singer with the explicit purpose of promoting Israel’s tech start-ups and their integration into foreign, chiefly American, businesses. As was noted in a recent MintPress report on SUNC, Wendy Singer is the sister of neoconservative political operative Dan Senor, who founded the now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative with Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, and was previously the director of AIPAC’s Israel office for 16 years.
Gabriel’s founders have been quite upfront about the fact that the uptick in shootings in the U.S. has greatly aided their company’s growth and success. Last November, Sherizen told The Jerusalem Post that new mass shootings in the U.S. not only increased U.S. demand for his company’s product but also were opportunities to show the effectiveness of Gabriel’s approach:
Unfortunately every month there seems to be another high-profile event of this nature. After the Vegas shooting, we were able to show [that] our system would have managed to identify the location of the shooter much quicker.”
The Jerusalem Post noted that Gabriel is set to make considerable profits if concern over mass shootings continues to build in the U.S., writing:
With more than 475,000 soft targets across the US and amid increasing security fears, the potential market for Gabriel is huge. The company could gain revenues of almost $1 billion if only 10% of soft targets were to invest around $20,000 in its alert systems.”
Sherizen told the Jerusalem Post:
Our starter kit costs $10,000. Depending on the size and makeup of the community building, it would cost between $20-30,000 to fully outfit the location. We have made it very affordable. This is a game-changer for the lock-down and active shooter drills that are now a standard part of any child’s upbringing in the States.”
Much more than just a start-up
While it is certainly possible that numerous former officials and commanders of elite Israeli intelligence agencies may have no ulterior motive in advising or founding technology start-up companies, it is worth pointing out that top figures in Israel’s military intelligence agencies and the Mossad don’t see it that way.
Last March, Israeli media outlet Calcalist Tech published a report entitled “Israel Blurs the Line Between Defense Apparatus and Local Cybersecurity Hub,” which noted that “since 2012, cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that in some cases were built for this exact purpose.” (emphasis added)
The article notes that beginning in 2012, Israel’s intelligence and military intelligence agencies began to outsource “activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber technologies.” (emphasis added)
It continues:
In some cases, managers of development projects in the Israeli military and intelligence arms were encouraged to form their own companies, which then took over the project,’ an Israeli venture capitalist familiar with the matter told Calcalist Tech.”
Notably, Calcalist Tech states that the controversial company Black Cube was created this way and that Black Cube had been contracted, and is likely still contracted, by Israel’s Ministry of Defense. The private security agency Black Cube is known to have two separate divisions for corporations and governments. The firm was recently caught attempting to undermine the Iran nuclear deal — then also a top political objective of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — by attempting to obtain information on the “financial or sexual impropriety” (i.e., blackmail) of top U.S. officials involved in drafting the accord. NBC News noted last year that “Black Cube’s political work frequently intersects with Israel’s foreign policy priorities.” As previously mentioned, one of Carbyne’s co-founders — Lital Leshem, also a veteran of Unit 8200 — worked for Black Cube prior to starting Carbyne.
The entrance to Black Cube’s offices on the 26th floor of a Tel Aviv high rise, Feb. 8, 2019. Raphael Satter | AP
One of the main companies profiled in the Calcalist Tech report appeared to be a front for Israeli intelligence, as its registered owner was found not to exist: even high-level employees at the company had never heard of him; his registered addresses were for nonexistent locations in Israel’s capital of Tel Aviv; and the three people with that name in Tel Aviv denied any association with the business.
This company — which Calcalist Tech was unable to name after the Israeli military censor determined that doing so could negatively impact Israeli “national security” — was deliberately created to service the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence. It is also “focused on cyber technologies with expertise in research and development of advanced products and applications suitable for defense and commercial entities.” (emphases added) In addition, the company’s management consists largely of “veterans of Israeli military technology units.”
Notably, a former employee of this company told Calcalist Tech that “crossing the lines between military service and employment at the commercial outfit was ‘commonplace’ while he was working at the company.”
It’s not exactly clear why Israel’s military intelligence and other intelligence agencies decided to begin outsourcing its operations in 2012, though Calcalist Tech suggests the reasoning was related to the difference in wages between the private sector and the public sector, with pay being much higher in the former. However, it is notable that 2012 was also the year that Paul Singer — together with Netanyahu’s long-time economic adviser and former chair of the Israeli National Economic Council, Eugene Kandel — decided to create Start-Up Nation Central.
As MintPress noted earlier this year, SUNC was founded as part of a deliberate Israeli government effort to counter the nonviolent Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement and to make Israel the dominant global “cyber power.” This policy is aimed at increasing Israel’s diplomatic power and specifically undermining BDS as well as the United Nations, which has repeatedly condemned Israel’s government for war crimes and violations of international law in relation to the Palestinians.
Last year, Netanyahu was asked by Fox News host Mark Levin whether the large growth seen in recent years in Israel’s technology sector, specifically tech start-ups, was part of Netanyahu’s plan. Netanyahu responded, “That’s very much my plan … It’s a very deliberate policy.” He later added that “Israel had technology because the military, especially military intelligence, produced a lot of capabilities. These incredibly gifted young men and women who come out of the military or the Mossad, they want to start their start-ups.”
Netanyahu again outlined this policy at the 2019 Cybertech Conference in Tel Aviv, where he stated that Israel’s emergence as one of the top five “cyber powers” had “required allowing this combination of military intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place” and that this further required allowing “our graduates of our military and intelligence units to merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners.”
The direct tie-ins of SUNC to Israel’s government and the successful effort led by SUNC and other companies and organizations to place former military intelligence and intelligence operatives in strategic positions in major multinational technology companies reveal that this “deliberate policy” has had a major and undeniable impact on the global tech industry, especially in Silicon Valley.
Mossad gets its own In-Q-Tel
This “deliberate policy” of Netanyahu’s also recently resulted in the creation of a Mossad-run venture capital fund that is specifically focused on financing Israeli tech start-ups. The venture capital fund, called Libertad, was first announced by Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office and was created with the explicit purpose of “increasing the Israeli intelligence agency’s knowledge base and fostering collaboration with Israel’s vibrant startup scene” It was modeled after the CIA’s venture capital fund In-Q-Tel, which invested in several Silicon Valley companies turned government and intelligence contractors — including Google and Palantir — with a similar goal in mind.
Libertad declines to reveal the recipients of its funding, but announced last December that it had chosen five companies in the fields of robotics, energy, encryption, web intelligence, and natural language processing and text analysis. In regard to its interest in web intelligence, a Mossad employee told the Jerusalem Post that the intelligence agency was specifically interested in “innovative technologies for [the] automatic identification of personality characteristics – personality profiling – based on online behavior and activity, using methods based on statistics, machine learning, and other areas.” (emphasis added)
According to Libertad’s website, in return for its investment, now set at NIS 2 million (~$580,000) per year per company, “the Mossad will receive access to the IP [initial product] developed during R&D [Research and Development] while under contract, and a non-commercial, non-exclusive license to use it. Libertad’s contract with the company will not provide it with any additional rights.” In an interview with Calcalist Tech, Mossad Director Yossi Cohen told the paper that the Mossad’s partnership with civilian companies in Israel is “excellent” and that the agency will continue to strengthen those ties.
Israeli intelligence has a documented history in placing “backdoors” into technology products for the purpose of surveillance, with one well-known case being Israel’s repurposing of the PROMIS software, discussed in Part III of MintPress’ series on Jeffrey Epstein. Furthermore, given that U.S. intelligence, specifically the NSA, had “backdoors” placed into the products of major Silicon Valley companies (a service performed by Israeli intelligence-linked tech companies no less), Mossad may very well plan on doing the same with the technology products of companies it backs through Libertad.
Tim Shorrock, investigative journalist and author of Spies For Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, told MintPress that the Mossad’s continuation of such practices through Libertad was definitely plausible, especially given what Shorrock described as the “unusual” choice of Libertad choosing not to release the identities of the companies in which it invests.
“The Mossad is trying to hide what they are investing in,” Shorrock stated, adding that Libertad’s secrecy “raises a lot of questions” particularly given that it was modeled after the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. Shorrock noted that In-Q-Tel and other venture capital funds with ties to U.S. intelligence or the U.S. military rarely, if ever, hide the identities of the companies they finance.
However, Libertad is merely the latest and most public expression of the Mossad’s interest in Israeli tech start-ups, the lion’s share of which are created by veterans of Unit 8200 or other Israeli intelligence agencies. Indeed, former Mossad Director Tamir Pardo stated in 2017 that “everyone” in the Israeli cybertechnology sector is an “alumni” of either Israeli intelligence, like the Mossad, or Israeli military intelligence, like Unit 8200. Pardo even went as far as to say that the Mossad itself is “like a start-up.”
Pardo himself, after leaving his post as Mossad director in 2016, dove straight into the world of Israeli tech start-ups, becoming chairman of Sepio Systems, whose two CEOs are former Unit 8200 officers. Sepio Systems’ advisory board includes the former chief information security officer of the CIA, Robert Bigman; former member of the U.S. Military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Geoff Hancock; and former head of the Israel National Cyber Bureau and veteran of Israeli military intelligence, Rami Efrati. Sepio Systems’ cybersecurity software has been adopted by several banks, telecom and insurance companies, including in the U.S. and Brazil.
Pardo is not the only prominent figure in Israel’s intelligence community to compare Israeli intelligence agencies to tech start-ups. Shin Bet Director Nadav Argaman described Israel’s domestic spy agency in similar terms. “The Shin Bet is like an evolving start-up, with unmatched strength,” Argaman stated in a June 2017 speech, as he extolled the agency’s use of “pre-crime” technology to detain Palestinians based on their social media activity.
Argaman, at the time, claimed that more than 2,000 Palestinians, whom he described as “potential lone-wolf terrorists,” had been arrested as a result of these “breakthrough technological advances” that use artificial-intelligence algorithms to monitor the social media accounts of Palestinians, especially younger Palestinians, for the use of “tripwire” phrases that have been used by Palestinians who later committed acts of violence. In the case of those who use such terms, “their phones are tracked to see if they meet other suspects, or leave their districts to move towards potential Israeli targets. In such cases, security forces detain the suspect,” according to a 2017 report on the practice by The Economist.
The road to fascism, paved by a corrupted PROMIS
Though Israeli intelligence’s interest in tech companies goes back several years, there is a well-documented history of Israeli intelligence using bugged software to surveil and gain “backdoor” access to government databases around the world, particularly in the United States.
As was mentioned in Part III of MintPress’ Epstein series, a sinister yet cunning plan was executed to place a backdoor for Israeli intelligence into the Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) software, which was then being used by the U.S. Department of Justice and was the envy of government agencies, particularly intelligence agencies, around the world. This bugged version of PROMIS — born out of the collusion between Earl Brian, Ronald Reagan’s then-envoy to Iran, and Rafi Eitan, then-director of the now-defunct Israeli intelligence agency Lekem — was seeded around the world by Brian’s company Hadron as well as by Mossad-linked media mogul Robert Maxwell, father of Jeffrey Epstein’s long-time girlfriend and alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell.
After this first PROMIS “backdoor” was discovered, Israel would again gain access to sensitive U.S. government communications, as well as civilian communications, thanks to the collusion between Israeli intelligence and Israeli telecom and tech companies, especially Amdocs and Comverse Infosys (now Verint), that were operating throughout the United States. Today, Unit 8200-linked start-ups appear to have taken up the torch.
While the PROMIS software is perhaps best known for offering Israeli intelligence a backdoor into as many as 80 intelligence agencies and other sensitive locations around the world for nearly a decade, it was also used for a very different purpose by prominent officials linked to Iran-Contra.
One key Iran-Contra figure — Lt. Col. Oliver North, then serving on the National Security Council — decided to use PROMIS neither for espionage nor for foreign policy. Instead, North turned PROMIS’ power against Americans, particularly perceived dissidents, a fact that remained unknown for years.
Beginning in 1982, as part of the highly classified Continuity of Government (COG) program, North used the PROMIS software at a 6,100-square-foot “command center” in the Department of Justice, as well as at a smaller operations room at the White House, to compile a list of American dissidents and “potential troublemakers” if the COG protocol was ever invoked.
According to a senior government official with a high-ranking security clearance and service in five presidential administrations who spoke to Radar in 2008, this was:
A database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”
In 1993, Wired described North’s use of PROMIS in compiling this database as follows:
Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude.”
The COG program defined this “time of panic” as “a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a US military invasion abroad,” whereby the government would suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, and incarcerate perceived dissidents and other “unfriendlies” in order to prevent the government’s (or then-serving administration’s) overthrow.
This secretive database has often been referred to as “Main Core” by government insiders and, most troubling of all, it still exists today. Journalist Christ Ketcham, citing senior government officials, reported in 2008 that, at that time, Main Core was believed to contain the names of as many as 8 million Americans. Eleven years later, it is highly likely that the number of Americans included in the Main Core database has grown considerably.
Author and investigative journalist Tim Shorrock also covered other disturbing aspects of the evolution of Main Core back in 2008 for Salon. At the time, Shorrock reported that the George W. Bush administration was believed to have used Main Core to guide its domestic surveillance activities following the September 11 attacks.
Citing “several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations,” Shorrock further noted that Main Core — as it was 11 years ago at the time his report was published — was said to contain “a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies.”
Bill Hamilton, former NSA intelligence officer and the original creator of the PROMIS software, told Shorrock at the time that he believed that “U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main Core database” and had been told as much by an intelligence official in 1992 and an NSA official in 1995. Dan Murphy, former deputy director at the CIA, had told Hamilton that the NSA’s use of PROMIS was “so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem.” “I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding to Main Core,” Hamilton had told Shorrock.
Though most reporting on Main Core, from the time its existence was first revealed to the present, has treated the database as something used by the U.S. government and U.S. intelligence for domestic purposes, MintPress has learned that Israeli intelligence was also involved with the creation of the Main Core database. According to a former U.S. intelligence official with direct knowledge of the U.S. intelligence community’s use of PROMIS and Main Core from the 1980s to 2000s, Israeli intelligence played a role in the U.S. government’s deployment of PROMIS as the software used for the Main Core domestic surveillance database system.
Israeli intelligence remained involved with Main Core at the time of the August 1991 death of journalist Danny Casolaro, who was investigating not only the government’s misuse of the stolen PROMIS software but also the Main Core database. This same official, who chose to remain anonymous, told MintPress that, shortly before his death, Casolaro had obtained copies of computer printouts from the PROMIS-based Main Core domestic surveillance database system from NSA whistleblower Alan Standorf, who was found murdered a few months before Casolaro’s lifeless body would be found in a West Virginia hotel room.
The source also stated that Main Core’s contents had been used for the political blackmail of members of Congress and their staff, journalists, and others by Walter Raymond, a senior CIA covert operator in psyops and disinformation who served on President Reagan’s National Security Council during and after Main Core’s creation. If used for this purpose by Raymond in the 1980s, Main Core has also likely been used by other individuals with access to the database for blackmailing purposes in the years since.
Given that Israeli intelligence was known to have placed a backdoor into the PROMIS software, before it was marketed and sold around the world by Earl Brian and Robert Maxwell, its role in the U.S. government’s decision to use PROMIS in the creation of Main Core suggests that Israeli intelligence likely advocated for the version of PROMIS containing this backdoor, thereby giving Israeli intelligence access to Main Core. Given that Reagan aides and officials colluded with Israeli “spymaster” Rafi Eitan in his efforts to create a backdoor into the software for Israeli military intelligence, the use of this version of PROMIS in the Main Core database is certainly plausible.
Furthermore, the fact that Israeli intelligence was known to be involved in Main Core nearly a decade after its creation suggests that Israeli intelligence may have played a role in certain aspects of the database, such as the criteria used to flag Americans as “unfriendly,” and — like Walter Raymond — may have used information in the database to blackmail Americans. In addition, the fact that the cooperation between U.S. and Israeli intelligence, particularly between Unit 8200 and the NSA, has only grown since 1991 further suggests that Israeli involvement in Main Core continues to the present.
While Main Core’s very existence is troubling for many reasons, the alleged involvement of a foreign intelligence service in the creation, expansion and maintenance of a database with personal details and potentially damaging information on millions of Americans targeted for detention or increased surveillance in times of crisis is chilling. It is especially so considering that the Trump administration’s latest proposals to prevent mass shootings before they occur are likely to use Main Core to flag certain Americans for increased surveillance or potentially detention, as was done by the George W. Bush administration following the September 11 attacks.
It appears that Main Core serves a dual purpose; first as a mass targeted surveillance system to crush dissent during times of “national crisis” — whether spontaneous or engineered — and, second, as a massive blackmail database used to keep every potential opponent in line during non-emergencies.
Peter Thiel’s Seeing Stone
As was mentioned earlier in this report, Palantir — the company co-founded by Peter Thiel — is set to profit handsomely from the Trump administration’s plans to use its “pre-crime” technology, which is already used by police departments throughout the country and also used to track Americans based on the company’s integrative data-mining approach. Palantir, named for the “seeing stones” in the Lord of the Rings novels, also markets software to foreign (and domestic) intelligence agencies that predicts the likelihood that an individual will commit an act of terrorism or violence.
Aside from its “pre-crime” products, Palantir has come under fire in recent years as a result of the company’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), where it created an intelligence system known as Investigative Case Management (ICM). The IB Times described ICM as “a vast ‘ecosystem’ of data to help immigration officials in identifying targets and creating cases against them” and also “provides ICE agents with access to databases managed by other federal agencies.” ICM further gives ICE access to “targets’ personal and sensitive information, such as background on schooling, employment, family relationships, phone records, immigration history, biometrics data, criminal records as well as home and work addresses.” In other words, Palantir’s ICM is essentially a “Main Core” for immigrants.
Notably, part of Oliver North’s original intentions in “Main Core” was to track immigrants then coming from Central America as well as Americans who opposed Reagan era policy with respect to Central America. At that time, Main Core was believed to be controlled by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), which is now part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
VICE News reported in July that the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, which is run by DHS, “serves around 300 communities in northern California and is what is known as a ‘fusion center,’ a Department of Homeland Security intelligence center that aggregates and investigates information from state, local, and federal agencies, as well as some private entities, into large databases that can be searched using software like Palantir. “ VICE further noted that this center alone used Palantir to surveil as many as 8 million Ameicans. There are many more such DHS “fusion centers” throughout the United States.
If the Trump administration moves forward with its proposal of employing technology to detect potential mass shooters before they strike, Palantir’s technology is set to be used, given that it has already been used by U.S. law enforcement and U.S. intelligence to determine which people run “the highest risk of being involved in gun violence,” according to an investigation of Palantir by The Verge. Furthermore, Palantir’s close ties to the Trump administration make the company’s role in a future nationwide “pre-crime” prevention system based on technology appear inevitable.
Palantir founder Peter Thiel listens to Trump during a meeting at Trump Tower in New York, Dec. 14, 2016. Evan Vucci | AP
Worse still is the apparent overlap between Palantir and Main Core. Palantir — which has obvious similarities to PROMIS — is already known to use its software to track potential terror threats, including domestic terror threats, and a category of people it refers to as “subversives.” Palantir’s tracking of these individuals “is all done using prediction.” Palantir’s close ties to the U.S. intelligence community suggest that Palantir may already have access to the Main Core database. Tim Shorrock told MintPress that Palantir’s use of Main Core is “certainly possible,” particularly in light of the company’s use of the term “subversive” to describe a category of people that its software tracks.
Palantir also has alleged ties to Israeli intelligence, as there have long been suspicions that Israeli intelligence has used Palantir as part of its AI “pre-crime” algorithms targeting Palestinians after Palantir opened a research and development (R&D) center in Israel in 2013. The current head of Palantir Israel, Hamultal Meridor, previously founded a brain-machine interface organization and was senior director of web intelligence at Verint (formerly Comverse Infosys), which has deep connections to Unit 8200, a history of espionage in the United States and was one of the two companies contracted by the NSA to insert a “backdoor” into the U.S. telecommunications system and popular products of major American tech companies.
Given the above, Peter Thiel’s 2018 decision to fund Carbyne, the Unit 8200-linked start-up that markets itself as a technological solution to mass shootings in the U.S., strongly suggests that Thiel has been anticipating for some time the now-public efforts of the Trump administration to employ “pre-crime” technology to track and target Americans who show signs of “mental illness” and “violent tendencies.”
A nightmare even Orwell could not have predicted
In early August, in the wake of the shooting at an El Paso Walmart, President Trump called on big tech companies to collaborate with the Justice Department in the creation of software that “stops mass murders before they start” by detecting potential mass shooters before they cnm act. Though Trump’s ideas were short on specifics, there is now a new proposal that would create a new government agency that will use data gathered from civilian electronic devices to identify “neurobehavioral” warning signs, thereby flagging “potential shooters” for increased surveillance and potentially detention.
This new agency, as proposed by the foundation led by former NBC Universal president and vice chairman of General Electric Robert Wright, would be known as the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA) and would be modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Per the proposal, recently detailed by the Washington Post, the flagship program of HARPA would be “Safe Home” (Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes), which would use “breakthrough technologies with high specificity and sensitivity for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence,” specifically “advanced analytical tools based on artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
The program would cost an estimated $60 million over four years and would use data from “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home” and other consumer electronic devices, as well as information provided by health-care providers to identify who may be a threat.
The Washington Post reported that President Trump has reacted “very positively” to the proposal and that he was “sold on the concept.” The Post also noted that Wright sees the president’s daughter, Ivanka, as “the most effective champion of the proposal and has previously briefed her on HARPA himself.” Ivanka has previously been cited as a driving force behind some of her father’s policy decisions, including his decision to bomb Syria after an alleged chemical weapons attack in 2017.
Liz Fed — president of the Susan Wright Foundation, which is led by Robert Wright and created the proposal for HARPA and “Safe Home” — told The Post that the proposal emulated DARPA because “DARPA is a brilliant model that works. They have developed the most transformational capabilities in the world for national security…We’re not leveraging the tools and technologies available to us to improve and save lives.” Fed further asserted that DARPA’s technological approach had yet to be applied to the field of healthcare.
For anyone familiar with DARPA, such claims should immediately sound loud alarm bells, especially since DARPA is already developing its own solution to “mental health” issues in the form of a “brain-machine interface” as part of its N3 program. That program, according to reports, involves “noninvasive and ‘minutely’ invasive neural interfaces to both read and write into the brain,” help distance soldiers “from the emotional guilt of warfare” by “clouding their perception” and “to program artificial memories of fear, desire, and experiences directly into the brain.” Though N3 is intended to improve the prowess of American soldiers, it is also set to be used as a means of pursuing DARPA’s Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS) project, which aims to “to develop a tiny, implanted chip in the skull to treat psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, PTSD and major depression.”
Given that HARPA’s lead scientific adviser is Dr. Geoffrey Ling, former director and founder of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO), which “merges biology, engineering, and computer science to harness the power of natural systems for national security,” it seems likely that DARPA’s neurological-focused research programs, like SUBNETS and N3, would be folded into HARPA’s portfolio, making the proposed agency’s approach to mental health very questionable indeed.
Aside from the dystopian nature of both DARPA and potentially HARPA’s approach to mental health, there is grave cause for concern regarding the Trump administration’s moves to address U.S. mass shooting events by implementing pre-crime technology based on artificial intelligence, data-mining and mass surveillance, technologies already laying in wait thanks to companies like Palantir and numerous Israeli tech start-ups led by former Unit 8200 officers.
With companies like Carbyne — with its ties to both the Trump administration and to Israeli intelligence — and the Mossad-linked Gabriel also marketing themselves as “technological” solutions to mass shootings while also doubling as covert tools for mass data collection and extraction, the end result is a massive surveillance system so complete and so dystopian that even George Orwell himself could not have predicted it.
Following another catastrophic mass shooting or crisis event, aggressive efforts will likely follow to foist these “solutions” on a frightened American public by the very network connected, not only to Jeffrey Epstein, but to a litany of crimes and a frightening history of plans to crush internal dissent and would-be dissenters in the United States.
Feature photo | Graphic by Claudio Cabrera
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
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